DID THE UNIVERSE HAVE A BEGINNING?

Did the universe have a beginning, or a time before which nothing existed? Or did the universe exist for an eternity, like an infinite line extending in both directions? Or, quite possibly, is our universe cyclic like the circumference of a circle, where it repeats over and over indefinitely. Even though we can trace our cosmic history all the way back to the earliest stages of the Big Bang, that isn't enough to answer the question of how (or if) time began. Going even earlier, to the end-stages of cosmic inflation, we can learn how the Big Bang was set up and began, but we have no observable information about what occured prior to that. The final fraction of a second of inflation is where our knowledge ends. Thousands of years after we laid out the three major possibilities of how time began- as having always existed, as having began a finite duration in the past, or as being a cyclical entity- we are no closer to a definitive answer. Whether time is finite, infinite, or cyclical is not a question that we have enough information within our observable universe to answer. Unless we figure out a new way to gain information about this deep, existential question, the answer may forever be beyond the limits of what is knowable.