SearlesGold, please excuse my light hearted response.
If, apart from your 'black curtain', you were asking a serious question then you are in the company of many a serious scientific mind. I think it was Olbers (don't hold me to that) who raised the conundrum which was basically the question, "If there is an infinite numbers of stars then why does night exist, as the combined light from them should light up the sky even more than does our sun?". Even if one raised the point that there are dust and gas clouds between us and many of the sky regions the suggestion that they block light doesn't hold. This is because the universe is so old that those objects would have already absorbed so much energy from the stars that they would have been saturated to the point where they emit as much energy as they receive. The assumption in this situation is that the universe and the laws of physics as we know them are the same wherever you might be located
and that the universe is static.
Someone once calculated that should this obviously false situation hold then the Earth would probably be hotter than the surface of our Sun. I don't know how that was worked out as logic would say that infinite stars would produce infinite energy. The only reason is probably that, at some point, we would be shielded from most of the more distant radiation by those stars which block light from those 'behind' them from our perspective. So why is it not so?
Well, basically because the universe is not static. In fact it is expanding. Any energy source which is moving away from a measuring point (in this case us on Earth)
appears to be less energetic than it would do should it be stationary. That's part one. Part two is simply that, even if the universe is infinite, most of it is and never will be observable from our part of the universe because at a critical point anything that exists beyond that will be retreating faster than the light which is directed towards us is approaching us.
Whew, I hope that encapsulates the basic ideas. Still, astro_nutt's explanation is still correct when it comes to what we see with our eyes, or even our telescopes.
astro_nutt, I'll accept your challenge and bet you AUD1. I'll be waiting to collect.
