I was reading in the 13.7 blog on NPR's website that the Big Bang theory, as a theory of beginning (and not in its role of describing the universe's conditions billions of years ago), is becoming more and more precarious, scientifically.
I've always wondered a bit about this, but my take on it is more related to the problem time itself presents: it's just a dimension, which happens to have a sort of built-in directionality or "slope" (forward), that our perceptions roll down. And to talk of beginnings or endings in the broad sense of the whole universe neglects the very real possibility that time is a local condition, rather than a universal one. Which is to say, there's no meaning to concepts of begenning or ending without any time. Beyond time.
I suppose you could say that I'm trying to apply the so-called anthropic principle to time, and suggest that time is just an accident of our (local) universe that seems special but isn't. It seems special because it's part of what gives our consciousness its unique, weird, consciousness-like characteristics. But in the bigger picture, it's a minor, even irrelevant characteristic, or a sort of emergent property of other, deeper things, in the same way that there is a specific value for pi that emerges from the mathematical relations between points in a plane, or that we experience something we call temperature, which is really just the fact of a large bunch of particles wiggling at a certain average energy level.
South Korea is unique, and complicated.