## Astronomy’s Decades-Long Quest To Understand Cosmic Topology If some aspects of cosmic topology turn out to be true, the idea that starships might voyage the cosmos over hundreds of thousands of light years without ever returning to the same neck of space-time could be problematic. That’s because some aspects of cosmic topology (the global shape and connectivity of our cosmos) could dictate a closed loop universe — at least on the largest scales. That means that in some instances if a starship heads in one direction for long-enough, hypothetically, it could return to its starting point. In…