In the Fourth Doctor story “Full Circle” (1980), the Doctor discovers the life cycle of three closely related species on the planet Alzarius—the humanoid Alzarians, the Marshmen, and the Marshspiders. “Full Circle” was the first of three loosely connected stories set in another Universe to the Doctor’s own known as E-Space.
Are there baby Universes out in the deep space of our Universe? There certainly is in the Whoniverse. In the Fourth Doctor story “Full Circle,” the Doctor was on his merry way to Gallifrey, as they say. But a wormhole swallows up the TARDIS (what’s new?) and the Doctor finds himself on the planet Alzarius. The planet Alzarius has the same position as Gallifrey, but in another (baby) Universe, known as E-Space. The Doctor’s own, much larger, Whoniverse being known as N-Space.
To be clear, E-space here stands for exo-space. And N-space, unsurprisingly, stands for normal space. If it helps, you can think of E-space as a more cosmic version of exoplanets—planets outside our Solar System. Just decades ago the idea of exoplanets was merely theory. But telescope technology has since delivered the evidence that there are probably billions of exoplanets out in deep space. The same can’t be said for detecting an exo-space. Yet.
Is the Whoniverse anything like our own Universe in this arrangement? Possibly. As you probably know as a Whovian, our Universe is big. Really big. In the words of the Eleventh Doctor, “This is one corner . . . of one country, in one continent, on one planet that’s a corner of a Galaxy.” And as Monty Python sang about our Galaxy in their “Galaxy Song”:
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars/It’s a hundred thousand light-years side to side/It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick/But out by us it’s just three thousand light-years wide/We’re thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point/We go ’round every two hundred million years/And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions/In this amazing and expanding Universe.
As you know, talk of all these light-years is due to the fact that astronomers measure things in light-years. Light is the fastest thing there is. Light takes over two million years to reach our telescopes from the next galaxy, Andromeda. Andromeda is the closest galaxy to Earth, out of the two trillion other galaxies out there in the observable Universe. In fact, the farthest we can see from Earth is about fourteen billion light-years away, which means it would take fourteen billion light-years to make the journey from the edge of the Universe to Earth.
The story of the Universe began around fourteen billion years ago. According to current theories that are subject to change, a bubble of space and time then popped into reality and began to expand. Before then, there was no space, no stuff, and no time. It could be that as it was growing and evolving over the last fourteen billion years or so, our Universe spawned a number of bubble-like, baby Universes. The question is: If these baby Universes exist, would there be a way of getting from our Universe to the baby bubble Universes? Possibly!
It could be that wormholes would link the main Universe to the bubble babies, so a space traveler could jump from the Universe to a baby, and even from baby to baby. All this means that the idea of E-Space was a very cunning creation by Doctor Who. Indeed, the storyline in Doctor Who is that the entity that allows travel between the two Universes is known as a Charged Vacuum Emboitment (CVE). The tale told is that a CVE was created by the mathematical brains of inhabitants of the planet Logopolis. They used it to stop the Whoniverse collapsing due to a shortage of available energy.
So perhaps in the future, we may meet an advanced alien intelligence who are able to solve the problem of creating wormholes. Sadly, for the time being, as with exoplanets, we’ll simply have to wait until our tech is advanced enough before we can discover the possible existence of an E-space.