Layman
No, you can look from a telescope and see the radiation released from the opaque early Universe when the temperature dropped so that protons and electrons could join to form atoms. This was the first light of the Universe, before that the Universe was invisible to us.
You seem unable to understand that the furthest/oldest thing we can see(the CMB, the OLDEST thing VISIBLE in the Universe) is NOT receding from us at apparent light speed, YET(we can still see it). Nor do you seem to know that everything else in the Universe is between that first light and us, meaning they are not as far back in time as the CMB. And since we can see the CMB, we can see everything else in the Universe as we look back in time. We see different places at different distances in time, but we see them all(in principle). Since Dark Energy is continuing to accelerate the rate of expansion, and the CMB is already receding from us at a significant portion of lightspeed there will come a time in the next few billion years when it exceeds apparent lightspeed, at that point it will no longer be visible, even in principle.
The light that the surface of last scattering emitted, was emitted when the Universe was ~300,000 years old, it's been coming toward us for 13.7 billion years. We don't live in a 300,000 year old Universe(where the light would quickly disappear in the local area), we live in a Universe that is 13.7 years old, and right there in the telescope, at 13.7 billion years, is that first light, stretched so much by the expansion of space that it is equivalent to about 3 degrees above absolute zero(in the microwave).
This is a spherical projection of the CMB radiation. It's missing one whole dimension and you would actually be dead center looking outward. It's a lot like the rubber sheet that illustrates the bending of space in 2D, it's as close as we can get to visualizing the reality that the Universe contains itself, there is no outside view as there is nothing outside the Universe.
The galaxies we see at that distance are smaller, less organized, more violent and more numerous, none are within a half billion years of the CMB(the first stars formed about 300 million years after the BB). The CMB is the fastest moving(apparent velocity due to expansion), the oldest/furthest in time and distance thing in the Universe. If there is a god and he said "Let there be light" that was the CMB. If we can still see it despite the fact that it is the furthest, fastest moving visible thing in the Universe, then we can see everything else in the Universe with good enough equipment. We will see the further parts as they were when the Universe was young, we will see closer things closer to our own time, and we will see the light that left our own sun in about 8 minutes(the moon is approximately 1 second away in the dimension of time). In other words we will see them in the dimension of time, where time is a distance.(we cannot see the size of the Universe in space as it is today, what we see is an illusion caused by the dimension of time).
And, to further confuse you, the furthest things were the smallest things when they released the photons that we see. All those small galaxies you see around 13 billion years ago occupied a much smaller volume than they appear to today, and today's Universe is larger. That extra dimension that is so hard to conceive turns the whole Universe inside out. The centerpoint of the Universe is the source of time, and everything else is further and further in the past as you look in any direction. And that centerpoint(the now)is where every point in the Universe sees itself occupying, seeing the past radiating out from it further and further and closer and closer to the beginning(once smaller than an orange). Beyond a certain distance, nothing you see exists any longer, at least in it's original form. Another consequence of that inconceivable extra dimension.
Did that help?
Really?
Grumpy
