"We don't assume the universe looks the same in every direction, it does."
Sort of true from here, right now.
But, I said it is assumed to be true from everywhere, all the time. That is what is hard to envision and explain.
Same for "the universe is known to be homogeneous." Seeing from one perspective for an extremely limited amount of time is not actually knowing - it is assuming.
And, it actually is averaging. As you said, we do observe voids and clumps along "filaments" that we really don't understand. We just assume that those are the same everywhere, although we are only starting to resolve them closest to us.
And, the BBT assumes that what we see is expanding into nothing, rather than into some larger universe that may be getting other portions locally compressed by our local (but gigantic) expansion.
The BBT assumes that space is finite, and age is finite, but cannot explain how something never was until it is.
Seems to me we should be looking for some explanation that does not extrapolate to impossibility. And, I do not see any reason that it needs to be a cyclic process that takes the whole universe from a tiny spec to billions of light years in diameter and then back to a spec, again, before somehow repeating. Yes, we don't currently understand how that could work. But, then again, we don't understand what appears to be dark matter and dark energy, either. Unless we can find both, we really have not come close to validating the BBT model.
Sort of true from here, right now.
But, I said it is assumed to be true from everywhere, all the time. That is what is hard to envision and explain.
Same for "the universe is known to be homogeneous." Seeing from one perspective for an extremely limited amount of time is not actually knowing - it is assuming.
And, it actually is averaging. As you said, we do observe voids and clumps along "filaments" that we really don't understand. We just assume that those are the same everywhere, although we are only starting to resolve them closest to us.
And, the BBT assumes that what we see is expanding into nothing, rather than into some larger universe that may be getting other portions locally compressed by our local (but gigantic) expansion.
The BBT assumes that space is finite, and age is finite, but cannot explain how something never was until it is.
Seems to me we should be looking for some explanation that does not extrapolate to impossibility. And, I do not see any reason that it needs to be a cyclic process that takes the whole universe from a tiny spec to billions of light years in diameter and then back to a spec, again, before somehow repeating. Yes, we don't currently understand how that could work. But, then again, we don't understand what appears to be dark matter and dark energy, either. Unless we can find both, we really have not come close to validating the BBT model.