More than I think about the Roman Empire TBH.

Kinda partial to the ancient Mesopotamian beliefs:

"When on high the heaven had not been named, Firm ground below had not been called by name, There was nothing but primordial Apsu (male fresh water), their begetter, (And) Mummu Tiamat (female salt water), she who bore them all, Their waters commingling as a single body."

I can't help but imagine the watery sea serpent Tiamat wearing a Mumu - Kinda like Mrs. Roper.

I am not religious at all but I think about this a lot. If a bunch of particles slammed together and created the big bang, well, where did those particles come from? Nothing makes sense.

I'm far from clued-up on the matter, but I'm of the opinion that the big bang was born from a black hole. Which I discussed here on SN. Many credible astronomers believe something similar, but the question would then be whether that black hole came from THIS universe or another.

Either way, we need more attention on this subject! For too long we have questioned the existence of the big bang, when to me it just seems obvious that human's current understanding & theories surrounding spacetime is incomplete. I would also like to see more people trying to break it down into layman's terms. This subject should be approachable to everyone with a curious mind.

If I remember correctly, the idea of the Big Bang stems from the "groundbreaking" book A Brief history of Time by Stephen Hawking.

I don't think he intended for his very reasonable theory to lend credence to an origin or beginning of the universe, because that lends credence to the cosmological argument:

A few years ago, I read an article in Discover magazine that reported on his more recent work, essentially, trying to refute his earlier work in A Brief History of Time. He was dabbling in theoretical work "at the outer limits of testability" if I recall the quote correctly.

That's a fancy way of saying he was now making stuff up.

I watched a random YouTube video today that claimed the universe is a simulation and the big bang was a fake genesis story.

I think about it quite a lot. Also Loop Quantum Gravity Theory is interesting— the "Big Bounce".

either god or a simulation.

Nothing

Time existed since the big bang so there's no concept of before the big bang.

Some people interpret this as time being in a loop, kinda like if you were to walk around the earth, you will end up at the same place at some point and start again.

We might be living in a multiverse, where this universe is just a tiny part of it, or there could be multiple universes running at the same time.

The truth is that we don't know yet, and maybe we will never know.

Well what about the edge/end of the universe? This thing just expands forever? Used to give me nightmares to think about it, now I just feel small and unimportant in the very grand scheme of things

IANA cosmologist, but here's my current view on it.

We perceive time as having a particular direction. This arrow of time is not dictated by any known physical laws. That is, if we look at all events and interactions in the Universe, exactly the same rules apply whether played forwards or in reverse order.

Any explanation of the arrow of time boils down to one of entropy. As time passes, the Universe gradually goes from a state of greater order (less entropy) to one of less order (greater entropy). Think of the Universe as moving gradually and somewhat randomly from each state to the next. There are exponentially more unordered states than ordered ones, thus from any somewhat ordered state, there is a much greater chance of moving to a less ordered one than to a more ordered one.

So we can try to imagine going backwards in time, with more and more order and less and less entropy the further back we go. Eventually we will reach a point where the universe is perfectly ordered, with minimal entropy. This would be the beginning of the Big Bang and the beginning of time itself.

Asking what would be before the beginning of time is a bit like asking what is north of the North Pole. You can keep going straight towards the North Pole, but at the point where you reach the North Pole, you cannot get further north. But you can keep going in the same direction you were heading. You will find yourself going straight south, although still going away from where you initially started.

Similarly, we can imagine going backwards in time, and then keep going as we reach the Big Bang. Suddenly we would find ourselves going forwards in time, but not going towards the point we started from. We'd be in a sort of mirror universe, with the mirror being the Big Bang.

A little bang, then turtles all the way down

The Big Bang didn’t happen

God

You can ask God one day

I really like the theory that the universe is forever expanding and contracting and that one day, the expansion will once again stop and then reverse back into a collapsed state, and along the way, all the grabby aliens that have dominated their region of space will find themselves going from feeling alone in the universe to being neighbors, until they are right on top of each other and battling for existence in the collapse.

And maybe the goal is to figure out how to break out before being squished.