There are a lot of unproven theories about the universe, and although most of them are at least improvable, at least for now, one of the most outlandish ones that made the rounds may actually be true, even if it is not exactly the way people think. The theory is that NASA discovered a parallel universe and it goes back to 2020. If this were true space exploration would have just become a lot more interesting, with the possibility of finding occult galaxies and other invisible structures through our space telescopes suddenly not sounding as outlandish.
NASA’s ANITA mission and how it led to some of the most convoluted theories
But in order to understand what we are talking about, we have to go back to 2020 when the theory first originated. At the time, NASA was running an experiment called ANITA, short for Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna. It was a huge balloon floating above Antarctica, loaded with instruments designed to catch neutrinos, tiny, nearly massless particles that do not interact with most matter, making them very hard to detect.
During the mission, ANITA picked up something unexpected, a signal that suggested that particles were coming up from inside the Earth, which was unexpected, as usually high-energy particles like that would be stopped by our planet, not shoot up through it.
As it usually happens when new data that is incomplete but sounds interesting gets published, many start launching theories at the wall and attempting to see what sticks. In this case (and do bear in mind it was 2020, we might have all just needed a good distraction) the one that seemed to progress the most was the idea of a “CPT symmetric universe.” Basically, this concept suggests that before the Big Bang, there might have been a universe that was a mirror image of ours where everything, including time, runs in reverse.
When outlets like New Scientist picked up the story, they did so with clickbait titles and stories that posed questions as if the theory was a done deal, and although articles were careful to frame everything as hypothetical that did not stop people on the internet from taking it as gospel and deciding that the theories and questions posed came closer to reality than they did, soon turning into headlines like “NASA discovered a hidden cosmos.”
First things first, NASA never said they found a secret universe or a place where time flows backwards. That was entirely an internet theory that has never been close to being proven or approved of by the scientific community at large.
One of the researchers who analyzed the ANITA results, Alex Pizzuto, even went to social media to clear things up, and he explained that there are much simpler ways to explain the strange signals But that did not deter many from jumping to conclusions, as these theories are a lot more fun for people than admitting that it takes a very long time and effort to make a true scientific discovery.
Given the human imagination and the prevalence of sci-fi movies that have come out in the last few decades, it can be easy to get swept up on the excitement and forget that small incongruences that we do not have an immediate answer for are not signs of aliens, alternative universes or the destruction of the universe as we know it. There are just plenty of things that we do not know about, and we still need to discover. For those who want a real theory, according to scientists it is more likely that the universe might be heading toward a cold, lifeless end, which is not as optimistic, but will give us a real problem to solve.