  This article gives a review of a recent construction, the ambient
cosmological metric, and its implications for the global geometry of the
universe. According to this proposal, the universe is a bounding hypersurface
carrying a conformal structure and lying at the (conformal) infinity of a new,
5-geometry which satisfies the Einstein equations with fluid sources. We
discuss our main results about the implied topological nature of the conformal
infinity of the ambient metric, the non-existence of spacetime singularities on
the boundary, as well as the validity of cosmic censorship as a direct
consequence of a new principle on the boundary.
