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.
Just to say you've got some good answers here, and it's mainly about lack of complete certainty but we make reasonable assumptions about what is likely to be going on. It's not so very different from everyday life. I don't know for sure what my cat is doing right now (it's not in the room with me at the moment) but I'm pretty sure it is not peeling a banana or riding on a bike. Very likely it is asleep.

However, when it comes to the universe at large there is an interesting observation to make, which is that we receive light from only a tiny fraction of the whole. We gather information arriving at Earth from our past light cone, and that's it: a tiny sliver from the whole history of the cosmos. You can often find statements referring to 'the observable universe' and then the speaker goes on to describe things way way out of our past light cone, sometimes without realising that they are doing so. It's a reasonable hypothesis that a galaxy we can see at a large red shift has, since then, evolved in a similar way to other galaxies of similar make up. But such a hypothesis is only good to the extent that there is uniformity as opposed to richness and variety in the universe. In practice the universe combines both. It is not a desert, but neither is it a jungle.