Contrary to popular belief, black holes do not "suck up everything". The same way the sun does not "suck up everything" in our solar system. Sure, if stuff keeps colliding with the black hole, the black hole gets bigger and bigger (the same way the sun would get bigger and bigger if enough mass would fall into it). But the black hole never turns into a giant universe-eating vacuum cleaner, the same way the sun doesn't "eat" everything that gets close to it (e.g. comets pass very close but still get away... the same would happen if the sun were a black hole, and at the same distance, since the mass is the same)<p>On the contrary, due to the expansion of the universe, stuff tends to move further and further away from other stuff over time, so the chances of things colliding with a black hole get smaller and smaller with the age of the universe. At some point all black holes evaporate (at least according to current theories) because so little stuff falls into them that the tiny amount of hawking radiation that they radiate is enough to evaporate them over trillions of years.....<p>Also, the question whether "a universe before the big bang" (if such a thing exists) is "the same" as ours, or "different", doesn't really make sense. If you take all matter in the universe, heat it up so that only high-energy radiation is left, and then let it "create another universe"... . how would you define if it's "the same" or "different"? All matter has been removed and recreated. It's similar to the idea that you take a ship, any ship, and piece by piece replace every single part of the ship one by one. At the end, is it still the same ship or a different one?<p>To take a more traditional scientific stance, asking "what happened before the big bang" is meaningless because time didn't exist, it was created by the big bang. It's tricky to wrap your head around the concept, the same way that it's tricky to wrap your head around the concept of an "expanding universe" that seems to expand "away" from us in every direction, yet we are not in the center of it. Or that the universe might be infinitely large or even wrap around, yet we will never know because we can only ever "look" 14 billion light years far into the universe. It could be that after travelling for 20 billion light years we wouldn't reach the end of the universe (because it has no end) but instead land back on earth.<p>Some questions can never be answered because of physics. They will forever be unknown because answering them either makes no sense, or none of the answers you could give could ever be verified/falsified. So: does asking these questions even make sense?