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How do we know the universe outside our solar system truly exists?

This is something that has been bothering me for a while as I’m diving through space articles, documentaries etc. All seem to take our observations for granted, which are based on the data of the entire observable universe (light, waves, radiation…) we receive at our, in comparison, tiny speck. How do we know we are interpreting all this correctly with just the research we’ve done in our own solar system and we’re not completely wrong about everything outside of it?

This never seems to be addressed so maybe I’m having a fundamental flaw in my thought process.

ricecake ,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle

We don’t, but it’s the simplest explanation that’s consistent with our observations.

If it’s not, then we can’t actually know anything about anything in a very real sense.

A related question is “how do you know that the universe outside your mind is real?”.
You don’t. You can’t disprove solipsism, but the existence of external reality is as consistent and significantly more actionable, so most people choose to follow that belief.

dumples ,
@dumples@kbin.social avatar

There are a few assumptions in scientific pursuits and the Cosmological Principle is a big one

tigerjerusalem ,

Just passing by to say that I love those kind of questions, because it’s so basic and elementary, yet really mind fucking when you stop to think about it. The answers here are really great.

lea OP ,

I absolutely love the answers.

blazera ,
@blazera@kbin.social avatar

Whats different in our understanding within the solar system compared to outside? It's telescopes looking at light from far away.

lea OP ,

In ours we can send probes to confirm our observations, but the closest other star is so far away we’ll never even get 1% closer in our lifetime.

I’ve already gotten good answers to why this shouldn’t matter though.

ShepherdPie ,

You could make the same argument about our own solar system during the hundreds of years before space flight or probes existed. We knew the planets were there based on observation alone. There were many theories previously like the Heliocentric model that had our sun as the center of the universe but these were proven wrong without ever leaving the planet itself. The fact that probes now confirm that the other planets exists lends credence to the theory that other galaxies and solar systems exist too.

Krudler ,

There’s lots to learn about and lots of perspective shifts that (counterintuitively) can be found when you start to learn about particle physics.

I started to get into it about 2 years ago, and at first I was totally baffled. I kind of saw that as a fun thing though because it gave me cause to keep exploring backwards until I understood some fundamentals better.

Every time I started to think I grasped something, it just made more questions bubble up.

In the end, for as much as I think I understand about particle physics, I really don’t, but I sure as hell know about all kinds of scientific measurement processes, theories, and underlying concepts of how the universe works (which is fundamentally different than what we assume and what we have been taught).

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