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Originally Posted by oojay
Movement is measured in relation to something else. The Earth moving in relation to the sun, our solar system moving in relation to our galaxy, our galaxy moving in relation to nearby galaxies in the universe, etc.
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Of course, my point is really that your thoughts contradict some important points of Einstein. According to him, the speed of light does not behave the way you explain - observed by a slower observer, it is always at the speed of light, regardless of direction. So the light coming out of the headlights of a car moving at 50 miles an hour does not move at light speed + 50 miles an hour .. just light speed! (But don't ask me why, I have a hard time understanding it)
As for a special frame for slower speeds, I think the special frame generally used is the cosmic background radiation and according to that, the earth is moving at 627 kilometres per second which is pretty damn fast. But it's still just a tiny bit more than 2 thousandth of light speed, so we're far away from doing any time travel based on that reference.
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Originally Posted by Oojay
We measure a year as the time that it takes the Earth to fully revolve around the sun, do we not? And if that length of time changes, does our age not change? I guess I'm trying to say that our total time being alive would not change, just the way we measure it.
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Yes, I agree with you. You wrote this :
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Originally Posted by Oojay
So if the Earth was moving faster, we would all be younger (as it would take fewer years to travel the same distance). And if the Earth was moving slower, we would all be older (as it would take more years to travel the same distance).
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And that looks like you've got it backwards. Accepting that we'd all passed roughly the same amount of time during our lives in either of these scenarios and that we measure age by years which is the time it takes our planet to go round the sun, we should be older if the earth moved faster because the years are shorter. So, instead of being 24 years old after X amount of time has passed, you might be 30. If the earth revolved slower, fewer years would have passed during our lifetime and you might just be 20.