Keeping young

I had a dream that people lived longer lives and kept themselves appearing young by travelling at great speeds in space. Due to relativity, they aged less quickly than those who were planted on earth. I believe it was mainly used to extend life, i.e. living more than 100 years. But I imagine that it might be one of those futile things we try to get more time out of life. In order to "live" longer, you would have to spend a great deal of life aboard a space craft traveling at great speeds. Our technology is not there where we can approach great enough speeds to really slow down time for the traveler in a short amount of invested time. Invested time being the relative time aboard the traveling vessel.

This dream got me thinking of another thoughts about relativity and light. How do we calculate the speed of light? Would we not have to know our absolute speed in the universe to make that calculation? I mean, we are on earth that is rotating on an axis. Our earth is rotating around our sun. Our solar system is rotating around our galaxy. Our galaxy may have a rotation among a group of other galaxies. The there is our "outward" speed inside the universe. That is a lot of movement. How can we calculate the real speed of a universal constant and not be calculating the relative speed?

OK, lets get some more stuff out there. To a photon, traveling at the speed of light, little or no time has appeared to have passed since it started it's outward journey from wherever it was created. When our universe started all the energy exploded outward. At the time that photons were made they have traveled outward at a constant speed. Take into account that there is gravity on all sides there should no bending just traveling at constant speed outward. Does that means that the universe has been expanding at the speed of light? Unless there is bending somewhere. I would like to get a better picture of the universe as a whole. I'm sure that I'm still thinking of our universe like people thought of the earth before they knew it was round.

But if we, and by we I mean the stuff in the universe, used to be traveling faster than we are now wouldn't we have to take that into account when calculating the age of the universe? We use numbers like 13 billion years. Can we really think that way? If there is a center of the universe that is where we can say there is absolute time. If everything in the universe is slowing down from it's expanse from that point, then it had to have been moving faster. To the center of the universe a lot more time would have passed, relatively speaking, that the stuff moving outward.

Here is a puzzler for me. If we have absolute speed in the universe in a specific direction, would photons that are created perpendicular to that motion not appear to have an arc? If not, there is an issue. Because from where it is formed it is traveling at the speed of light outward on axis x. It is also moving along axis y at the speed from where it was formed. If you were to stop at that point in the universe and watch that photon traveling on axis x and y it's speed would be greater than the speed of light. If the line from both x and y is z, and it is traveling at the speed of light in that direction, would it not appear to arc to an observer traveling on the spot that the photon was created? Also it would appear to be traveling at less that the speed of light if you could not take the y axis speed into account. Actually either way there is an issue. To me it is constant speed of light. Again, I may have a flat earth view.

If you have these answers, please let me know. If you have questions of your own, post those also.