Does the universe age faster than earth?

Question

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…

In: 97

Answer 1

So this stuff took me a while to even begin to understand, but there’s a couple problems with the premise here.

One is that there isn’t really a singlular thing you’d call “the universe” for the purposes of relativity. Every object in the universe is its own observer relative to the speeds everything else in the universe is moving relative to it.

Another thing is that the universe isn’t really expanding at a “speed” faster than light. It is expanding quite slowly, but it is doing it *everywhere.*

So lets say one inch becomes one point one inches over a period of time, right? Well because there are SO MANY goddang inches, and *every single one of them* is becoming 1.1 inches, the amount of distance increases drastically over a long enough distance. Two inches becomes 2.2 inches. 3 inches becomes 3.3 inches. And millions of millions of inches increase by an amount that light cannot cross in the same amount of time that the expansion happens. But again, the rate of that expansion can be quite slow and still have this effect over vast distances.