Paul C- on your second topic regarding multiple universes- I am open to the possibility of multi-universes. One idea I like to play with in my mind is that if indeed our universe originated from a big bang, then the mass that formed that singularity had an origin from somewhere else.... perhaps another universe?

If you think about it, even unscientifically, humans have been forming ideas of multi-universes for a while... for example, in the Abrahamic religions (i.e Judaism, Christianity, Islam) the concept of an afterlife has the idea of a heaven/hell after humankind dies... and really if you strip out all the religious imagery and ideas of punishment and reward (I'm not wanting to discuss if it's religiously correct or not) but rather asking all of you to just ponder the idea that the Abrahamic afterlife is really the idea of living in another universe philosophically speaking.

Conceptually also if we look at the Hindu and Buddhist ideas on reincarnation....Using unscientific methods, the Hindu/Buddhist philosophers through observation of the birth, life, death cycle of life on earth developed reincarnation concepts that have analogies to the scientific observations being made on the birth, life and death at the cosmic scale of stars and planets as well... i.e all of us are made of star dust... one day the Earth and our Sun will die, the particles that made us will roam through the universe to eventually coalesce into a new star or planetary system...

My intention in bringing those analogies to light is not to give scientific justification for any of those religious beliefs, but rather to just point out that humankind has been undergoing for thousands and millions of years, a journey to greater knowledge and self awareness of its place in the cosmos, and as such prior to the tools of science being available, using unscientific methods likely our ancestors were touching on concepts that our modern scientists are now studying with mathematical and scientific rigour surrounding multi-universes and cosmic life cycles.