Yet what we are seeing is "were," their light having taken so long to get here. If an entire galaxy had collapsed by the time we got there, would there have been anything to "understand"? If by that time we could outrun light, where would we go to see what happened?
And so on. Most of the time, I get to feel like a bug on a rock, as if the rock was the whole world. In a way, to me it is.