Ok, that one (or those?) may be a little bit tricky. Orac may have a better take on the answers. But let me make a start at it.
Let me start with the question of the parts of the universe that are moving away from us at greater than the speed of light. This is kind of difficult, but they aren't really moving away from us. They are separating from us. That looks like just saying the same thing in different ways, but it isn't really. What is happening is that space is stretching. The distant galaxies aren't really moving at greater than the speed of light. I have thought about that and thinking in a science fictional way I have come up with a sort of a thought experiment. Assume we have some kind of space travel that will allow us to travel any place in the universe instantly. So let us measure the average speed of all the near by galaxies with respect to our galaxy. I'm not sure what the value would be, but the average would be relatively low. It wouldn't be high enough to cause any huge variation due to time dilation. Now let us turn on our transport and travel 14 billion light years. Remember that this is that science fictional transport system that is "instantaneous". One thing we take with us is our proper motion with respect to all the galaxies in this neighborhood. That is we are still moving at the same speed we were moving, with respect to our neighboring galaxies here. Now let's measure our speed with respect to near by galaxies in the location we have moved to. If I understand it correctly then we will find that our proper motion with respect to all our new neighbors will be at least in the same order of magnitude as with our old neighbors. That's because they aren't really moving away from us. They are just getting farther away because there is more space between here and there.
I hope you can understand what I am saying there. The bottom line is that at no time have the different parts of the universe actually moved at close to the speed of light with respect to each other. So that clocks all over the universe are keeping approximately the same time.
I recognize that this is one of those weird concepts that come with modern physics. Some of it I am afraid we just have to accept on faith if we don't want to go back to college and enter an advanced physics program.
Bill Gill
