Infinity is already a pretty difficult concept to grasp.
Humans weren’t made to comprehend the never-ending, and for that reason
Infinity has always been treated with caution by mathematicians. It wasn’t
until the latter half of the 19th century that Georg Cantor developed the branch
of math known as Set Theory (mentioned before in Russell’s paradox), a theory
which allowed him to ponder the true nature of Infinity. And what he found was
truly mind-boggling.
As it turns out, whenever we imagine infinity,
there’s always a different type of infinity that’s bigger than that. The lowest
level of infinity is the amount of whole numbers (1,2,3…), and it’s
a countable infinity. With some very elegant reasoning, Cantor determined
that there’s another level of infinity after that, the infinity of all Real
Numbers (1, 1.001, 4.1516…basically any number you can think of). That type of
infinity is uncountable, meaning that even if you had all the time in the
universe you could never list off all the Real Numbers in order without missing
some. But wait—as it turns out, there’s even more levels of uncountable
infinity after that. How many? An infinite number, of course.