I came across an interesting idea yesterday in the comments thread of a news story about the most distant galaxy ever detected. The comment was: "It's us. We are looking back in time, at ourselves". It got me thinking about all the other early galaxies we've seen, and whether or not it's really possible to see so far back into space-time that we'd be able to witness the Big Bang happening (theoretically impossible, since light was not transparent for the first 380,000 years of the universe’s existence).
The idea that we are looking back on ourselves when we look at the most distant galaxies isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. In order for it to work, the universe would have to be shaped like a spiral. Each rung of the spiral would be like an iteration of time, allowing light to take shortcuts between them, through something like an eternal wormhole, the space filling the darkness of the spiral probably accounting for dark matter. It would mean that each time we see light from the distant past, we are witnessing some stage in the development of our galaxy and the ones closest to us- a.k.a. the Virgo Supercluster. Perhaps the voids between superclusters aren't voids at all, but merely the warped space in between the spiral. Looking through a void would mean the same thing as seeing down one of its rungs.
I don't think this is really happening though. We'd probably see a more consistent evolutionary process going on if it were. The galaxies in their formation process should be easy to identify if we were seeing their development at different stages. Perhaps the rungs of the spiral are too far apart for us to make any identification of our galaxies, which is the only way this model could make sense to me. If that were the case, a spiral-shaped model of the universe would best describe it. I just don't see any indication that these earliest galaxies evolved into our present-day ones, but I could be wrong.
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