From what I've read, there is a distance beyond which galaxies are no longer visible because light from them has completely redshifted into nothing. This occurs somewhere around 14 billion lightyears away. I have also read that there is no evidence that the universe ends there, just that is as far as we can see. The visible universe may be a miniscule fraction of what is truely out there.

Here is a website recently posted by Marcia, it really shows the scale of what we *can* see:

The visible universe

It is hard to understand what role life has in such a vast superstructure. From orbit, under high magnification, large crowds of people appear like dust on a shelf. Zoom out, and we aren't visible at all !

And with the inverse square law of radiation snuffing out our radio transmissions, no words spoken by any man could be of any consequence anywhere else in the universe. How does that fit with the vastness of space? Man, I don't know.