BTW, when cosmologists refer to "pocket universes" they are usually familiar with Philip Farmer's use of the term ~ all interesting stories ~ I'm not exactly sure who Farmer got his science from, but he knew how to spin a yarn.
Take another look at Billy Pilgrim, the character in several of Kurt Vonnegut's stories. Recall, quickly, that for a long time Kurt and Phil were big buddies ~ until Phil wrote a story for Billy himself.
There you discover a theory of "time" that suggests multi-dimensionality for time in pretty much the same manner as Farmer's pocket universes are expanded out from the point of origin.
As I was saying, and you might not have picked up on it, the current most speculative theories of the Universe's structure are getting closer to some ideas worked out in literature in the 1960s and 1970s by two Indiana writers.
If you haven't read Farmer's stories, here's your chance for some provocative thought.
We know how far we can see, but that's not the same as the boundary of all the inflationary space there could be.
Correct. Check out Linde's article (referenced in post #1). There he mentions that some inflation theories suggest that the radius of our cosmic bubble could be as large as 101,000,000,000,000 centimeters—that's a 1 followed by a trillion zeros. By contrast, the part of our universe that we can currently see has a radius which is only about 1026 centimeters, exceedingly miniscule by comparison.