It's Official: We Were WRONG About the Big Bang

Some good questions.  I like to think of it this way - you can't get something from nothing - A "Big Bang" doesn't make sense.  The only reasonable explanation is that it was always there.  The next part is that it has to be a dynamic system - if it was "static", nothing would explain why it suddenly changed.  Aristotle created the concept of "The Prime Mover".  He was an atheist, but allowed for the concept of a god in that it would be the "thing" that set everything in motion.  The next part is that there is no reason to assume that there is only one of us.  Whatever this dynamic system called "space" is is probably infinitely everywhere.  Your graphic of the many "bubbles"" is a good one.  And there should be no reason that these bubbles are not in a dynamic system where they collide and reform all the time.

So, given that - it would be impossible that the universe is simply expanding.  Time did not start from our POV, for the same reason the universe didn't.  Given an infinite amount of time, the universe would have just expanded out into "the nothing".