What if time was circular? That in the future all matter becomes compressed smaller than this period.

Then the process begins all over again, and that is the solution to the problem of infinite regress? It's counter intuitive but as NDT said, "the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you"

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hartfire

Marshall Barnes on Quora gives the perfect answer...

"Time itself is neither. Time doesn’t flow or move but allows other things to do so. So cycles that we observe have nothing to do with time other than time allows them to exist. Time is attached to every part of space, forming the space-time continuum and since everything is moving, vibrating, changing, that is due to the fact that time is the dimensional aspect that allows change, and spatial dimensions allow things to be in different places. When those things change position, that is because time allows it to happen. No time, no change, no nothing.

We know time is real because if it wasn’t, time dilation wouldn’t occur. Time dilation is those distortions in what we think to be the flow of time, during high velocity transits or in the presence of strong gravitational fields.

When people think that celestial changes, or seasonal changes due to the Earth’s position around the sun, are time, that’s like thinking a fish swimming in a fish tank, is the water. Actually, the tank is like space, and the water is like time. The water fills the tank and is everywhere. If it wasn’t, the fish couldn’t move and would be dead despite all of that space in the tank.

The fact that time doesn’t move explains the asymmetry of time, or why things never seem to go backwards. Despite the fact that physicists can run their equations forward and backwards, we never see the events that those equations explain, happen in reverse. That’s because time has nothing to do with either, it’s just there serving the purpose I described. For things to happen in reverse, all of the forces and process that cause them to happen in a causal order, would have to reverse, and that’s never going to happen. Gravity, will not reverse, your biological processes will not reverse, the expansion of gases during an explosion will not reverse, because there is no causal agent that could make them do so."

Marshall Barnes has 20 years + experience on time research