[harmonygirl]

Interesting. I guess I would ask 'came from where?' and point out that the entire question is irrelevant speculation.

[Mr. Nobody]

We, the universe did not come from anywhere, we were always here in some shape or form. The questions of where, when, how and why are related to our finite mind's inability to imagine infinity.
It does not mean that we should give up the search for more answers, it only provides us with one more way of viewing back beyond 12.7 billion years.

[harmonygirl]

so both the chicken and the egg were always here...no one was 'first'...

[Mr. Nobody]

Well, if you are trying to be literal with the topic, then I'd have to say that the egg came first. The egg laying scheme evolved with the dinosaurs and reptiles and it is widely accepted that birds are descendants of dinosaurs.

My point is though, where did the initial energy and matter come from? Where did all this stuff we see originate?. In accordance to inflationary theory, matter may have been created out of an inflaton field that jumped to a non 0 minimum or a phase transition when the nuclear force began breaking away from the weak and electromagnetic forces by the cooling process. That would have crerated enourmous inflation and would have released energy for matter creation once it was settled. This field would represent the seed for infinite reality.

[harmonygirl]

given the view that there was no origin, they didn't come from anywhere...

[Mr. Nobody]

No origin or creation of initial energy does not mean the negation of all creation. The initial energy that set this cosmic epoch into action was and is always there, just in different forms, energy is not created nor destroyed, it only gets converted. Perhaps you are right and one can say that technically there never was and never will be any creation but only conversions.
I think that one can deduce that the first law of thermodynamics is perhaps the only law that does not show an evolutionary path, but an absolute nature.

[Nobody]

Mr. Nobody,

Inflationary theory hypothesizes the expansion of the very fabric of space-time. That well-known analogy of the expansion of a balloon is usually given to depict the concept. Yet, the balloon requires a place in order to expand; whereas according to inflationary theory, there was no space or time (place) before the inflationary era. So what exactly did the space-time fabric expand into?

[Mr. Nobody]

Expansion of___into___ is an invalid expression for lack of the proper terms to describe the expansion of a whole.
Look at it this way. The expansion of the balloon represents a 4-dimensional (space with time) model depicted as a 2 dimensional example. Only the surface of the balloon is spacetime (you have to sqeeze space down to just 2 dimensions), so expansion of space into space is not how you should look at that example, but a 2-dimensional object into 3-dimensional space.
Which leads you to the answer. 4 dimensional space-time will expand into the next dimension, a 5th one.

[Mr. Nobody]

Spacially there is nothing outside the cosmos. I have once posed a question of what would happen if one could block the cosmic background radiation within a sphere? Would that create a whole in space, since the EMR is all permeating and a fundamental attribute of all space, and to take that idea even further, is that what black holes do in the core? Is the core of a black hole made up of the same spacial void as the outside of the cosmos and therefore connected? Is the cosmos really like cheese after all (green cheese-moon, lol)?

[Mr. Nobody]

Another way of looking at it is that the observable universe is expanding. Postulating that the total spatial expanse of the universe to be infinite, one can say that the part we can see, the part that we receive information from, is expanding. That way, there is infinity outside of what we can see.
If expansion continues at current rate we may lose information from anything that is not gravitationally bound to our galactic local group.
If expansion continues to increase (as observation show, perhaps due to increasing vacuum energy) then the fundamental forces will become so diluted that nothing can be held together anymore and reality will melt away into infinite darkness