Question: My question is in regard to “seeing back in time” when observing objects in space. I understand the concept that light takes a certain amount of time to reach the earth and we can determine the distance to a very distant object via red shift. Certainly this allows us to see and understand how objects were and the progression of the universe. However aren’t we blind as to how the universe looks like at the present. If an object is a million light years away we have no idea what it’s present state is. In fact we have no idea what it’s state was 500,000 light years ago. If the universe presents nothing but the past how can we be sure what is really happening right now in the present? 
Maybe this has a simple answer but it has me stumped.

Answer: 
We assume that the universe is the same everywhere. This assumption is known as the [cosmological principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle). If this assumption is correct then distant regions of the universe right now look like the near regions, and the differences that we see are only due to time.

The cosmological principle is just an assumption, but it is a reasonably well founded one. When we look out at the universe we see it is the same in all directions. The only way this can be true is if either the universe is the same everywhere or we just happen to be right at the centre. The latter seems unlikely as it would be a remarkable coincidence that the planet we live on just happened to be in the centre of the universe, so we assume the former is true i.e. the universe is the same everywhere.
To observe the universe at the present time, we look not far away- just in our local neighborhood of galaxies that are no more than a few million light-years away. This furnishes us with a baseline against which we chart differences between what's near (and in our recent past) and what's far (and hence in our deep past).