Rick asked:

If I understand this correctly, when one looks to the night sky, and sees all those beautiful, twinkling
stars, one is looking into the past.

Therefore, very hypothetically speaking, could there not be a place in the universe, or even a
universe next door to ours, where one could stand, and look out upon the night sky and see the earth
as it was after the Big Bang? Or indeed, see the Big Bang itself?

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It's not hypothetical at all; that's why the Hubble telescope was put up into orbit. Take a look at the
pictures and text at this site:

http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.html

You'll love them.

That's for seeing the Big Bang (or as close as we can get at this point)... as for seeing the earth... are
you kidding? First, we'd have to look aroundthe curvature of space, but at this point the latest
theories are that space in fact isn't curved enough for that. Second, even if we could, the earth is
muchmore recent than the origins of the universe. Go look around that Hubble site; you'll learn about
all this.

Now, the interestingquestion is, why, when we look at the night sky, don't we see nothingexcept
bright light? Why are there spacesbetween the stars? After all, there arestars in every direction we
look, and in between those, and so forth. This question was posed quite a while ago, and was only
relatively recently answered. I won't tell you the answer... have fun looking around for it.

Steven Ravett Brown