Čech-Stone remainders of spaces that look like $[0,\infty)$

Abstract

We show that many spaces that look like the half~line~$\halfline=[0,\infty)$ have, under~$\CH$, a Čech-Stone-remainder that is homeomorphic to~$\Hstar$. We also show that $\CH$ is equivalent to the statement that all standard subcontinua of~$\Hstar$ are homeomorphic. The proofs use Model-theoretic tools like reduced products and elementary equivalence; rather than constructing homeomorphisms we show that the spaces in question have isomorphic bases for the closed sets.