For all that astronomers and physicists, philosophers and poets have learned about the universe since women and men first peered out of those tiny holes in our skulls, we are still no closer to answering perhaps the most fundamental cosmological question of all:
Why is there something instead of nothing?
But I have my own theory:
It was a tax write-off.
It was more beneficial to have a universe than not to have one. And it was designed to fail – which it has, if local conditions can be taken as any indication.