There is actually something called "The Theory of Everything" that many people are working on. There are observations made by Einstein (how space, time, weight and velocity interact with each other in ways we don't normally notice) and the more recent findings when observing things on a small scale. Two different sets of behavior are seen in the universe, one on very a large scale and one at very small scales. We know there should only be one set of rules that makes everything work but we can't find a single set that describes everything we observe - instead we use 2 different systems of calculating things depending on whether we're looking at very small scales or larger ones. The Theory of Everything, technically, is when someone finds a single set of rules that applies to larger or small scales the same, and include both Einsteins views and quantum observations.
But anyway, along with your views of the universe, I think most observations agree that this is likely how things evolved but I had some interesting ideas that might be fun to look for.
If the universe we see is all that exists (which is plenty of course) and there's nothing outside this, then at some point in time things should repeat. If you looked at the expansion of the big bang and possibly later the big crush, with likely another big bang, you could see it as a cycle repeating forever, like a guitar string vibrating back and forth, repeating a single note (ok, I'm sure someone is going to mention string theory).
The thing is that if there's no outside input, then eventually the universe would repeat, identically (not each big bang cycle maybe bit after X number of cycles) because there's no new "information" added to the system and it can't create new things out of nothing.
But, assuming there was a beginning to this, then there's a chance we haven't totally settled down to a single "pure note" yet, or that there are exteranl inputs to our universe that could create new and original events never seen before.
It could be that energy can be created or destroyed but it's just very unlikely to see. Imagine if as the universe cycled through big bangs and crushes, that there was a chance some "particles" could collide and be destroyed - like trying to play a bad note on the string, the string vibrates a little but only allows certain frequencies to remain stable. It could be possible to, for example, destroy matter or energy in this cycle of the universe but that event only would happen once and not be available to be destroyed next cycle, and why we don't see such actions normally occuring - anything destructive like that likely happened long ago and we've "stabilized" now. Or another way to look at it might be to see the planets orbiting in our solar system. They appear to have very regular orbital patterns (if they didn't they would have already collided or been ejected) but this doesn't mean they can't be moved from this position, it's just that it's
unlikely anyone would find a star system with chaoticly orbiting planets.
So the point is that there's a decent possibility we could see more funky discoveries as we find out more about how the universe works (or at least appears to work).
Something along similar lines:
Question: "How could the Earth be so perfect for humans if it wasn't created that way?"
Answer: "How many people are on Venus asking why their planet is uninhabitable?" or
"How many deep sea animals are wonder what the likelyhood of having a comfortable 200C sulfuric acid vent around is?"
It's a problem with biased sampling. Here's a way you can show the same thing pretty easily. Ask random people who many siblings were in their family. You'll likely find an average of 4 or 5 or even more and many people would assume that means that most families have 4-5 or more people, but that's incorrect, it's lower. It's because there are more people from larger families, so you're more likely to ask someone from a large family how many siblings they had:
Like 2 families, 1 with no siblings and another family with 6 siblings - the average family size should be 3 but naively people would calculate it as 1 person with no siblings and 7 people with 6 siblings, which seem to say 5 1/4 is the average size, when 5 1/4 is close to the maximum, yet still done by random sampling.
Along similar lines, someone could ask:
Question: "What's the chances that humans developed and are living right now if the universe was randomly create?"
Answer: "If you're asking the question, it's 100% certainty"
If we have no consciousness when we're dead, then it doesn't matter whether you were dead for eons and only alive for 30 years, or if you're reincarnated each cycle of the universe (possibly as someone else to relive how you affected others
), 100% of what you know is life. We know nothing about death. If you take the percent time you're conscious and divide it by the percent time you're not unconscious, the answer is always 1. %0.0001 / %0.0001 is still 100% conscious.
You can also sampling bias also to show that if the population grew exponentially over time, like doubling every 50 years, and there happened to be a catastrophic event that destroyed everything, what's the probability you'd be born within the last 50 years before this occured - it's a 50/50 chance
because more people are alive at the end than the beginning... but it's still fine to go into life insurance because you won't have to pay out.
There are ways of getting around the above observation but it still tends to indicate that the average life span of any species correlates with the period in which it reproduces, and you can see this to be true for most any animals - insects reproduce quickly but have short lifespans, mammals reproduce slower but live longer.
Well, that's not entirely on topic but it's some of the interesting observations I've made about how life/the universe could work. (But none of this even really hints at what consciousness is or the possibility of alternate universes).