for "almost infinite"

Yeah, there's like infinity minus one alternate universes.

for the obsession with the first few picoseconds of the big bang, when in fact the elephant in the room is the time immediately _preceding_ the big bang. Hawkings once famously opined that asking about that is like asking "what's a mile north of the north pole" which is kind of satisfying until you realize that the ex-nihilo creation of all this matter is basically the doings of a God.

What I find actually terrifying is the thought that, lacking any divinity to get the ball rolling, this is a cyclic process and has no beginning or end.. That's very hard to grasp.

jaunch, we created God so He could create the universe and give us somewhere to keep our stuff