DarwinX:
Sorry, but without aether, the universe becomes very illogical and silly.
To be clear: Is this because you believe the concept of "action at a distance" to be counter-intuitive?
I'm making an assumption here, so let me know if I'm wrong. But it sounds as though the concept of aether attempts to remove the need for action-at-a-distance by proposing that a "substance" (the aether) passes between separated objects like, for example, celestial bodies, and is responsible for their movements which are, in classical mechanics, attributed to forces, like the gravitational force.
If this is true, why would you consider action-at-a-distance to be illogical and silly? I can perhaps see how it might be considered to go against common sense and intuition (which is perhaps what you mean by "silly"?), because these things are based on everyday Earth-bound experiences. And we don't generally tend to see much of anything that looks like action-at-a-distance in our everyday lives. We're very familiar with the concept of contact forces - with the idea that the world is composed of material objects with clear, precise boundaries.
Why illogical though? Surely for something to be illogical it has to contain some kind of internal self-contradiction, and not merely disagree with empirical evidence. For example, the statement "it is raining" is perfectly logical, even if it's not raining. But the statement "it is raining and also not raining" is illogical.
Could you provide an example of a logical self-contradiction in an aether-less theory? Perhaps something along the lines of: "planets orbit in ellipses and they also don't orbit in ellipses".