It's interesting how perception and perspective has amazing differences and subsequent, consequences that diminish our curiosity.

We limit our minds to work within the boundaries of what we believe true.

Perception: Space is speeding up! Everything is getting further away, so space must be expanding.

Perspective: Space is speeding up! Everyone is getting further away, so space must be contracting.

Hmm 🤔 one of these is true. But its not the one you think.

As things speed up, time also slows down. Think of the classical grid of space. Turn the centre into a gravity well and imagine a funnel. The closer you got to the bottom of that hole (singularity), the more stretched the grid. Things would be perceived to be expanding faster.. because they are more expanded, and because you are indeed moving faster.. yet time slows from that perspective, to well, eventually infinity. A comoving observer would perceive time differently on this grid, depending on gravitational depth (distance to singularity).

13.8B years? From our perspective, sure. But to even define time immediately provides inaccuracies. From somewhere further up the gravity well, the observed time would be much faster. The universe might have only existed say, 1 Billion years... from their perspective. You see why this is only a baseline.

What really gets fun is when you combine different perceptions, you can change your perspective. Could there be an antimatter opposite to our funnel? Matter contracting towards a singularity at an infinitely fast speed and slow time scale and antimatter expanding into oblivion at ever accelerating rates?

Wait, wouldn't it be cool if it actually acted like a giant magnetic field, eventually looping around and creating a circuit, smashing together causing new matter for our universe and creating an infinite cycle of life and death.

Point is, be curious and think outside the box.