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.
The answer is predictability. We see things. We don’t know what they are or what they mean. We come up with theories about what they are and how they work. Those theories in turn let us make predictions about other things or behaviours we should see from similar things in the future.
If our predictions are correct, then we know our theories are good at describing what we see, and we thus have improved our understanding of how the universe works. Even if our predictions aren’t correct, we have learnt something.
Rinse and repeat over generations of scientists.