If I understand it correctly, we measure time by how fast light passes, or something similar to that. Now if the universe expands faster than the speed of light, would that mean that the universe ages faster than earth, or maybe slower than earth? Maybe this doesn’t make sense but I have a gut feeling that there’s something to it…
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The universe all ages at pretty much the same rate. When we look out into the sky, we see the universe in the past because that stuff is so far away that it takes a long amount of time for the light to reach us. Those things we are seeing may not even be there because they continued to change after emitting that light.
Now, the expansion of space happening faster than light, that’s not really happening inside of the universe. Once you get far enough away from Earth (where we are observing from) that the expansion of space is happening faster than light, that space it outside of the observable universe, and due to that fact, it essentially does not exist to us. It can’t interact with us, and we can never interact with it. We won’t even be able to see it.
Time does slow down when you’re accelerating, so near massive galaxies and black holes, things will age slower, but the universe still ages the same. Since space and time are really the same thing, any local time dilation really doesn’t change the universe as a whole.
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