yeah, it would be extremely hard to know because you can barely see individual stars in most other galaxies at all.

i sorta thought of this before but then i was like, "but muh doppler effect" so i decided that space must be expanding and pushing everything apart at larger scales. but what if space is static in volume, then implicitly, ... see, i can't wrap my head around this. if space is expanding then it becomes less finite the longer the time you are looking at, and it also challenges the idea that light speed is a constant.

i mean, one of the conundrums of that itself, is if gravity changes the speed of light (because light speed is distance over time) then if the time is way longer, subjectively at higher gravity, than at low gravity (this is confirmed also) then at high gravity light speed MUST be slowing down, and eventually reach a point where with sufficient mass around, light stops entirely. i mean, supposedly photons don't have mass, so it's not gravity causing it, it's time.