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.
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.
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.