>>17840786 (OP)
They figured out how the universe came to exist. To know why it happened, we have to go further. The first thing is to discard all fire-related imagery. Heraclitus is out. The "big bang" was not red and yellow, it wasn't a nuclear detonation or even a supernova, we're viewing a larger scale here. No, matter behaves more like a liquid -- Thales is in. Genesis is back in. The Big Drip was a bag of matter/energy, like a black hole, that formed in another universe and eventually dripped through, splattering everywhere. The behavior of matter is like liquid in a vacuum, bouncing or sticking to itself and turning spherical. Because smaller black holes exist here, we might surmise the previous universe is a more energetic version of ours, or even just an earlier version with galaxy whirlpools forming and colliding constantly in a relatively smaller area. We might envision them as different zones of an ocean, only radiating out from one source of absolute energy. One ultimate black-hole ocean at the center of all universes, that occasionally sloughs energy like the smaller versions do. After that, or rather before, you enter theoretical phases of matter. Imagine an exo-universe empty of matter and gravity, so no liquid behavior. Only energy charge and discharge like invisible lightning that eventually coalesce into the ultimate ocean. It's possible that when heat death occurs, not just of our universe but of all universes in many trillions of centuries, similar conditions will exist because all the energy will be dispersed into huge fields that scrape over each other where universes meet, going back to the ocean zone metaphor. It's probably an infinite cycle where the natural state of matter is just gravel floating in the abyss and occasionally a pileup of universes causes so much energy buildup that reality comes into existence. Why does the piece of gravel, your ancestor, exist? The world where it doesn't exist is likely a human invention. They're crafty.
