Are we growing?

[TaraJo]

No

Although space is expanding, nuclear forces keep the atoms together and gravity keeps the galaxies together. Eventually however, dark energy will become so strong that everything will be ripped apart.

That's one of the theories, anyway. There are a couple of others, first being that gravity will pull everything in the universe back together into a kind of super black hole that's similar to what started the big bang. I don't think this one is widly believed, but if it was, it would certainly answer the questions about what was before the big bang (answer would be, another universe). The other theory is that we keep expanding but the nuclear energy of the stars burns out into a big freeze. The only question I have about the big freeze theory comes down to the law of conservation of energy: if energy can't be destroyed, what happens to all that energy when the universe experiences the big freeze?

But the big monkey wrench to any of these theories is still dark matter and dark energy; we just know so little about either of them that it's difficult to make predictions around them.