> Now, my question is, how is it possible that we can see so far in the past? I think you're overthinking it. Forget about expansion for a moment, or other wei

> Now, my question is, how is it possible that we can see so far in the past? I think you're overthinking it. Forget about expansion for a moment, or other weird effects. We can see 12 billion years into the past because the universe is far larger than 12 billion (or 24 billion) light years across--possibly infinite, possibly not, but nonetheless at least that large, and at least that large at the moment the signal was emitted. What we're seeing isn't a reflection, it's light that has been traveling 12 billion years in a straight line from point of origin. Because of expansion, the earth[1] and the emission source may have been closer than 12 billion light years, but they were still very far apart. The big bang doesn't mean the universe exploded from a point source, at least not in any intuitive sense of the phrase. The exact topology is still unknown, but assuming a flat, infinite universe, the universe was already flat and infinite when the signal was emitted. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe [1] Disregarding that the earth and our solar system didn't yet exist.