What -is- this?

[Fist and Faith]

Could be.

Or we could lose contact with the probe. Which could mean any number of things. It no longer exists; it cannot send info from where it now is; it is not able to sense anything where it now is...

Or it could start sending back data. Which means its sensors would be receiving input. Which means it's not outside of our universe, we've only learned that the border is beyond what we thought it was.

[Loredoctor]

In one of those deep philosophical veins...What is "cause"? As humans we get very caught up in oppositional forces, our language, and our cultural perceptions. We really have a hard time with the idea of non-existance, beginnings, and causation. It is our neurotic compulsion to exert control or preceive control. That's why we refer to nature as having "laws" and why the Big Bang seems basically counter-intuitive to some of our basic observations of the universe.
Personally, the Big Bounce has slightly more weight with me. Not really a beginning or end but a constant state of being with some radical universal horizions mixed in. I suspect we are the the only species at the very least on this planet that thinks we matter.

I find the theory regarding re-impacting universal membranes more interesting and 'possibly more accurate' than the universe being born from some quantum event or nothing. It certainly would make sense with the increasing expansion of the universe which flattens out spacetime and 'erases' the previous universe. And then the system begins again when the branes collide. Although, it still begets the question of where this system originated.

I recommend people to read Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos, and some of the more recent astrophysics journals which discuss this.