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Our main contending models are nowhere near well enough developed to describe the topology of the universe - that's maybe 50 - 100 years away. So the debates we are having now are topical - but the science and technology necessary to rule in or out models doesn't yet exist (even as an idea) and the models themselves are so incomplete as to have almost no predictive power yet to be validated.
We don't understand dark energy yet well enough to even begin theoretically speculating what it is or isn't. Personally I ponder whether spacetime could have far more complicated and subtle interactions with matter and energy in it than we have allowed for - the curvature of spacetime could open up whole branches of science in itself if hidden dimensions at a Planck level are shown likely to exist. CERN and GRB studies are likely to be the labs showing data supporting this. Space is thought of as a large, most empty room - that is itself neutral to things in it - but what if that is very, very far from the reality? MOND looks at this very slightly, scale relativity delves alot further saying at a Planck level spacetime isn't quantised but fractal. Dark energy may be for instancey hidden geometries of spacetime interacting with energy or matter in it. If that is discovered to be the case well it will be a real inflection point for our physical understanding of reality.
Until we reach that point - there is a whole lot of unknowns - without even a theoretical framework to speculate against.
Example - imagine the universe is either far larger than we thought - or infinite. Secondly image our big bang was just a minor, local area event - a minor burp overall. Well there could be trillions of these events happening every second - like bubbles bursting or forming in the foam of a very, very large universe. Large bubbles of existence would form - large to our scale of thinking yes - but these bubbles would not be anywhere near all of creation and each would really be infinitesmally tiny compared to the entirety of the universe. If each little bubble had its own local physical parameters and the geometry of that bubbles spacetime could vary slightly (e.g. weight and charge of a proton, speed of light etc just slightly different) well eventually some bubbles would be capable of sustaining intelligent life. Where would the centre of this reality be - we in our bubble can have no way of knowing. So what such a bubble universe moves in - or what's outside our Hubble bubble that may be cause its overall expansion well we have no models to ponder this seriously yet.
String theory could model this - but string theory can model over 10 ^ 384 possible realities without preference for any (yet) so it has basically no predictive power (yet).
Stay tuned!
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