Reminds me of the Heechee series by Frederick Pohl. In those books, humans discover that there's an alien race, very ancient and powerful, who have learned how to cause a Big Crunch, survive it, and influence the form of the resulting new universe -- presumably to make it more suitable for inhabitation by said race.

OTOH, the same series includes technology that can "drill into" the event horizon of a black hole and come back out... so have the salt handy!