Reply #12: The universe doesn't expand at 1c

[Xithras]

Remember expansion. The universe, by the best current estimates, is somewhere around 15 billion years old, and yet it is also at least 20 billion light years across, and probably far larger. Why? 1) Because the universe can actually expand at up to 2c (1c in each direction) per year. 2) Because it now appears that for a brief period in the early universe, for reasons we can just barely comprehend, the universe expanded far faster than the speed of light.

This is why the sky isn't white at night :)

Also, it is unlikely that we will ever "see" the singularity because of the universes prior high rates of expansion. The universe has been stretched so much that any light generated at its beginning would have been doppler shifted out of existence by the time it reached us. The best we can hope for is to see the formation of the first galaxies, which may bring us within a few hundred million years of B Day, but the light and energy from the bang itself is so stretched and dissipated at this point that it isn't observable as anything other than background radiation.