That question has always bugged me!

This is so weird. Ever since I took an amateurish interest in astronomy as a child, I've always enjoyed pondering such unweildy and mind-blowing questions as, "What exists beyond the edge of the universe?", and "What existed before the Big Bang?".

Well, about a week ago, I stumbled upon what looked like a nifty astronomy blog, called the Bad Astronomy Blog, that I decided to plug into Google Reader. Today I read my very first posting from that blog, and low and behold, it answered one of my unweildy and mind-blowing questions!! Or at least, it offered a possible answer. It's an enthralling read, check it out: What happened before the Big Bang? Here's the meat of it (elipses are mine, to shorten):

It’s been thought for sometime that there may have been some previous Universe that existed "before" ours. This is a difficult idea, because in the Big Bang model, space and time were created in that initial moment. But if Bojowald’s solutions are correct, it leads the way to understanding this previous Universe. It was out there, everywhere, and it contracted. Eventually it became an ultradense, ultrahot little ball of space and time. At some point, it got so small and so dense that bizarre quantum laws took effect...

What Bojowald’s work does, as I understand it... is simplify the math enough to be able to trace some properties of the Universe backwards, right down to T=0, which he calls the Big Bounce. The previous Universe collapsed down, and "bounced" outward again, forming our Universe. No doubt the physical aspects of this previous Universe were somewhat different; the quantum uncertainties at the moment of bounce would ensure that. It may have been much like ours, or it may have been quite alien. In his equations, it’s the volume of that previous Universe that cannot be determined. How big was it? It may literally be impossible to ever know.

This is great, I appreciate that people smarter than me are putting thought into my unweildy and mind-blowing questions. But I wish they would avoid generating new ones in the process...

So the universes (hm, never used that in a plural sense before -- is it universi?) have been "bouncing" up and down for kerjillions of years. Has that been going on for all of time, or did something happen that started the bouncing? And if so, what was that something and what did the universes look like before that something?

If there are multiple universes, they must be contained within something bigger, right? Just like there are multiple galaxies within a universe, there must be multiple universes within a _____? I need a name here, people. For now, I guess I'll just go with ploink. I wonder if there are multiple ploinks out there, too?

But perhaps most perplexing, if our own universe might have existed in a very similar way before the Big Bang/Big Bounce, then does that mean that we're now living in reverse of our pre-Big-Bounce counterparts? I mean, if they were headed towards a bounce and we're headed away from it, is it possible that their universe worked in reverse of ours? Did they die first, grow younger, and then get shoved inside their mother? Did they walk backwards? Did they read a book from the back page to the front page? Did they always know the winner of a race before it even started? And was pooping like eating to them, and eating like pooping? (Hey, that's where logic took me. Blame the Vulcans.)