Existence

I suppose you could if you take the analogy too literally and out of context.The globe represents the universe. The surface of the globe represents spacetime. Travel north you travel back through spacetime. At the pole, where you gonno go? Outside spacetime? What is that? It doesn't make sense.Keep the analogy in perspective and it makes sense that there is nothing north of the north pole. There is no such thing as before spacetime. There's not even a "before" to even consider.Edited by AZPaul3, : clarity

As we go further back in time, further north if you will, we reach a point where our two greatest and most productive theories (General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory) start throwing infinities at us. In math that's fine but in cosmology it means the theories have gone bonkers, gotten drunk, fell in the gutter and are broken. This area of our ignorance is called the singularity. It is about 10^-43 seconds after whatever happened to cause this mess happened. 10^-43 seconds this side of the north pole. Earlier than that we cannot tell what was going on so we cannot tell how this whole thing started. We are stuck just short of the north pole.The big push in cosmology is to find something called Quantum Gravity which is kind of a marriage between GR and QFT. The hope is this new theory will help us pierce the singularity and get some idea what started the universe. There is some speculation that QG might, though no one knows how, be able to look at conditions preceding the start of the universe. Kind of what you were speculating about going "somewhere" past the north pole.For right now, however, without Quantum Gravity or something like it to guide us, we are stuck at 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second this side of the north pole and can't go any further. And speculations of what is there and what might be "beyond" there are certainly fun, but, ultimately, useless.Edited by AZPaul3, : clarity