Great point, Livingston, and I think this episodes neatly illustrates that the picture we intuitively make when we try to imagine the universe, here a collapsing one, is wrong. Ironically the people in the Middle Ages who imagined the world to have an end might better cope with this than we.
We face the same problem with time. We cannot imagine that time actually started one day and automatically ask what happened before the big bang just like we cannot imagine not having existed before our birth and not existing anymore after our death.
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