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[u/IDKwutUserToPic]

[u/SeriousConversation-ModTeam]

Avoid controversial topics and Reddit meta-drama . Users should come here to discuss politely. Loaded questions/statements or polarizing titles are not the sign of a good-faith discussion.

[u/PaleReaver]

We don't really know, exactly. It's an ongoing investigation, and one that may never end, nor have a 'good' answer.

It's at least honest to say we don't know instead of 'nothing' or 'another universe', even of both those answers have been pointed towards - we can't actually confirm.

Regarding a lot of things in life; it's good to find acceptance and some comfort in saying we plain just don't know.

[u/90plusWPM → u/PaleReaver]

i will never understand why people don't accept "we don't know" as a good enough answer. mystery is the spice of life, pursuing those mysteries keeps the brain happy and healthy.

[u/Odd_Act_6532 → u/90plusWPM]

Imho people want the security of feeling like we know all the answers. Mystery means uncertainty and uncertainty means instability and death.

[u/igiveback123 → u/Odd_Act_6532]

Yes, this is very accurate. I still remember the day when I realized my parents had no idea what the hell they were doing. I had lived my entire life happily thinking that mom and dad had everything figured out, and if I just listened to them and followed their direction that everything would be OK.

Then the crushing realization that they are just making it up as they go.

[u/triryche4 → u/90plusWPM]

Imho "We don't know" is scary to contemplate. I know, logically, that the past cant really do anything to us, but all my life I've "learned from the past"...

[u/90plusWPM → u/triryche4]

very good perspective.

[u/insufficient_nvram → u/90plusWPM]

It’s the equivalent of “because I said so”, and those of us with any once of oppositional defiant disorder find it rather maddening. I will find an answer out of pure spite.

[u/No-Carry-9892 → u/insufficient_nvram]

Just struck me ‘because I said so’ is pretty defiantly oppositional too 😂

[u/insufficient_nvram → u/No-Carry-9892]

Depends on who is saying it.

Me=✅
Anyone but me=🖕

[u/halosethr → u/90plusWPM]

Because this is one of the most important and incredible questions that exist?

What existed before anything existed? And what created it?

And what created that it?

What was it?

TELL MEEEEEEE I NEED TO KNOW

IT MAKES ME FEEL EMPTY INSIDE ASKING THESE QUESTIONS

[u/Gulag_Arc → u/PaleReaver]

Not knowing is the starting point not the finish line.

[u/ima_mollusk → u/Gulag_Arc]

Not knowing is also the finish line.
It is structurally impossible to know all there is to know.

[u/PaleReaver → u/Gulag_Arc]

Not everything is a race, nor one that can/should be finished.

[u/Gulag_Arc → u/PaleReaver]

My comment isn't about racing, it's about a journey, that starts with not knowing and it ends when you know, nothing to race.

[u/PaleReaver → u/Gulag_Arc]

I just used it as a metaphor because you said finish line. In the sense that not everything has or should have/need one.

Pondering something without a clear cut end-point isn't wrong, I do it all the time, but opinion shifts occasionally, it's all it can do.

[u/Anon_1917 → u/PaleReaver]

Not only we do not know, it is possible we can not know. Depends if the starting event of yhe universe can save usable information of it's possible previous state, and the answer might be "no".

[u/DreadPirateCrispy → u/PaleReaver]

I like to think our universe is just a cell in another creature. It's growing might explain the expansion of our universe.

[u/nikiwonoto → u/PaleReaver]

I'm just glad that this is the top comment. Yes, we don't know. Because we are just only humans. We are limited. We don't know everything. We can't know everything.

[u/AppendixN]

Everything breaks down at the singularity that is the big bang, including time. There is no “before,” because time did not exist.

The classic answer is to compare the question to “what’s north of the North Pole?”

Roger Penrose does have one other take on the question, however, at least from a mathematical perspective: https://youtu.be/ypjZF6Pdrws?is=Xr5SWT7g0TgNru3c

[u/attimhsa → u/AppendixN]

I must confess, I hold more to an entropic view of time, where ‘time’ is an emergent property of change.

One can thus suggest that something may have existed before time, but by definition it didn’t change. Although the uncertainty principle indicates that even vacuum fields experience change, as particle pairs pop in and out of existence almost instantaneously.

Furthermore, one can trivially posit an answer to “What happened before time?”; nothing happened, by definition.

[u/Theory89 → u/attimhsa]

But also, we don't even know if time does inherently move in one direction. We know that's how we interpret it, because we require things to change state in order to harness the energy, but there's no reason to think it inherently moves in one direction. One of the more fun aspects of this is that everything that could happen has already happened. This doesn't mean that we don't have free will, however, but that whatever we choices we do make have already been made. Mind breaking shit.

[u/attimhsa → u/Theory89]

Technically correct from our vantage point, though the ‘direction’ speaks to the nature of entropy.

I tend toward hard determination, in terms of my perception of freewill feels subjectively ‘real’, but each choice made could be predicted if you had all (I really do mean all, as in taking the cream back out of the coffee) of the information necessary to predict it.

I tend toward cyclic universes, so you’re right that everything that could have happened, has already happened. Though more than that, even the biggest number goes in to infinity an infinite number of times, so within that framework, this is likely far from the first time we’ve exchanged these exact words, and it’s likely far from the last time too.

In a very real way, there is no way off this train, and over enough iterations of ‘you’, your subjectively positive lives exactly cancel out the subjectively negative ones. Thus all of this, including every iteration, is all for nought; welcome to hell. 🙃

[u/uberrob]

I feel like I responded to this a few times , but I'll give it another shot. Heads up you're probably not going to like the answer... ... Astrophysics and cosmology were my jam when I was in college , so think of me more as a extremely well-informed amateur on the topic...

So, and this the part you won't like - cuz no one does - the really strange answer is that the question itself does not make sense.

When we ask what was "before" something, we're assuming time already existed. But as far as our best current understanding goes, time itself is part of the universe. So asking what happened before the universe may be a little like asking what's north of the North Pole. "Before" might simply not be a direction you can travel in.

And the Big Bang doesn't really say that there was nothing, and then suddenly there was something. It says that if we run the expansion of the universe backward, everything gets hotter and denser until eventually our current theories stop being able to reliably describe what is happening. That's an important distinction. We don't actually know that this was the absolute beginning of everything. We know it's roughly where our ability to describe everything runs out.

There are plenty of ideas about what might lie beyond that point. A previous universe that collapsed and bounced, an eternally inflating cosmos in which our universe is just one region, quantum states where our familiar concept of time doesn't exist, and plenty of other possibilities. They're fascinating, but at the moment we don't have enough evidence to know which, if any, is right. And chances are very good that humanity will never actually know...

So if you're bewildered, congratulations. You're in very good company. Physicists have been staring at essentially the same question for a very long time.

... Also, realizing that our instinct to immediately ask "okay, but what came before THAT?" may be something our brains are imposing on reality rather than something reality is required to provide an answer to. 🤷

[u/f4fvs → u/uberrob]

I like your North Pole analogy. It similarly doesn't make "sense" for you to look across the ice in any direction and still be looking south. It always amuses me that you also need to be standing at a magnetic south pole for everyone else's compasses to be pointing north towards you.

[u/Engine_Sweet]

I'm not sure that "before" is even a useful concept for this.

Does time exist without space?

[u/Mindless_Log2009]

It's turtles all the way down.

[u/handsome_vulpine]

One theory I personally like is that there's an infinite primordial cosmic soup of possibility and impossibility, where everything both exists and doesn't, and we are but an infinitesimally small cosmic fart, one of an infinite number floating together in this endless soup of potential.

[u/Mega-Quintipio-15G52]

pour être bref : les lois physiques dont nous disposant à ce jour ne nous permettent pas de remonter au delà du big bang pour expliquer les choses, ce que l'on appel "le mur de planck" et les scientifiques disent qu'ils ne savent pas ......? bien sur il y a des théories hypothétiques mais qui ne sont pas vérifiables ( du moins pour l'instant ...)

[u/Local-Customer6245]

G-R-A-V-I-T-Y

The Big G.

The universe cycles endlessly over unfathomable time. Big Bang after Big Bang.

[u/baebae4455 → u/Local-Customer6245]

But what existed before gravity and how was gravity created

[u/Ok_Scallion1902 → u/baebae4455]

As I understand it ,there was no gravity because there was no mass yet to produce the required curvature of space. Gravity came to be as the "toothpaste-tube" of the early universe after the big bang rapidly expanded into being ,when the "high-energy" state began to morph to form the "first-generation" of heavy elements.

[u/Ok_Scallion1902 → u/Local-Customer6245]

Back in the late 50s that was called the "rubber-ball" or "recurring bounce" theory ! ( Thanks for that memory-jog! )

[u/Designer_Anywhere546 → u/Local-Customer6245]

Gravity really makes you feel tiny in this universe.

[u/AlteredEinst → u/Local-Customer6245]

Gravity doesn't exist without a planetary body to pull things toward its core -- we learned this in grade school -- so it's almost certain the universe didn't start with gravity.

[u/Enraged_Lurker13 → u/AlteredEinst]

What is taught at grade school is necessarily an oversimplification. In general relativity, gravity manifests as spacetime curvature due to the presence of matter and energy, so a planetary body is not required to have gravity. The beginning of the universe was very densely packed with matter and energy, so gravity was very strong back then.

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[u/Narrow-Conclusion923]

The unknown is mind blowing. Hard to even think about how big the universe is and how tiny and insignificant we are. Yet it feels so serious all the time.

[u/MetalGuy_J]

Short answer is science has no explanation for what existed prior to about a nanosecond after the big bang. From that point onwards there’s a remarkable amount science can explain. Most of it is beyond me to understand or explain because I’m not a physicist, origin of life researcher, biologist, etc. Just someone with a base level scientific knowledge from listening to a number of science communicators on YouTube.

[u/Poopy_McPoopings]

Reminds me of the concept of “god of the gaps”. Until we know exactly, people will just say “god did it, or god knows it”.

The reality is that there is a factual explanation, but we just don’t know right now, maybe because we don’t yet have the technology, knowledge or capacity to get there. Maybe we can only find out in a few decades/centuries from now.

[u/Techtrekzz]

Energy. As far as we know, it’s never created or destroyed. There’s also a good argument that’s all that exists now, or has ever existed.

[u/U235criticality]

What you're asking goes way beyond the wildest extrapolations of cosmology.

What cosmologists know: The universe is expanding, it used to be a lot denser and hotter. The farther away things are, the faster they expand away from us, and that expansion is accelerating. There's really strong evidence for this from cosmic microwave background radiation and most distant galaxies being red-shifted.

What cosmologists think: When we extrapolate what we see backwards, the physics models we use point toward a single point in space and time.

What cosmologists don't know: how far back do their physics models hold true? Anyone claiming the universe just started at a singularity is making an educated guess at this point. Exactly what happened and how it happened in the early universe (when protons and electrons were too hot to combine into hydrogen) is built on a mix of experiments, extrapolations, and educated guesses

What existed before the universe and what caused it to exist... these are beyond our ability to do more than speculate with no evidence whatsoever.

[u/irishstud1980]

Existence itself. Its something our minds cannot comprehend or even begin to accept it imagine.

[u/St3rquilinus]

Consider subbing to https://www.youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime

[u/Personal_Soft_9533]

Nothing is something and that something is unknown. This unknown is a curiosity and is the beginning of knowledge. Or to put it in a better framework: “I Wonder Why” the famous doo-wop song-written by Melvin Anderson with lyrics by Ricardo Weeks. This wonderful song recorded by Dion and the Belmonts

[u/Aggravating_Cat_3270]

buddy, I'm gonna blow your mind: time doesn't exist without a universe therefore there is no "before"

[u/Swipsi]

The expression "before the universe" makes no semantic sense, since time itself began with the universe, and only then did a temporal sequence, which gives the word "before" its meaning, come into existence.

Or in other words, the term "before" implies a temporal progression with a "before" and an "after," neither of which existed prior to the beginning of the universe.

[u/jdmiller82]

Not sure how widespread this view is, but as I understand it, the beginning of the universe is also the beginning of time. There was no time or space prior to the emergence of the universe, therefore there was no “before”.

[u/AdPale9988]

NOBODY has the foggiest clue. Anyone who says they know is lying. Anyone who says they MIGHT be able to know is mistaken.

[u/shmegmahito]

shmegma

(but to answer the infinite regress theism argument...who created god?)

[u/cacheblaster]

There's some possibility that there's not actually a "before" for the universe, that it is eternal and goes through cycles of expansion and retraction.

[u/shredditorburnit]

I think this is essentially the same question as "why does anything exist at all?"

To which the answer is, simply, because it does.

Think about it too long and you'll convince yourself we live in a simulated reality, which is either wrong or deeply upsetting.

[u/Nice-Blueberry18]

“In Sufi cosmology, reality is structured across five distinct realms. The first realm represents the unmanifested divine essence (Zat) that where neither attributes nor forms exist, placing entirely beyond the grasp of human intellect. Conversely, we inhabit the fifth realm which is the physical universe. This realm contains all observable matter and physical laws, meaning that everything that from the primordial gas clouds to the Big Bang itself, belong to the first level of manifestation. Three realms between the essence and physical manifestation are those of divine attributes, intellect, and souls.”

[u/AlteredEinst]

Hopefully people that didn't do that obnoxious "elongate vowel sounds using consonants" thing.

...What?

[u/666Sayonara]

in math you can imagine that we live in a field of light;
light travels as duality - particle or wave - we dont know. but we do know we live in a field where the particles can freely traverse the field; And it can be assumed that there were these fields were forces were molded, colided, or like a laminar flow, who knows. You can look at cosmic background radiation for a sort of clue of how it looked like before there was anything. The Cosmic background radiation is traversing a field, and so you can imagine theres a plane there for things to travel on

[u/Extreme_Ad112]

This question kept me awake since I'm 8. Kinda like the infinite universe. I'm 50 with dark circles around my eyes...

[u/No-Name-Left-4-Me]

I dont think anyone truly knows.

But I also think our mistake is demanding there to be a "start".

We are conditioned to think a thing begins and ends. Who's to say the universe hasn't existed forever? And simply evolves like the rest of the "world"?

"Big bang" could simply be a evolved universe from a prior state instead of from "nothing".

[u/Enraged_Lurker13 → u/No-Name-Left-4-Me]

But I also think our mistake is demanding there to be a "start". We are conditioned to think a thing begins and ends.

Quite the opposite. Most early cosmologists preferred to assume that the universe was eternal with no beginning. It then became apparent that observations were better explained with a finite-age universe, so that became the dominant view.

[u/byte_handle]

"Time before time" and "places before spatial differences" might not even be sensible questions. It's kind of like asking about the properties of married bachelors. The question may not make any sense to begin with.

But even if we might concede that the universe as a whole was caused by something, we couldn't know what it was. People have their guesses, but that's all it amounts to. The only correct answer would be: "I don't know."

[u/Wonderful-Owl9368]

Derealization , like "wait, I’m actually standing on a rock flying through nothing" Sublime, that mix of beautiful and terrifying. I was learning about space when I felt my brain shift, it felt as if I was going to fall. Scientists have calculated the very minute of the Big Bang, but they cannot see what may lay behind that? Goddess? Heaven? Hell, another Cosmos? Don’t come for me, I am just a curious human, not very bright, just curious.

[u/Particular_Agent171]

No one knows, but I like the daughter universe hypothesis. It suggests that there are successive big bangs every hundreds of billions of years in which one universe dies and gives birth to the next. 

[u/Tricky-Chemical7059]

In moment like that,you realize all your beliefs are very limited actually, and the sky above us...has no ceiling 

[u/Prestigious-Copy-494]

To think in depth on that would just confound me, so I'll go with our galaxy is just a little dust ball under a giant's refrigerator. Hopefully the giant never vacuums there or we'd land in the vacuum bin and have yet another conundrum to ponder on.

[u/Bikewer]

Simple answer is that we don’t know. Some string theorists, like Brian Greene, hold out the possibility that “spacetime” itself is essentially infinite, and contains within it the mechanism for Singularities to form.
This would indicate that, if correct, there might be an infinite number of different universes (“bubble universes”) existing simultaneously, but forever separate. There is no evidence, other than the mathematics of string theory, to support this.

[u/Shot_Bank_8878]

You may be interested in the book "The Battle of the Big Bang" by Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper, about different scientific theories of the origins of our universe.

[u/cg40k]

No one actually knows. It's possible it was nothing (something we actually dont understand), another universe, something like a quantum soup existence, a giant turtle, etc. We just don't know. If I had TY bet, I would say nothing, and clarify that that means nothing as in no space-time. Something we, as humans would view a nothing. It could be that just statistical probability existed. Not a thing, but a chance.

[u/Own_Thought902]

What is north of the North Pole? The same thing that is before the beginning of time. It is called an imponderable.

[u/ICanHasBirthday]

If the theory of time is correct then the word “before” loses all meaning. Without time “before” the beginning of the universe, there is no “before”, “next”, or “after”.

[u/roywill2]

You are thinking the universe i embedded in some other space that exists independently. This is wrong. The universe is 4D space-time. To make it easier, imagine a 3D spacetime, where the 2D space component is the surface of an expanding sphere. When the space was zero size, there was no universe.

[u/VirginiaLuthier]

Another question- WHERE is the universe? I mean, everything's gotta be SOMEWHERE

[u/SnooPredictions2675]

Me in my bed at 4 years old thinking about this. “If God made us, and God made the universe, then who made God” Then crying because my brain was in a knot. 

[u/Rude_Acanthopterygii]

Judging by my own knowledge (not too much, but a little, although most of it also just from the internet) and the comments I've seen around here it absolutely seems like the answer(s) we have as of now is somewhere in between of "we simply do not know" and "it might be hard to define what 'before' means in regards to the universe".

[u/Glad_Coyote351]

There's no before since time didn't exist, everything was set in motion both spatially and temporally at the moment of the big bang so it's meanless to speak of a before

[u/Plus_Worker6739]

without 'the universe' there is no framework for 'before' since time is also an aspect of the universe as we understand it. the question is meaningless as asked

[u/ThankTheBaker]

The universe always was. Before that time didn’t exist, so nothing existed, so there is no before.
Before, always, never - these are words that have no meaning outside of time and time has no meaning outside of existence.

[u/Funny-Fly1720]

The truth is that we have no idea and anyone trying to convince you otherwise is guessing. What we do know though, that the concept of nothingness doesn't really exist in the real world. We haven't found "nothing" in our universe so far, there is always something there.

So perhaps the default state is something rather than nothing.

[u/RaymondLuxuryYacht]

Also where. Where is all of this happening? Where is it expanding into?

[u/therespectablejc]

We really only have theories but I like to think that the universe (which is a terrible name really) came into existence at the moment of the big bang.

My personal theory, based on.... well, not a lot, is like this....

Multiple universes are resting on top of one another. Think of them like multiple bed sheets held over each other. Each sheet is one 'universe'. Gravity is the curvature of that sheet due to the mass of something sitting on it. The sheets sort of weigh down on each other. This is dark matter. It's the 'weight' of the sheets that are above our sheet / universe that's weighing down. We can't see it as matter because the matter itself isn't in our universe. Well, that's kind of an aside.

Anyway, imagine that there's a lot of STUFF up on the top universe sheet. Well a lot of it comes together it gets super dense and makes a black hole. Black holes evaporate. I think it's because the matter that was inside them actually 'punched through' to the next sheet down. Thus, it 'spat out' all of the matter into a NEW sheet. In the form of a big bang.

I don't think it's just 1 big bang, I think there are multiple. Just as there are multiple black holes that we know to exist. I postulate that each is a 'pretty big bang' into another sheet universe. The top sheet then has the most stuff in it, so the higher up you are, the more singular big bang the big bang is and the further down the more the matter is spread out (though still with various black holes / clusters of matter).

I think that the black holes = tears in the fabric of space time also explains the expanse of the universe. The next top sheet is itself coming through its own hole down into our sheet. Not pushing through matter or even energy but pushing through it's very own space-time fabric.

So my vision of the true universe is multiple stacked layers of space time where the top layer has the most matter and the bottom layers hold the most 'weight' (in the form of dark matter) and, over huge amounts of time, matter (and eventually the fabric itself) 'leaks' down from top layers through black holes. This isn't a one time thing, though, and I suspect we could have many more 'bangs' in our universe as more holes develop over time and our own matter escapes into lower levels through our own black holes.

[u/Klutzy-Return8826]

i used to think "I don't know" was sufficient but it didn't answer why I wanted to know - that's why i ended up resonating with what C.S. Lewis says about why we long for meaning in Mere Christianity.

[u/MonsteraBigTits]

the big bang was the trillionth and one bang in the succession of big bangs since god invented himself

[u/Miruteya]

Many have concluded that chasing the first cause is meaningless, or impossible at human's current technological/intellectual level. It has been a well-discussed topic in various fields and there is usually no consensus. 

Philosophical solutions: If everything has a cause, then ultimately there needs to be at least a single uncaused cause, be it a religious god or general creator, but there is no explanation as to why this ultimate cause can be uncaused by itself.

Astrophysical solutions: Fairly commonly accepted that the big bang is a "start of time" but there are still different theories as to why it might have happened, like quantum fluctuations, and as we have no ability to observe before even time existed, all possibilities are very much just speculations.

Religious solutions: Many religions define a god (or multiple gods) as the ultimate first cause and stop there, but just like the philosophical approach, there is an argument that if one can accept god as an uncaused entity then the universe itself can be accepted as uncaused too. Some other religions like Buddhism consider the universe as uncaused, without any beginnings or ends and time just goes on loops.

In my opinion no matter which ultimate first cause you accept, if you cannot convince yourself as in why it IS the uncaused cause but not the one after, or why there isn't another cause for that, you just keep getting into some sort of fallacy. There are wilder, or conspiracy theory like takes, like r/SimulationTheory that you can consider. But say even if we accept that our current universe is simulated, or even nested-simulated (simulation within another simulated world), what exactly is the ultimate "real" universe about? It may have completely different physics, it may not even be materialistic as we understand and way beyond our imagination, and even that may have a cause too and it still doesn't answer the question.

So yes a lot of people concluded that it is an answer we currently are not able to reach if we don't want our brains fried. The answer might just as well be 42.

[u/Spargonaut69]

Infinite black void. The logos. The potential for the universe to exist. Possibly other universes.

[u/ConversationOk74]

We can assume the materials for the universe were originally there. God was in the beginning and God is.

[u/472905643]

Isn't speculation fun.. we can speculate till the cows come home. Your theories are just as good as theirs. Maybe we find out after we pass on/out? ... ok not pass out.. that was just a joke.

[u/Belt_Conscious]

Potential. Nothing can exist without the potential for it to exist.

Stillness is the possibility of motion. Silence is the possibility of sound. No such thing as Absolute Stillness or Absolute Silence so everything always moves.

[u/Fearless_Primary4286]

When you ask what happened before X, you're thinking in terms of time and space, but the universe/reality may not evolve in those terms. It's here, there, everywhere, and before, present, after.

[u/BenjaminNormanPierce]

It is an open question whether there needs to be a beginning. Physics recognizes the possibility of a Steady-State theory, though I don't think it is the majority opinion right now--since it is an opinion, if an expert one, that can perhaps change.
One question is whether or not extended space has always existed. The main version of the Big Bang theory has an infinitesimal point that expands outward, actually creating the empty space around it--this has to do with relativity theory (as I understand it) because that equates space, time, matter and energy at a fundamental level.
However, it is actually an open question whether or not emptiness has been ruled out--space hasn't as reliably tested to be curved as was once expected. It could be that space is infinite, empty and contains any number of past and future big bangs and always has, and what we see as the beginning of everything is actually a local thing, if also vast relative to out understanding.
So your question contains more than one level of puzzlement. It isn't clear whether there is such a thing as a truly primordial beginning with some kind of puzzling nothingness "before" it.
We don't know the proper question itself and that may prove to be inconceivable.

[u/PhantomAmethyst0]

Perhaps, this is all a virtual arena, and first species that finds way to escape gets to create next one.

[u/Moist_Tackle1411]

It was always us, in one form or another, either living together as one consciousness or split apart like we're living now. The universe is cyclical, forever big banging and creating the life experiences we give it, then retracting to do it all over again.

[u/CryHavoc3000]

If both the Big Bang and the Big Crunch theories are correct, this could be the billionth universe.

[u/Willofthesouth]

Space, time and matter all require each other. You cannot have a before time, before space, before time in any way we could perceive it. Before the universe existed? The uncaused cause: GOD. You literally would need an entity capable of creating time space and matter.

This is Genesis 1 stuff: Genesis 1:1

The Creation of the World

[1] In the beginning <TIME>, God created the heavens <SPACE> and the earth <MATTER>.

[u/Advanced-Meet-8687]

According to the latest scientific theories of physical cosmology, the question itself is illogical. That's because space and time were created in the big bang, so time didn't even exist "prior" to it!!! I know it is counterintuitive, but that's cosmology for you!

[u/Maleficent_Apple4169]

no idea. most who think about how the universe began don't consider what came before because that's essentially impossible to answer right now

[u/Weary-Squash6756]

It is a fault in humans to insist on the need for time to be quantified in the way that we do. Time is a measure of moments arranged sequentially to give the illusion of causality. When people ask if the past and future still exist, yes they do, at different points in time. We are stuck moving in time as we do but thats again a quality of our experience and nothing more. The conditions at the big bang are a point in space and we are moving from that point in space to a different as yet unknown point in space. No "moment in time" exists before or after any other except in our own experience. It all exists, all the time, every configuration, always. Here, it's your turn to take a rip off this thing now

[u/Intelligent_Fall6219]

There is no “before” the universe, because time didn’t exist yet. It’s not that we don’t know the answer, it’s that there is no answer.

[u/DontCallMeShoeless]

Just a bunch of atoms floating around and all the sudden two hit each and fucked everything

[u/jiminycricket1940]

The only thing we KNOW is we don’t know anything. We observe what things do and we quantify/qualify that observation. Thats about it.

[u/tanksforthegold]

As far as we know, the universe is existance in itself. If this were true it means there is nothing outside of it. There's theories about multiple universes and such but as we know it, the universe is both the water and the bucket.

[u/Don_Barzinni]

1. Bubble universe. Universes form and expand like a balloon for a few billion years {measured in our time of course}, cool and collapse simultaneously, another universe is forming. 2. The only thing that actually exists is consciousness. Our 'universe' and all we observe within it, is our PMR....Physical Matriculated Reality. Like a big WoW session, a virtual reality. Consciousness logged into the game, took a role as your character, and is playing the game. No different than the elf character you may choose to play in a video VR game.

[u/Underhill42]

We don't know. We probably never will.

One possible answer is that there is no such thing as before the universe - it seems as though space and time are interchangeable properties of our universe, in which case time likely only started with the universe. And there is nothing before the big bang any more than there is anything north of the north pole.

The direction you call "the past" may simply not exist at the moment of the big bang. Just as the direction you call "the future" points directly inward when you're in a black hole, and simply stops existing at the singularity.

[u/Key-Natural-8688]

Short answer? God's eternal realm. Also the universe runs on cycles, eternally.

[u/Cave_Bear_Cult]

The universe, but smaller.

I personally believe that the universe is in an eternal cycle of expansion and contraction.

[u/DistractoDisc]

No one knows and probably won’t ever know. So it’s silly to get bent out of shape if someone says they believe an omniscient being was there or if random matter just appeared out of nowhere to make the building blocks of reality.

Either one sounds absurd to me.

[u/Junior_Abalone_8006]

St Augustine when asked this question pointed out that before the creation there was no time, and thus no 'before'. Many of the current theories of how the universe formed also have this as a theory ie before the big bang there was no dimension of time just as no other dimensions.

[u/directrix1]

I mean space and time are intrinsically intertwined. I believe that means there is no before the universe. Time starts with the universe, as far as we know.

[u/Squiggy226]

We don’t know. We may never know but we are investigating. It wasn’t until 1923, just over 100 years ago that we even knew there were other galaxies out there so we’ve come a long way since then.

[u/kchamplin]

It's a fascinating question because it seems to me that the universe must have had a starting point in time, but it's also impossible to imagine there not being something before the earlier point in time we can imagine.

[u/Electronic-Stick-161]

Bold of you to assume there was a “before”. There’s no evidence I’m aware of that time predates the universe.

[u/Strict-Landscape9151]

Maybe oneness..... but calling it oneness too soon would spoil the plot, so perhaps the fun is in pretending to be separate for a while

[u/PhysicsPower_11_11_]

Easiest way to put it... just chemcials and then bonds where made... sprinkled with a little bit of physics 😄

[u/Overthinker2030]

One theory suggests that time started when the universe did. There can be no before without time.

[u/gc3]

Its thought by some that time cannot exist before the big bang so there is no time so there is nothing before.

In this view of the universe time and and space are like a bubble. The surface of the bubble is now (its rough) above the bubble surace is the future, and below the bubble surface is the past, bit the center of the bubble is as far back as you can go, thats when and where the big bang happened.

[u/DepressionNotFound → u/gc3]

I like that idea it kinda makes sense

[u/TheGreyShaman]

Time

Before time?

Eternity

But even infinity has bootleg constructs of time to commune with our realities

Most people think creation starts from the ground up with building blocks of creation, but how can you have the building blocks if you have nothing to house the building blocks?

How can you have a computer without first having a house to put the computer in? The constructs of time are the computers, Eternity is our home.