That's true with stars. We can never see stars or planets in the 'now' bc it took the light we are seeing time to get to us.
Even the sunlight takes 8 minutes to travel from the sun to earth, so if the sun exploded, we wouldn't know for 8 minutes.
In 2015, LIGO detected some gravitational waves from something that happened 1.3 billion years ago, in the constellation, Hydra. If you were on Hydra looking at Earth rn, you'd be seeing Earth from 1.3 billion years ago. 1.3 billion years ago, we were in the Mesoproterozoic Era here on earth. Life was just beginning to develop into multi-cellular organisms.
In conclusion: yes
wait i was in a tiktok comment section for something abt space and im no scientist obviously, but what if the reason we haven't found proof of life in space yet is because light takes time to travel from there to earth. like we arent seeing what's currently happening up there just what was happening way in the past.