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CraigS
Some brief comments.
I have the greatest of admiration for Leonard Susskind, expecially as a gifted writer and lecturer, but clearly he is not afraid to let his imagination run a little wild as Woit and Smolin have pointed out in their respective books. Let us remember that these theories are based on assumption after assumption with no prospect of verifiability and thus by any basic analysis no longer qualify as scientific. This is not to say they are not valuable and thought provoking, and one may, after some considerable contemplation accept them as likely or not, but they need to be put in a separate class to what we would call normal scientific discourse.
I would disagree strongly that the prospects of falsification or confirmation always justify the effort. This argument could be used to justify any research on any matter irrespective of ethics, cost or just plain triviality. There is only a certain amount or resource available and that resource needs to be allocated on merit.
In regard to velocities I think you know well I was not referring to recessional velocity this being a property of the received redshifted photons. It is misleading to say "We see many galaxies moving at, or greater than c as this is a comoving velocity relative to our reference frame. Yes, they are theoretically receding from us at greater than c mainly due to the expansion of space, but the velocity that they are actually moving at would be a matter of some debate depending on your reference frame.
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