[snarks_when_bored]

I purposely left 'time' out of my response. While it's true that at the origin point-instant of the Big Bang (should such there have been), spacetime itself came into existence, from what I've read, cosmologists don't seem to speak of time as also having expanded along with space (indeed, it's not clear what that might mean). An extremely small amount of time elapsed while the vast expansion of space occurred—that's what the gist of this result seems to me to be.

But, of course, I'm not a cosmologist, so everything I say should always be taken as the comments of an interested gawker.

[AntiGuv]

I just posted this in the other thread, but it might be of interest to some here as well:

The Myth of the Beginning of Time: String theory suggests that the big bang was not the origin of the universe but simply the outcome of a preexisting state.

And, so far as what I said above, I shouldn't have said "no one has a clue" (someone might, for all I know), but rather: No one knows for sure.

[edsheppa]

cosmologists don't seem to speak of time as also having expanded along with space (indeed, it's not clear what that might mean).

One way to think of it, by analogy with the spatial dimensions of spacetime is that time got "big." A universe w/o inflation would exist for a virtually infinitesimal amount of time before collapsing. Our universe, according to the latest and greatest evidence, may last forever.