After seeing the James Webb space picture, in which a tiny sliver of the sky the size of a piece of rice from our perspective here on Earth was examined and revealed contain, as expected, an abundance of galaxies and stars, I am wondering how this confirmation coincides with the Big Bang theory and the concept that Earth is in a non-privileged location in the Universe.
A common line NASA uses regarding the Webb telescope is that "looking into space is like looking back in time", which is true, for it take time for light from those distant objects to reach us. So, by examining far enough into a region of space, we are able to "wind back the clock" to see early galaxies now long dead and some of the earliest stars in the history of the Universe. What seems odd to me is that we see the same things at roughly the same distance from every direction in space.
If Earth was located in an unprivileged spot, anywhere but the center of the Universe, then some of the space around us should go "farther back" than others.
I understand that we are limited in the amount of light we are able to see. An apt comparison would be that we are in a sort of bubble isolated from the rest of the Universe and can only a uniform distance back in all directions. But this doesn't explain why each direction contains roughly the same timeline of events. We can see back a uniform distance, but the fact that this uniform distance seems to reveal the same information in all direction is confusing to me.
It won't do just to say the Universe had no "point" in which is started - the BB should be thought of as a sort of circle, the center of which all events spread uniformly from. We are just one event way off in a region of that circle necessarily closer to some part of the circumference than others, since our galaxy did not exist at the beginning of the Universe. So, we should be able to look one way and see nothing beyond galaxies roughly our own age and no early stars, and look the exact other way and see a much richer history, with more early stars and galaxies layered atop one another. But this is not the case - we see the same "density" of events from all directions. Unless, in some way, we are also seeing future events in some direction? Not sure how that would work.