The universe appears "old", but it is still less than 10,000 years old

[LostLocke]

Looking at the night sky is like looking at the lights on Earth at night. While you can calculate the distances between the lights it's an error to think that that distance means that the objects are a certain age. In other words, distances does not translate into age. We are supposed to have local star clusters that are almost as old as the alleged age of the universe.

A more reasonable statement might be that if you could travel at the speed of light and didn't hit anything it would take you 13 billion+ years to reach the farthest object you saw 13 billion years ago. By then you would have a whole series of new problems.

Distance does translate indirectly into age. It doesn't tell us the actual age, but gives us a minimum age that object can be.

Yes, if you traveled light speed it would take you ~13by to reach the farthest object you saw, but it also means that if we can see it now, it took its light ~13by to reach earth.
If the object were 13b light years away, but was only 1b years old, we wouldn't see it for another 12b years.