Next up on Existential Crisis Theater: Netflix’s new documentary A Trip to Infinity.

I suck at math but I love the elegance of math… the simplicity and the complexity. I love the theories and concepts, even if my brain breaks and I never made it into the higher levels in school. So this documentary was made for me.

I remember seeing a PBS documentary when I was a kid that explored Mandelbrot sets and the infinite descent into recurring complexity. I remember sitting in 4th grade realizing numbers could go on forever… or space may have no end. Infinity is haunting and this documentary knows it. It plays with it. I might mess you up.

Maybe this is the perfect movie for spooky season!

It explores the concept of counting upwards to infinity… but then reminds you that there’s an infinite number of numbers between just 0 and 1. So infinity contains infinite infinities. But it also explores infinite space and infinite time. That in an infinite universe with infinite space and infinite combinations of possibilities, it’s quite possible there are an infinite number of you that you will – and can never – see or visit. Because the speed of light is fast but the expansion of the universe is faster so there’s light from distant suns that we will never be able to see in the infinite history of the universe.

This is a brain-melting bunch of ideas explained for mathematical cavemen. Science and math popularization at its best. Even if sometimes the cartoons it uses to illustrate its points are a bit silly. And I imagine people with great big brains will scoff at it for over-simplifying. Good enough for a drooling grunt like me!

I enjoyed this documentary. I’d thought of a lot of this before but this made me think about it in different ways. I mean, hell, it made my head spin to say that humanity is finite, but then asks if human imagination is infinite. And why wouldn’t it be? Or why would it be? or how could it be?

Score: 87