I have been pondering the question of how we can look back to the state of the early universe for some time. So I came here and found, to my delight, that several such questions have been asked, such as this one. Fortunately the answers to that (and other questions) has helped immeasurably, but I have one lingering area of confusion:
I often hear, in cosmological TV documentaries (such as Horizon in the UK) words such as "The further away we look, the further back in time we are looking. Our technology has now advanced to the point we can see objects so far away they began emitting their light just [n] after the big bang" [this is not a quote from a programme but my synthesis of what I have heard].
My question is this: I understand the limitation of c and light taking finite time to reach us from distant objects. Having now understood that inflation caused the early universe to "move" so far away we are only now receiving its light; How can today's technology evolve into tomorrow's technology and enable us to see "older" light as we can only see what is arriving at the Earth right now. I.e. if a time-traveller turned up today bearing a better telescope from the future, I should not be able to use it to see further away and therefore back in time, because it is dependent on the age of the light arriving at my location.
The only solution I can think of is that due to tricksy inflation rate effects, the light of successively further objects is arriving at, essentially, the same time (when looked at over a universal age). But that doesn't seem to make sense and even if it did how would we sort the older light from the newer light from the same object if it is all arriving at once (notwithstanding red shift, which I do (hopefully) understand)...