QUOTE (Startraveler @ Jun 28 2008, 06:03 PM)

If you're talking about this idea in the context of cosmic inflation, then the answer is fairly simple: the visible universe is not the Universe. Not the entirety of it, anyway. What we know as the universe would merely be a pocket of a much larger Universe, a bubble in a far greater sea. Thinking in terms of there being "more than one universe" or "spacetime outside of the universe" makes the idea needlessly complicated, in that those phrases don't quite accurately capture what's going on. It might be helpful to think of it merely as reconsidering what we define as "the universe"--is it everything we see out to the furthest quasar or could it be far more expansive than that?
Then if our universe is an entity simply inside another universe, where is "the Universe" since it has spacetime for our universe to expand into, what does "the Universe" have in position inside spacetime?" A multiverse theory would simply make it more complicated and meaningless therefore.