Questions of the Universe

The following are several thoughts that came to mind when reading Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (Chapters 1-3). Any "facts" in this post are credited to him and the scientists he mentions.

The "Big Bang" is a popular theory nowadays. As humans, we have to know the origins of life, the universe, everything (42). We have to know a theory that unifies all that we observe (I don't think this is possible, yet it's fun to think that this unifying theory would predict the outcome of humans finding or not finding this theory). The Big Bang does a good job of explaining what we see in the universe today - except for the part where the theory breaks down at the quantum level. Though the Big Bang was proven to have happened by Hawking and Roger Penrose, it is based on Einstein's general theory of relativity which breaks down at the quantum level. First of all, everything was condensed into an infinitely dense ball of matter (a singularity). Then this ball exploded its matter into infinite space. Infinity has had scientists scratching their heads forever, yet, it's there. It's hard to accept that the universe is not infinite when one can ask "What's outside the universe?" Here are my thoughts:
1. It has been "proven" that the universe is expanding. Alexander Friedmann came up with a possible model where the universe  is in constant oscillation in which the universe magically shrinks in on itself after it reaches a maximum and then another Big Bang happens. This also makes it convenient to explain what may have happened before the Big Bang. However, there is no evidence to support the oscillation of the universe. Friedmann made two other models: the universe may be expanding more and more slowly but never quite reaches zero just to avoid collapsing in on itself, or it could reach the Big Freeze scenario - all matter and energy spreads apart and dissolves away into space until energy is so diluted in the universe, it's as if it's not there. This implies that there is a finite amount of energy in this infinite universe. What kind of universe is this where everything dies and no one is there to bask in its wonder? It boggles the mind to really think on this (I see where religion can have a say in this).
2. We can look to the edge of the observable universe and watch galaxies wink to life. This is essentially a time machine where we can see billions and billions of years into the past when the universe came to being. The thought that the universe had a beginning is valid because if there was an infinite amount of time before humans looked to the stars, we would be able to see much further past the orb of the observable universe than we do now - the light from those distant stars would have had time to reach us. Now, Friedmann made two assumptions (upon which the above models were based) in 1922: the universe (generally) looks the same in whatever direction we look, and the same observation can be made from any other galaxy. While the first assumption was later proven by Edwin Hubble, there's no evidence to support the second - it was made out of modesty because the first alone implied we had a special place in the "center" of the universe. If the second assumption is true, that could imply one of two things: there is an infinite number of galaxies and an infinite amount of matter, or gravity is so strong that space is bent on itself such that there is a finite amount of space and matter, but there is no boundary to the universe. This can be easily visualized when taken down a dimension. It's like the surface of the Earth - one can travel a straight line on its two-dimensional surface, not hit any boundaries, and end up where he/she started. The same goes for the universe in 3D space. One can travel in one direction and eventually end up where he/she started (though this is not allowed because one cannot travel faster than the speed of light). However, if Friedmann's second assumption is false, we are indeed in the "center" of the universe (I find this unlikely), or the universe has an edge, and time has not existed long enough for us to observe it. Whatever the case, this all make for some awesome science-fiction thinking.
3. The universe is not expanding from a central point, rather from everything else. But what is pushing everything apart? The book suggested, then refuted that gravity could be repulsive over long distances. It used a scale of a distance between two stars in this argument. However, it left a lot open to question. What if we upped the distance to about the distance between two galaxies? Is there some length of space where the anti-gravity is just "switched on"? Black holes are shreds of impossibility in this universe, and there is a super massive one in the center of every galaxy. Why not suggest that they have the key to anti-gravity, and they interact with the other super massive black holes in other galaxies? Hubble observed that there was no randomness to the rate at which distant galaxies were moving away (by using the Doppler effect with light). The speed at which any two galaxies are moving apart is proportional to the distance between them i.e. the further away the galaxy, the faster it's moving away. There could be some reliable math behind this anti-gravity if it exists.  I could be missing something that shuts these suggestions down, but hey, I'm just a college student.
4. This is just a fun fact that I want to relay - I can actually understand this now. Einstein suggested that gravity is a consequence of the fact that space-time is warped by the mass and energy in it. Bodies in space-time do not travel in orbits due to a force called gravity, rather it follows the nearest thing in a straight line in curved space (a geodesic). This geodesic once again can be easily visualized when it is taken down a dimension. It's much like how the distance between two points on a piece of paper is a line, but if you bend the paper through three dimensional space, the line is now a curve. The new shortest distance between those same points is now a different line, or a three dimensional geodesic.

I now leave you with a crazy suggestion. Time may not have existed until this very moment. We were just implanted with all of these memories by a higher being.