What was there before the big bang explosion?

What if the universe is a continuously collapsing system? A contracting one.**

Imagine marbles on a fabric; if you roll them, they follow a circular path for a time before ultimately converging toward the center. Einstein demonstrated that celestial bodies behave in a similar way with space and time—like marbles on a flexible fabric—because space and time themselves are a kind of pliable fabric, influenced by the mass of objects. The greater the mass, the stronger the gravitational pull. Naturally, the rotation of these bodies slows the attraction between them, but it doesn't prevent them from gradually moving toward each other, drawn ever closer to the more massive objects nearby.

Think about the moons of planets—they are gradually and inexorably drawn into a collision course with their more massive planets. So, when we ask, "Is the universe expanding?" the answer is yes, but not in the sense of bodies drifting apart on an infinite plane. Rather, the universe is expanding in proportion to the presence of celestial objects within it.

For example, there is no "edge" to the universe, no center; it is a fabric, a grid that forms only where there are celestial bodies to define it. This fabric is not expanding in the sense of moving away from itself, but instead, the bodies within it are converging toward each other. There is a key consequence here—the overload of the system. While the space in this fabric expands as long as there are bodies to occupy it, the real issue is that these celestial bodies form and expand within already occupied space, not in some virgin, unoccupied void.

As new bodies emerge where matter already exists, they crowd the already saturated space, causing an internal expansion, not one into untouched areas of the universe. The celestial bodies are gradually approaching each other, and this process will, over billions of eons, lead to inevitable collisions. Galaxies will collide with galaxies, and eventually, supermassive galaxies will merge, taking up less and less space as these collisions continue.

Supermassive black holes, in turn, will begin merging with other black holes. The result is the gradual construction of even larger, more powerful black holes. A black hole, however, has a capacity; it does not destroy matter but traps light and objects within its event horizon. Eventually, we will arrive at a point where the universe contains a single, supermassive black hole—the ultimate "winner" in this cosmic competition of collisions and absorption.

This supermassive black hole will contain all the matter in the universe, and in mere seconds after the last collision, it will collapse under its own immense gravity, triggering an implosion of unimaginable scale. This implosion, however, is not unique in cosmic history; it is part of a periodic contraction that repeats over the course of eons. The collapse will result in another massive explosion, scattering matter across vast, now-empty spaces left by previous collisions.

This explosion is what we call the Big Bang—just one of countless others that will occur throughout eternity, as the universe goes through a continuous cycle of collapse and rebirth.