nothing existed before

Thing is that there's no "before", because time itself started with the big bang. The questions to ask are: is there anything other than our universe, and does that even matter? If nothing can get in or out of our universe, then there's no way to prove the existence of anything outside of it and there's zero impact one way or another.

God was created by man. Change my mind.

All the matter in our universe was sucked into the black hole and then coalesced into all the forms that exist now. (Presumably, and if this hypothesis is true)

I have always wondered about this and it's always been the question I would want to ask neil degrasse tyson about if I ever met him... I never realized there was a term for it or even other people believed it...

My other crazy theory is that we are always in a state of jumping between realities... As a state of self preservation... We exist in the reality where we keep living. With the possibility of realities being infinite and the possibility of a subset of those infinites being basically the same as the one you're in...

Who knows maybe it's just a reassuring way to be happy knowing that one day your actually going to die instead of all those times you have felt like you have almost died being truly a time you have died...

My theory is that the Big Bang is local and there have been other big bangs outside our observable universe and our entire existence is inside a multi trillion year expanding and contracting space foam

Big Crunch and white holes and all that

Dude, after reading the paper from start to finish, this whole thing seems off.

• The guy's an associate professor of computer science and has no degree in cosmology, but he's talking about cosmological implications of these findings.
• Every single paper cited supporting his argument was written by himself (in exactly one case, it was written by himself and a coauthor). In total, Shamir cites himself ~~106~~ 130 times.
• Numerous other papers by numerous other authors (some mentioned by this paper in attempted rebuttals) using a variety of methodologies find this not to be the case.
• It violates the cosmological principle used by major and highly successful models of the universe.
• The way he performed this analysis was an algorithm which he wrote. When he cites papers that have used this algorithm, he only cites himself, indicating no other academic in the world has thought this algorithm is seriously useful for this application.
• When speaking to The Independent (which is of really middling quality), instead of speaking about the data itself and how he arrived at it, he (again with no formal background in cosmology) starts talking about the most clickbaity possible implications of this data.

It's totally possible Shamir is right and that there really is a massive bias. That would be extremely cool. However, he's published numerous papers on this over the last decade yet still seems to be the only one who agrees with it. Which to me is highly unusual.