And since "science" comes up with something new every decade (collapsing, accellerating, warbling), let's just assume we will really never know what's going on.
There may in fact be zillions of universes existing all at once, on different planes of existence. Or there may be just one, our own. If just one, what is "beyond" that one universe? For that matter, if there are a zillion, what is beyond the zillion of them?
Unanswerable questions, fun to ponder.
Though it doesn't matter a whit in my daily life, I am unaccountably thrilled to be amoung to first generations of humans to know that we live on the outer arm of the quadrillionth galaxy in the known universe (which may or may not be one of many now existing, or periodically existing due to endless expansion and contraction) - - that the earth beneath us is changing and moving all the time, with continents joining together in mega-gloms and separating again with oceans filling in between - - that humans are the latest blip in eons of different life forms on the planet, constantly evolving, elephants ages after mastodons, birds ages after dinosaurs, dinosaurs ages after each other (Disney was wrong: The Tyronnosaur 'fighting' that stegosaurus are separated by a lava stream of several hundred million years) - - and that all the life on this planet that now lives or ever died has been constructed from the atoms of the stars that lived and died long before our sun burned hot in space.
None of this gets me so much as a cup of coffee, but I love knowing it.
