What you disregard, DL MARTIN, is that time and space are connected. We can't break free of our own spacetime to find information about something that is not located in our own spacetime.
When I was 15 years old, I grabbed my parents' binoculars to go outside and have a look at Andromeda. It was incredibly powerful to see the pale yellow fuzzy spot and realize that I was looking at millions and possibly billions of stars at a glance. I felt convinced that there were habitable planets in that fuzzy spot, and in short, I had an overwhelmingly strong sense that I was "looking at aliens".
I started fantasizing that these aliens were not so different from myself. I imagined that there was another teenager in there on a planet in Andromeda, probably a girl, and maybe she was looking at us with her binoculars just like I was looking at her. I wanted to wave at her.
Years later I reviewed the possibility of "waving" - that is, sending a signal - to anyone inside Andromeda who might be looking our way. But if it was even possible to send such a signal, I realized that it would take two million years for it to reach any intelligent beings in Andromeda. And then, if the intelligent Andromedans decided that they wanted to send a signal back to us, it would take another two million years for that signal to reach us.
In short, if we were to send a signal to Andromeda, it would take four million years before we could even hope of getting an answer.
And if we - whoever "we" would be after four million years - actually got an answer from Andromeda, it still wouldn't tell us what Andromeda is like "now" (in what at that time would be our "now"). Because the answer from Andromeda would still be "two million years late".
We exist in another time frame than Andromeda. We can't know of each other's "now".
It is meaningless to ask what Andromeda is "now", and even more meaningless to ask what M66 is "now". Because there is no universal "now" in space, only all these separate locations in spacetime.
Ann