Yes, Jack, my tribe has been flying around the galaxies for billions of years. So how old am I?
No, Caroline. I don't mind telling my age. This might be an issue with some of your gender on Earth, but I am fine with telling you that I emerged from my planetary egg 90 million years ago.
Yes, Jack. In human terms I am very old, but young for a Cosmic Swan. Many members of my tribe live over a billion years. We have our predators. The worst are the ice dragons that live in dense atmospheres of gas giant planets.
I don't understand why you think my age is impossible. The infinite universe is also infinite in time -- not as your Big Bang Mythological story tells you. Your race has recently run down a dark lane of nebulosity, believing that the light you see from distant galaxies undergoes no change as it snakes its way through space. When your scientists determine that a photon from a distant galaxy has lost energy, has its spectrum shifted toward the red, they assume the explanation that the galaxy is flying away. And the farther away is the galaxy, the more it is red shifted. So everything they see must be flying away from the Earth and accelerating according to its distance. What a strange universe they describe. At some distant time all the galaxies would be spread out to infinity. They have invented Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and complex explanations for what drives the accelerating expansion. Every time they find a contradiction, they must add more epicycles to the Big Bang Model.
Why do stars attain ages that seem to approximate the age of the universe? Galaxies are built of stars so they must be a lot older. Why have your scientists not seen primitive galaxies at the greatest distances? The deeper they look, the more of the same they see. Since Quasars have large red shifts, they assume that they are at the "edge" of the universe. They are actually very very dense material recently ejected from the core of a galaxy, from the jet emitted by a Black Hole. Black Holes evolve from Quasars that spin out from the mother galaxy to attract and soak up intergalactic material to form new galaxies.
Of course there is a better explanation, Caroline. The space that I fly through is not empty. I could not survive if it were. Much of the stuff I inhale to give me energy, to feed the blue star in my heart, takes energy away from photons as they fly. The hot plasma that fills most regions of space takes energy from photons. The abundant little iron whiskers take a little energy from many photons they encounter. I swim through the ebb and flow of gravity fields that steal a little energy from photons. I do not know all the reasons why photons lose energy, but I know that they do, because I have met other Cosmic Swans that have sailed farther than the 13.7 billion light years that your scientists call the size of the universe.
Yes, it is not just an odd coincidence that your scientists say the universe is 13.7 billion years old and it is 13.7 light years in radius. It is incorrect. The size of the universe is infinite and it takes a photon emitted from a star 13.7 billion years of travel to be robbed of all its energy through encounters with plasma, whiskers, and other robbers.
I swim through the Cosmic Microwave background radiation. How does it prove there was a Big Bang that created the universe? Its energy spectrum is better explained as the stable energy levels and variations achieved after hundreds of billions of years of recycling of energy and mass through galactic growth, stellar emissions, photon absorption by galactic dust, whiskers, plasmas, quasar ejections by galactic jets, galactic formations and evolutions, stellar novae gas and debris productions, and on and on.
No, not energy is lost or gained. No mass is lost or gained. They keep recycling on and on forever. Only one parameter changes consistently -- the level of understanding, incite, creativity, and freedom of thought of beings such as we -- Cosmic Swans, Humans, and all other sentient beings that swim through this wonderful open and infinite deep.
