Here's some wildly cranky thoughts-<br /><br />Space is expanding. This is almost universally accepted. It is also pretty much accepted by everybody that space only expands in areas which are not gravitationally bound. It doesn't expand inside galaxies, we're told, or inside clusters, or even inside superclusters. It seems space is only allowed to expand in the voids between the galaxy clusters. This, if correct, tells us something very interesting- mass, or rather the gravitational field it creates, has a direct effect on the expansive urge of space.<br /><br />I've never seen it quantified just *how* gravitationally bound a region needs to be to stop expansion, rather there seem to be just general statements that space either expands (in unbound areas) or it doesn't (in bound areas) but it seems unlikely that there is this hard Boolean choice and we must therefore assume that expansion is proportional to... well, to the local gravitational field, somehow. We might say that at the centre of a cluster it's not expanding at all, and at the edge it's expanding quite a lot, and neither half way up nor halfway down the hill it's expanding a bit, or some amount. I daresay the reason I've never seen this amount quantified is I simply dont' read at a high enough academic level (i.e. at all) but it would be nice to find out how much gravity it takes to slow the Hubble constant to, say, one half. I'd sleep easier at night and I could impress women with my cosmological knowledge, and become a kind of "babe magnet" perhaps.<br /><br />Anyway, we can draw some amazing cranky, kind of flaky conclusions from these basic facts. Taking into account that the universe conserves mass, pretty much, except when it loses some converting it into energy, we can presume that in the past, the same mass being crammed into a smaller volume, there were less intergalacticcluster voids, or rather they were smaller, so therefore there was less space available to expand. So we should expect, as the voids