I get that Dan (okay to call you Dan?) and I'm not meaning to be a PITA, just enjoying the debate, as I hope you are too

It's true, as you say, that we don't know for sure whether the Sun will rise tomorrow and there are a myriad reasons why it may not do so, but there are also very sound reasons to expect it will

Sorry Dan, got sidetracked talking to my stepdaughters fella. He's a fantastic kid who has autism and he's just achieved his goal, which is to work as a sound engineer at just 17 years of age. The guy has diplomas and plaudits coming out of his ears and he is supremely talented, he's a damned good guitarist to boot. Full of admiration for his dedication and ambition just now

We are coming at this from different perspectives Dan and I doubt we will ever agree. There's no 'belief' paradigm in play here just an admission of what might be possible and the probabilities therein. It never hurts to speculate as long as the foundations are reasonably sound. I cannot categorically state to you that there is life on other planets as you cannot state the opposite. What is interesting however is that NASA's Curiosity rover found evidence that water once flowed on the surface of Mars which poses an interesting question: Could Mars have harboured life early in its history? There is a lot of science to do before we get an answer one way or another, however it is an intriguing thought none the less

Who says they haven't found us? I'd say the evidence says exactly the opposite.

I think they just keep their distance coz humans are idiots. NEDS of the universe,really.

Kant would have said that there are good reasons to believe that the Sun will rise tomorrow, can you really imagine a world where the Sun doesn't rise every day?

You can't choose what you believe and don't believe, it doesn't work like that.

Lawrence

Dave, my point was a little deeper than considering the physical possibilities that may cause the Sun to disappear from view. Kant believed that our experiences are given structure by our faculty of understanding, the forms of space and time themselves are provided by the powers of cognition:

"Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us. This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest. Now in metaphysics we can try in a similar way regarding the intuition of objects. If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well represent this possibility to myself. Yet because I cannot stop with these intuitions, if they are to become cognitions, but must refer them as representations to something as their object and determine this object through them, I can assume either that the concepts through which I bring about this determination also conform to the objects, and then I am once again in the same difficulty about how I could know anything about them a priori, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, the experience in which alone they can be cognized (as given objects) conforms to those concepts, in which case I immediately see an easier way out of the difficulty, since experience itself is a kind of cognition requiring the understanding, whose rule I have to presuppose in myself before any object is given to me, hence a priori, which rule is expressed in concepts a priori, to which all objects of experience must therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree."

Kant thought that the ideas of space and time, and even universal laws such as gravity, aren't just the product of experience, they are the lense through which we experiences the physical world. None of us could 'make any sense' of a world in which there was no space or time or where gravity did not apply at all times and everywhere (except perhaps the sub atomic world). We have to believe in universal laws, it's not a matter of choice, because we are the source of those laws, not the outside world.

Lawrence

Yes indeed we are . Every complex element that exists in the universe (apart from a few short-lived ones created in labs) was created inside a star, and many stars are second or third generation, their predecessors having gone supernova and the clouds of dust and gas reformed into new stars. It is only the larger stars that have enough gravity to produce the heat required to form heavier elements, our Sun is relatively small. VY Canis Majoris has a radius about 2,000 times that of the Sun and if placed in the solar system would nearly reach out to the orbit of Saturn. Quite amazing and awe-inspiring

I've been into this stuff since I was a wee nipper Lawrence and it was given even more momentum when I read a factual book authored by the great Isaac Asimov in which he described the inner workings of the universe and transcribed them into a form that is readily understood. My memory is somewhat hazy now but the chapter on the life-cycle of a star was particularly gripping. He made mention of things such as Chandrakar's Limit (hope that is the correct spelling) which, as I understood it at the time, is the mass a star needs to achieve before it will collapse at the end of its life to form a Neutron Star. I think I read the book when I was around eight or nine years old and it blew my mind. Unfortunately I forget the title and lost my copy in a house move many years ago. I'd dearly like to source another copy for my stepson as space and its inner workings absolutely fascinates him...

will we get sucked into it one day ?