Two points that arise out of the foregoing discussion may be worth considering.
1. Einstein did not say that no material object could travel faster than light; what SR forbids is the acceleration of any object through space from sub-light speed to super-light speed. Current thinking about the expanding Universe has distant galaxy groups moving away from us faster than light, because they are not moving through space; space is expanding and carrying them with it.
2. There seems to be a tacit acceptance that time “passes”, but if time moves, to what is that movement relative? Surely it is more reasonable to think of time as a static entity through which we all move. This leads to the possibility that everything moves through spacetime at the same speed; the speed of light. Light does all its travelling through space, which means it is static in time, whereas we do most of our travelling through time, and a very limited amount through space, because we are so slow (relatively speaking, of course).
Bill S.

There never was nothing.