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.
No fundamental flaw in your thoughts at all. Holding reasonable doubts is a core tenet of the scientific method, if we did not do so, that would prevent us from improving and refining our methods over time. We’d still be using things like Newtonian gravity.
This is, frankly, a very good question.
It’s only when people try to hold unreasonable doubts about very high certainty things here on Earth that people start getting a little irritated. Like, is the thing flat? No, no it is not.
Your doubt is about things that we cannot easily verify though, so is more reasonable.
One other thing to keep in mind, is that scientists communicate with us in narrative form, and say things like “such-and-such galaxy is x far away”, but amongst themselves, generally do not. They’re just treating us like children, and smoothing over the details to make things easy for us. Amongst themselves they just refer to the specific data that has been collected, like, “such-and-such light has x redshift”. No narrative translation. They do not think the way they talk to us.