No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.

googles

Interestingly, when he wrote that, it was part of a larger quote saying virtually the same thing that you are, just over a century ago:

Wilbur in the Cairo, Illinois, Bulletin, March 25, 1909

No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.

We did find out that Newtonian physics is wrong. Einstein got famous for it and we now use general/special relativity and quantum phsyics.

I'd like them to look for repeats of galaxies. Galaxies that may be the same but slightly different or in different parts of the universe. If the universe was its own black hole we might see like a sort of kaleidoscope effect

yeah, but it's always a shitshow when someone brings alternate theories to the big bang. it's almost like back in those days when they burned people for suggesting the earth may be slightly less flat than expected.

Sounds like a quote from the Hitchhikers Guide

Hey, it's me, the Universe. I just wanted to say, this is no longer working for me. And if it makes you feel better, sure it's not you, it's me. Please don't call.

Except it’s not that they are finding the expansion rate is different in some directions. Instead they have two completely different ways of calculating the rate of expansion. One uses the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The other uses Cepheid stars.

The problem is that the Cepheid calculation is much higher than the CMB one. Both show the universe is expanding, but both give radically different number for that rate of expansion.

So, it’s not that the expansion’s not spherical. It’s that we fundamentally don’t understand something to be able to nail down what that expansion rate is.

The only thing spherical is the visible universe from earth that we can see. Both in time and distance. Due to the expansion of space that volume is increasing.

The entire universe could be infinite and take on any number of infinite shapes. Our local universe could be completely different from the rest of the universe and we'll never be able to know..it's wild.

Recent experiments trying to determine what the curvature of space-time is in the visible universe has concluded that it's pretty much flat But it's entirely possible that we're just on a very very very large (infinite?) curved surface of spacetime that just looks flat to us..

I'm no way an expert in this, but I've been told it's wrong to think of the expansion of the universe like an explosion where everything moves away from a single point, but rather that the space between each object is expanding, comparing it to the way the surface of a balloon expands (if you were to paint multiple dots on the surface of a balloon they would all move away from each other when you inflate the balloon), though I like to think of it as yeast bread expanding since that's 3d.

Spherical? We don't know if the universe is of finite size.

As far as we know, it could just as well be infinite, and the expansion happens everywhere.

Everything is relative so the only thing we know is that the distance between galaxies increases. But we don't know if there's a “border” of the universe or not.