No, not necessarily. This is apparently what the astronomers first thought when the BB theory was first accepted and this is why Eddington invented the “expanding balloon” model. The astronomers literally didn’t want the religious folks to get hold of the “apparent center” information, since a visually apparent “central position” would be too “Biblical” for the astronomers to accept.

But, if you do some diagrams on graph paper or if you do some vector analysis equations, you’ll find that we would see the same thing if we were way out in the middle areas of the “expansion”.

We don’t have to be in the center in order to see all the galaxies expanding away from us, just as we don't have to be in the center of our own galaxy in order to see stars on all sides of us or the Milky Way encircling us. In fact, Herschel thought we were in the “center” of a “circular” universe. He thought the Milky Way was the whole universe, and since it circles the earth, he thought we were in the center of the universe. But that turned out to be wrong. We turned out to be way out near the edge of our galaxy, not anywhere near the center at all.

If you look at some of the inner dots in the fireworks picture, they see exactly what we see, i.e. “redshifts” of the other dots in all directions.

Now, there would be a “sideways” motion of some of the galaxies, if we were way out away from the center, but we can’t measure the sideways motion since it is so slight from our point of view. We could go hundreds of years and compare photos from now and from hundreds of years from now and notice no “sideways” motion of the distant galaxies. All we can see is their redshifts which reveals their radial motion.

The universe could have a center, but we don’t necessarily have to be in it.

But even if you take the “expanding space” point of view, that doesn’t get us out of the “center”. We’ve looked like we were in the “center” from the very beginning of the Big Bang theory.

Astronomers who say that they have “seen out to the very edge of the universe and back to within 5% of the beginning of the bb,” they are placing us in the “center”, since they claim they can see this “5%” in all directions of the sky. That puts us within 95% of the center.

However, I think the universe is much larger than they think it is. I think their “age of the universe” estimates are not correct, and I think the “inflation model” is wrong. The inflation model has the galaxies suddenly speeding up to almost an infinite speed, early on, and then suddenly slowing down again. I think that’s silly.

Look at it this way: We are in the “center” of our “sphere of visibility”, but that doesn’t mean we are in the “center” of the entire universe. It only means that our “radius of visibility” only goes so far, and the “radius of the universe” is much larger than our “radius of visibility”.