Oldest Remains of Modern Humans Are Identified by Scientists

New York Times (AP Wire) ^ | February 16, 2005 | AP Wire

[Alter Kaker]

NEW YORK (AP) -- A new analysis of bones unearthed nearly 40 years ago in Ethiopia has pushed the fossil record of modern humans back to nearly 200,000 years ago -- perhaps close to the dawn of the species.

Researchers determined that the specimens are around 195,000 years old. Previously, the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens were Ethiopian skulls dated to about 160,000 years ago.

Genetic studies estimate that Homo sapiens arose about 200,000 years ago, so the new research brings the fossil record more in line with that, said John Fleagle of Stony Brook University in New York, an author of the study.

The fossils were found in 1967 near the Omo River in southwestern Ethiopia. One location yielded Omo I, which includes part of a skull plus skeletal bones. Another site produced Omo II, which has more of a skull but no skeletal bones. Neither specimen has a complete face.

Although Omo II shows more primitive characteristics than Omo I, scientists called both specimens Homo sapiens and assigned a tentative age of 130,000 years.

Now, after visiting the discovery sites, analyzing their geology and testing rock samples with more modern dating techniques, Fleagle and colleagues report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature that both specimens are 195,000 years old, give or take 5,000 years.

Fleagle said the more primitive traits of Omo II may mean the two specimens came from different but overlapping Homo sapiens populations, or that they just represent natural variation within a single population.

To find the age of the skulls, the researchers determined that volcanic rock lying just below the sediment that contained the fossils was about 196,000 years old. They then found evidence that the fossil-bearing sediment was deposited soon after that time.

Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, which specializes in dating rocks, said the researchers made "a reasonably good argument" to support their dating of the fossils.

"It's more likely than not," he said, calling the work "very exciting and important."

Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, said he considered the case for the new fossil ages "very strong." The work suggests that "we're right on the cusp of where the genetic evidence says the origin of modern humans ... should be," he said.

G. Philip Rightmire, a paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University in New York, said he believes the Omo fossils show Homo sapiens plus a more primitive ancestor. The find appears to represent the aftermath of the birth of Homo sapiens, when it was still living alongside its ancestral species, he said.

[shubi]

Your statement is pure nonsense and shows you do not understand biological evolution at all.

[shubi]

I don't know much about this subject, but isn't the red shift caused by the Doppler effect and not by a slowing of light?

[Messianic Jews Net]

The Hubble hypothesis has been that redshift is caused by Doppler effect of receding galaxies. The Setterfield hypothesis is that the galaxies are not receding (the universe is not measurably expanding). However, the generally accepted Hubble hypothesis does not explain why the redshifts are quantized in multiples of 2.7 km/s, but the Setterfield hypothesis does, so it scores a point for greater explanatory power. Good question.

[VadeRetro]

As you pointed out, the photon energy is constant except for quantum leaps which decrease it, so a 6000-year-old photon now has much less energy than at emission. Originally it was emitted with almost the same energy as today. The old photon was redshifted slightly because decreased h in the past quantumly affected atomic structure, which sent out a shorter wavelength than photons sent today. Therefore we agree the old photon had "almost the same energy as now". I had that wrong at first.

The way you keep saying this doesn't work for me. The photon in flight at a quantum jump is more or less unaffected. hc is a constant (I think!) and lambda will not change. Perhaps you think its energy drops because c has gone down by some amount and h (which moves in such a way as to cancel) doesn't matter anymore since it was used to determine emission properties. If that's what you mean, I don't buy it. "h" wouldn't be in there if it were only a property of the emitting body and not of the photon. It's in there because h matters not only at emission but at absorption. The photon is the same photon. The rules for how it is emitted and absorbed are supposedly transparent to the quantum jumps.

Perhaps we're talking past each other, so I'll try restating in different terms. A photon in flight will after a quantum jump look "redder" than a photon emitted by the same process after the jump, yes. It will have the energy implied by its wavelength, however. The relationship of photon wavelength to energy does not change as I understand it. The relationship of c to energy is of course variable, as c is changing like mad in ways canceled by changes to h.

Therefore we agree the old photon had "almost the same energy as now". I had that wrong at first.

Which is still baffling because there's less mass (apparently a lot less) available to generate the photons. But maybe you answer this down the post where I haven't read yet.

Other side issues: ... For example, I was about to misstep and say theoretically h should not invert c, but once again I was struck that by observation h does invert c.

At least in earlier versions of the theory, it was explicitly stated that hc was a constant. As you go back in time, h gets tinier. I haven't noticed that as changed but perhaps need to recheck.

You are right, the energy of the sum of photons is greatly increased (but I was right, individual photon energy is conserved).

I tingle with anticipation.

I agree "it's far from clear why" there is low redshift. It appears to me, as one who does not understand much quantum theory, that as the granularity h increases with time, the atomic structure undergoes quantum resettlings, which I regard as compactings... [Long, long snip]... (If all this works out someday we will be ironically calling the quantum of 63.74c-now = 1.91x10^10m/s the "Setterfield constant"!)

Between how that paragraph is almost incomprehensible and per your own estimation likely wrong, I'm going to regard the large excess energy of photon emission as "unexplained free energy." The books would balance better if we didn't have it. I'm sure it's there simply so Adam won't be blind as I objected in my 2000 paper and likely others have done before. Anyway, we've established that it's there.

But since it's there we have all these excess photons just so we can shorten radioactive half lives inversely with c. (Or whatever exactly is being done to recruit radiometric dating to the Young Earth side of things.) We didn't really have to do THAT, either, except it must have been just too tempting. So the photons are only redishifted by 1.5 but, Gads! We have scads!

I still think "the decrease in density lowers the luminous energy by two factors, which are can-celled by the increase in lightspeed and the increase in total photon output."

I missed this earlier. Yes, if the Sun blows up really big, it gets less dense and the fires cool and it maybe shrinks a bit. In real life changes don't happen that fast in the first place so there's probably no need for the rubber band to yank it back.

Also, to the extent that lower density turns down the wick on the solar lamp, your attempts to make the Sun look old by burning up an excess of nuclear fuel are damped by just as much. How far there do you want to go?

I wish to remind you of the size of your energy excess from the photons. It is in the millions because you are aging the Sun and Earth billions of years in mere hundreds. You can do this or not do it, but any way you go there's a very high hurdle. For now, you're biting the bullet and doing this.

Any compensation for the huge magnitude of the excess energy introduced by high reaction rates needs to be as big as the problem. But changes on a similar scale in density or opacity or some other mundane property would be ... just nuts. Your presentation is polite and ever-so earnest, but you are not so much addressing this as descending into shuck, jive, and double-talk.

Are you saying the sun is a million times less dense, or a million times more opaque? OK, increasing opacity will create decreases in density. Maybe half a million times less opaque and half a million times less dense? There's a big problem here to get rid of.

Applying your stellar structure source to the changes in stars, it stated that decreasing opacity resolves to decreasing radius and volume, but also that increasing density resolves to increasing volume, so the volume and radius changes cancel and are not a factor.

Volume and radius on a sphere are going to change in concert. The formula is

V = (4/3)pr³.

Never mind that. The density/opacity relationship is what I thought you might be referring to. (Note that I'm just commenting as I read along here.)

These kind of "compensating factors" are on the wrong scale to help you. You can't blow the Sun up a million times as big. The Earth is too close.

I don't think that the photons are carrying "less light" so that many of them constitute one "optical photon" (neat concept, though).

I don't know what you're saying. I once speculated that the opacity was being invoked to somehow blueshift a whole lot of red photons into one blue one, but we've established you don't need that--the photons aren't so very red--and opacity doesn't do that. It works the other way. It absorbs a lot of photon energy, turns some of it into mechanical motion, and ultimately outputs a higher number of redder photons. You still have the same amount of energy to deal with. A star is going to be at some kind of equilibrium.

I read that electron scattering is dissipating (all or part of) the photon increase and that may contribute if I knew more about it.

You can't scatter the energy away in such a way that it isn't ultimately being radiated outward. This is wrong and naive.

The above is just a first reaction and I'm still digesting a lot of material. I'll probably be revisiting this for days yet.

[VadeRetro]

Didn't mean to skip the last paragraph.

Personally, would you prefer the theory to be right or wrong, and what would you do and believe (particularly about the earth's age) if the evidence were conclusive in either case? Have we established sufficient benefit of doubt to establish that there might be another reason for high radiometric dates? Thank you!

This theory is never going to be wrong until Setterfield is dead. He has been reissuing it every 3-6 years since 1981 to make it "right."

It is very hard, increasingly so through the years, to understand what it is even saying, much less to model with it. It is important to Setterfield and perhaps to you that it never be wrong. If it cannot be right, it must at least establish some reasonable doubt that mainstream assumptions of continuity in basic processes of physics are right.

A defense attorney clawing desperately for reasonable doubt can start to invent some pretty silly stories. "My client could have a twin brother with the same DNA! Even my client wouldn't know it if his mother decided not to tell him. The prosecution has not proved otherwise. Someone else could have driven my client's car into that mud to leave those tire tracks. The prosecution has not proved otherwise. A thief could have stolen the tires, put them on his car, committed the murder, and then put the tires back on my client's car to frame him! The prosecution has not proved otherwise. That 12-year-old girl might have attacked my client! The prosecution has not addressed this possibility at all."

There's a stream of increasingly silly stories coming out of cDK. The answer is Occam's Razor.

[Messianic Jews Net]

Just to enter them into the record:

Here is Setterfield 1987, first peer-reviewed publication of the hypothesis.
Here is Montgomery-Dolphin 1993, improved data-point set and statistical analysis.
Here is Montgomery 1994, similar to previous but with rebuttal of other statistical analyses.
Here is Setterfield 2001, containing the strongest statement of the theory; published in 2002 when reworked.
Here is Setterfield's 2001 explanation of observable consequences of VSL.
Here are Setterfield 2002a, 2002b, and 2002c, the published version of Setterfield 2001.
Here is Dolphin's commentary through 2003 as to the observable consequences of VSL.
Here is Setterfield backup material.
Here is the real datapoint chart, which has not been successfully rebutted, from Bowden 1998:

[El Oviedo]

Understanding minds wants to know - just the facts - if you have one.

[shubi]

There is no need for any one living thing to live forever for evolution to be true. I don't even know where you got such an idea.

[VadeRetro]

I checked what is supposed to be Setterfield's 1987 paper to see what he was saying back then on stellar luminosity. It says

REVISED IN LATER PAPER.

He cleary didn't publish it looking like that at the time. The posted link is not what you offer it to be and can't be used as I tried to use it. (That is, to trace the evolution of cDK.) Perhaps I have the real thing on my hard disk somewhere.

[Messianic Jews Net]

Thanks for your consideration. On both the science and philosophy fronts we are both apparently having some difficulty speaking in each other's language.

The short version is that your response to opacity, when admittedly hasty simplifying statements and light remarks are removed, mostly just restates that excess energy has always been your concern. You have not found in my explanation a sufficient phenomenological narrative to explain why the math works and the excess energy is not a problem. As we both study this, I think we will come up with that explanation together.

But more troubling and as I suspected, you are not answering what you would do if suddenly the evidence appeared to you to conclusively support Setterfield. Instead you compare him to a desperate attorney. For me, before reading Setterfield, I handled old-young-earth questions saying, "I believe young earth, but recognize it is against old earth evidence, so will respect the views of the science leadership establishment as worthy of investigation." After Setterfield (and multiple confirmation by scientists before and after 1987, and my own independent analysis), I can argue, "I believe evidence adduced for old earth actually supports a young earth." However, if Setterfield should fail on a little thing like opacity, I will be happy to concede to the prior position and admit that science seems to falsify the Setterfield version of a young earth, even though I still believe in it for religious and minority-scientific reasons. Are you able to do the same and admit reasonable doubt if the explanations should warrant?

You say we "must at least establish some reasonable doubt that mainstream assumptions of continuity in basic processes of physics are right." That is, you don't reasonably doubt the mainstream yet. As I said, usually statistical significance is accepted as reasonable doubt. Usually greater explanatory power is accepted as reasonable doubt. I forgot to mention Montgomery 1998 added explanatory power by naming three more puzzles of physics answered by VSL: supernova remnants, helium diffusion in zircon, and spiral preservation in galaxies. Perhaps you would like to move to philosophy of science, and establish a standard which you would submit to as proving a given theory. Let's both continue studying and see what enlightenment comes.

[VadeRetro]

You might want to add this paper to your list, Atomic Behaviour and the Red-Shift.

I have an even earlier (1995) version on my hard drive. It's titled "Atomic Behavior, Light, and the Red-Shift." In it, the quantum of c-change is notably different from the value you are using.

THIRD: The specific change in vacuum energy density required for a quantum change in the atom, also changes light-speed by (Delta c) = 331.27 times c(now). Though all atomic particles remain in the same orbit, and orbital radii are invariant, a discrete change in orbital energy results from a (Delta c) increment. All emitted wavelengths of light will change uniformly at that instant.

Well, obviously an earlier version is an earlier version. I merely point out you're going to keep coming back forever pretending to understand that THIS ONE is the real hot poop deal.

I also notice that the earlier papers are more readable. There's a downhill trend in clarity. At some point cDK will lose me to where I can no longer understand what it's saying/you're saying at all.

For propaganda purposes, you can't lose. Propagandists never lose. Their victory is in fact inevitable. "Inevitable victory" is one of the talking points.

For science purposes, there were always too many ad hoc hoops to jump through in cDK and it never worked. Someday I won't understand how it's not working, but that won't convince me that it is working. Maybe it's already happened. I'm confused on a number of points and I don't find my confusion to be an argument for cDK.

In science, to recognized as right, you have to be intelligible. cDK has never had a chance of being right. Reality, the history of the universe, betrayed it before cDK was born. Confronted with this, cDK is going the wrong way on intelligibility. It isn't playing for "right" anymore but for "reasonable doubt."

It will fool the people who want to be fooled.

[VadeRetro]

After Setterfield (and multiple confirmation by scientists before and after 1987, and my own independent analysis), I can argue, "I believe evidence adduced for old earth actually supports a young earth."

I find these claims to be, frankly, Messianically delusional. I give Setterfield more time than he deserves because I'm a hobbyist. I'm not a wannabee physicist. My major 34 years ago was in Psychology. I'm a wannabee shrink.

Setterfield is a crackpot. He flies under the radar of real science. His "refereed" publications are in some creationist journal utterly unknown to real physicists and astronomers. They don't even see him. That's why I'm scratching around trying to figure this garbage out for myself. There are no links from the great debate to Google up. There is no great debate.

It's all in your head. And that's why I talk to you.

[VadeRetro]

Still, your question is unanswered.

Are you able to do the same and admit reasonable doubt if the explanations should warrant?

I can't imagine what I would do if someone irrefutably proved that 1 + 1 = 3. There is in fact a lovely algebraic proof that 1 = 2 which might be used for such a demonstration, however.

So look for a lot of initial skepticism when everything I think I know about how the world works is wrong. I'll be checking for the gimmick. I'm already pretty old and may die before I conclude there is no gimmick.

But you couldn't be farther from giving me that problem. Every time cDK is trotted out to me, I see the divide by zero. No wonder the real scientists don't even bother with this. And, yes, if ever some day I can't find it, I'll probably still think it's there.

[PatrickHenry]

The Hubble hypothesis has been that redshift is caused by Doppler effect of receding galaxies. The Setterfield hypothesis is that the galaxies are not receding (the universe is not measurably expanding).

Unfortunately for Setterfield, there is more to it than just what you call "the Doppler hypothesis." There are several independent lines of evidence which all give the same result. The Four Pillars of the Standard Cosmology.

Additionally, there is yet another line of evidence: the Lyman Alpha Forest.

Setterfield needs to undo all of cosmology, and construct something else in its place that is consistent with all the relevant evidence if he wants Genesis to be scientifically accurate. Merely dismissing the Doppler "hypothesis" (it's more than an hypothesis regarding the redshift these days) isn't going to do it for him.

[VadeRetro]

Hands will be waved. "All those things would look the same under cDK."

[VadeRetro]

Your claim that the material you present in Figures 3 an d 4 "had not been successfully rebutted" seemed odd to me once I thought about it.

You're apparently not all that familiar with the history. Setterfield originally drew a curve through selected data points only. Later, forced to include all the data points including those below the line, he drew a squiggly damped-oscillation curve through them. That is, c actually dipped below the modern value but since then rebounded back and forth across the modern value, damping. SPROI-oi-oi-oing!

That was another clue. Figure 3 was either his original curve or he's jumped back to his old one, but the date on the document told me it's the old curve.

A look at Montgomery's Raw Data Table shows Figure 3 to be missing several data points between 1740 and 1780. Some of the missing points are below the drawn curve and one is below the modern value of c.

The "enlargement" in Figure 4 only helps show what the critics were talking about, as it shows an area where the real observations, most of which are not shown on the wide-scale Figure 3, consistently dip below the imposed curve originally drawn by Setterfield.

I believe Figure 3 with it's misdrawn curve is dead meat, not even being defended anymore as of the 1999 release of cDK. You make these announcements with such grandeur and they don't bear up.

[VadeRetro]

SPROI-oi-oi-oing!

I'm ashamed and embarrassed at my lack of inspiration. The correct rendition is below.

^SPROI-oi-^oi-oing!

[VadeRetro]

Just tidying up. I said this at the time:

That's a wrinkle that I missed concerning what happens in transit to a photon when a quantum jump occurs. The energy is lowered but the wavelength is constant.

I no longer agree that the energy is lowered. The photon in flight keeps the same energy. It doesn't matter if it loses velocity. Since hc = constant, the energy of the photon is constant assuming the wavelength is constant. In a non-expanding Setterfield universe, I don't know why it wouldn't be. What is emitted as green will arrive as green.

[Messianic Jews Net]

The books would balance better if we didn't have [unexplained free energy]. If the math is right, the books do balance better with excess energy. The excess energy should be necessary to retain the same biological effects, not to torch them. Here's some fresh meat to explain that.

The short answer appears to be that the star's excess energy increase of 10^7 (maximally, 10^8) is largely absorbed into internal kinetic energy of the star.

I said that opacity varies with (proportional to) c^2; this is from Setterfield 2001 and is repeated in his Brief Stellar History. Opacity is also the mass extinction coefficient, the rate at which photons are absorbed or scattered. Opacity is dependent on mass density, which varies inverse to c^2.

Without considering VSL, all things being equal, a star 100 times less dense than another (having 100 times more volume) is also 100 times more opaque, because the photons have much more volume to overcome without being dissipated by scattering or absorption. The path out may be less sparsely populated, but there is much more non-escape volume to be deflected to, which increases photon extinction. It appears this opacity must mean 100 times fewer photons will reach the observer, which forces me to conclude the remainder are dissipated into kinetic energy within the larger volume. This is ordinary non-VSL astrophysics derived from this site.

With VSL in play, with c increased by 10, we have a star 100 times less dense without volume change (because space is less granular, higher resolution, and mass and density decrease inverse to c^2). But it also is putting out 10 times the photons moving 10 times as fast. These factors overcome the factor of 100 times fewer photons, so the photon output is the same as the original comparison star. Apparently the opacity (increased photon extinction) means 10 times as many photons are being converted into internal kinetic energy. This energy then appears free to manifest as temperature, volume, pressure, and density compensation.

So for tonight, I think the excess energy is staying within the star. Perhaps my reading of the Rydberg and c-delta constants was off and these really do relate to dissipating that kinetic energy. Perhaps it is mostly dissipated as internal pressure and heat. Some of it may increase the luminosity by a small factor instead of 10^7. The sun runs at 3.85x10^26 watts, it seems like a factor of 10^7 would spread out comfortably. Here's hoping no foot-in-mouth, perhaps you can explain if this does not seem viable yet.

For other asides, why does less rest mass generate photons with the same energy? Because the photon generators themselves are moving faster and thus have the same energy as before too.

Yes, hc is a constant, my point there is when I was tempted to abandon that thought, I was reminded that hc being constant was observed not theorized.

My incomprehensible paragraph was intended not to explain the excess energy, but the reason the excess energy does not create major redshift, which point you seem to permit.

You make a couple other statements which don't read my meaning quite rightly, but since what you're saying by them is both essentially accurate and not responsive to my position, there's nothing of consequence.

My statement about the datapoint chart was about the datapoints, not the curve. The datapoints show some kind of lightspeed variability at statistically significant levels, and statistical attempts to rebut them have been flawed, while statistical attempts to repeat them have retained significance. I was similarly going to comment on missing points from Ichneumon's chart, but whichever chart you use, whatever data you reasonably select, it ends up rejecting the constancy hypothesis. The oscillation or cosecant-squared curve are not essential to the theory; but statistical rejection of the constancy hypothesis is, and that is what the charts always show. Ordinary plots of refinements of measurement should funnel toward the value from both sides; for c and h they simply do not. (Also Montgomery points out the low 1930s measurements were mostly using stellar aberration and Kerr cells, which gave methodically low numbers, which make datapoints from those methods fit even better when refined.)

But I'm really less troubled by your evidence against VSL, and more that your own methodological dismissals are losing cogency. I accept your explanation that you're just looking for the "divide by zero" and it keeps arising, but your other statements suggest a greater bias than that. You say that changing delta-c illustrates we're "going to keep coming back forever" refining, but refining hypotheses is the essence of science, not its disproof. You see a "downhill trend in clarity" as indicative, but when one moves from statistics about one datum to a whole worldview change, that is expected. You say "propagandists never lose", but your conclusion that the theory is propaganda you seem to hold as equally inevitable. You say "I don't find my confusion to be an argument for cDK", but confusion is not an argument for a theory but an argument against a ready acceptance of old or new theory. You say "to be recognized as right, you have to be intelligible", but Einstein was recognized as right when supposedly only he and Eddington really understood the theory. You say "Messianically delusional", but as a psychologist you should recognize the cult mentality of modern evolutionists. You say "Setterfield is a crackpot", but you seem to wrap a number of methodological and epistemological (and psychological) assumptions into that conclusion. You say "it isn't playing for 'right' anymore but for 'reasonable doubt'", but that's only my reframing as reasonable doubt that you're referring to, and I'm only doing so to find out your open-mindedness. I'm disappointed that you're unwilling to accept even the ordinary proofs that work for juries (citizens, or peer reviewers) as reasonable doubt, such as statistical significance and explanatory power.

Was Montgomery-Dolphin 1993 statistically significant? If not, why and who says? If so, what does that mean? Does VSL answer the rough dozen physics puzzles I've listed above, or not? If not, why and who says, for each case? If so, what does that mean? Rather than review the list, I'll let you pick and choose. Formulating groundbreaking theories is hard work, but if you let that methodologically prevent you from considering them you get stuck with epicycles and caloric and ether. Recall that Copernicus used epicycles too, but his theory was preferred because it had fewer than Ptolemy's, and by Galileo's time there were none. Setterfield has not had his Galileo yet, nor his Huxley. If you want to discuss methodology, please reply to my suggestion that we agree on what constitutes proof, evidence, doubt, simplicity, etc.

Here's a bonus I just thought up in the shower yesterday. I believe Chandrasekhar's limit would be decreasing with c^2, which means black hole formation would be much less than an evolutionary model would predict, whether from individual stars, galactic cores, or crisis pressures on smaller masses. So I tested this by looking for evidence of unexpected lack of old black holes. Sure enough, Stephen Hawking, the unquestioned authority on black holes, says p. 127 of Brief History 1998: "One would also have expected the density fluctuations in such a [chaotic-boundary] model to have led to the formation of many more primordial black holes than the upper limit that has been set by observations of the gamma ray background"; and p. 115: "Even if the search for primordial black holes proves negative, as it seems it may, it will still give us important information about the very early stages of the universe." Hawking prefers the no-boundary model, which predicts fewer black holes, to the chaotic-boundary model, but his description of it, and his whole drift on black holes, suggests to me he is still uncomfortable with their paucity: "Further predictions of the no boundary condition are still being worked out. A particularly interesting problem is the size of the small departures from uniform density in the early universe", which would cause these old black holes. Don't think I'm painting him as supporting VSL rather than no-boundary interpretation of black hole formation; he's merely saying 1) old black holes are unlikelier than expected and haven't been found, and 2) there are still problems to work out with the no-boundary model in re black hole formation. In sum, another experimentally verified prediction of VSL that I just made up now.

[Thatcherite]

But since it's there we have all these excess photons just so we can shorten radioactive half lives inversely with c. (Or whatever exactly is being done to recruit radiometric dating to the Young Earth side of things.) We didn't really have to do THAT, either, except it must have been just too tempting.

They did have to do that, or the observed decay rate of SN1987A would be wrong. This is the same as the frame-rate argument that I got confused about. If you don't speed up decay-rate by the same amount as you speed up c then you won't see the emmissions from SN1987A decaying at normal modern speeds, but you do. I felt that speeding up decay-rate proportionately as c expands is just post-hoc-rationalisation to justify the observations, but MJN says not. I lack the physics to argue the point.