From O'Reilly

My Cosmology

I believe the universe is an infinite expanse of very tiny (Planck scale) cubes, that have always existed and will continue to do so forever. This big (understatement) matrix of cubes can be described by an analog cellular automaton that seems to reproduce what we know about quantum electrodynamics. See physics for full details.

To keep things interesting, it would be convenient if this system exhibited some kind of stable behavior over time. Otherwise we would be exceedingly luck to live at this exact moment in all of infinity that happens to be pretty cool, in the definitional sense that I happen to exist (and so do you, given that you are here reading this, presumably). This is the much-discussed anthropic principle.

So, I think that black holes are the vacuum cleaners of the universe, cleaning up all the thermodynamic messes that we are constantly making: they are the ultimate anti-entropy machines. These guys eventually gobble each other up, until at some point there is this really really huge black hole, which exceeds some critical mass, and spews forth a whole new canvas of matter (the big bang), at which point the whole thing just starts over again. Of course, there must be very very distant other big bangs happening all over the place, given that the whole thing is infinite, but probably these are so far away and so few between that we don't really notice them.

Anyway, this seems like a very nice story that is perhaps consistent with observable facts (e.g., the ever puzzling flatness of the universe is always giving folks a tough time -- Einstein's biggest blunder and all that).