Funny how space and time are, essentially, the only way in which humans (or any other matter observers or particles) are able to understand reality.

Special Relativity states that if we could travel as close to the speed of light as we wanted, we could traverse the whole universe and back in a minute, or a second, or any unit of time we wanted, just by adjusting our speed closer to that of light. If we could reach the speed of light exactly, then time will stop existing for us.

This is precisely what happens to any photon (or any other massless carrier) that “pops out” into the universe. What may represent a minute or a hundred years to us always happens in no time to them.

So the force carriers we picture as going from emission to detection at the speed of light don’t feel those spacetime intervals at all. For them, the whole emission-flight-absorption sequence is a single blink of existence. This means that photons and other massless quanta don't know about our space and time dimensions.

Any phenomenom that appears to us as evolving at the speed of light is, at the same time, an instantaneous event from the point of view of the massless quanta that comprise said process.

So, spacetime is an artifact, caused by the way matter perceives reality. Matter can not escape from the subjective reference frame in which it’s embedded, where anything perceived appears to take some amount of time. Any phenomenon is a spacetime process to matter, regardless of its true nature.

Spacetime is, precisely, a subjective intuition about how the universe works. But in fact, the instant action/reaction exchanges the massless quanta represent support the structure of our spacetime scaffolding.