What if Andromeda galaxy already collided with us and we still don't know because light hasn't got here yet?

Well, we're not missing abstract objects that must necessarily exist, such as arithmetic and arguably reason. Arithmetic, or mathematics, is what we use to explain our reality scientifically (which is philosophically amazing). Your question depends on what you mean by 'missing'. Are we missing an asteroid that could, literally, possible hit the earth tomorrow and destroy life as we know it? Or are we missing some fundamental mathematical formula/principle that would contradict everything we think we know about the universe? And if that's the case, then we have to define mathematics. If it is the case that we're missing some fundamental principle or law, then does that mean that mathematics is a natural entity that would exist even if humans never began to exist? That we discover these principles, rather than create them? If they are discovered, then this is an objective truth about the universe and reality (for example, the fact that there is something rather than nothing). This would entail that we have some standard by which to measure and examine the universe - and that standard is mathematics, which we use to design our theories and laws to explain the world. Two + 2 equals four. And a mathematical formula that sufficiently describes some natural phenomenon, and contains no errors, [i]must[/i] be true. But this is assuming that the laws we find present in our galaxy are the same across all galaxies. Which leads to the [i]Copernican Principle[/i]. Which leads to the second abstract idea I brought up, which is reasoning - the more philosophical realm. We can use reason to determine many truths about the world. Like the one I pointed out above, we reason that there is something rather than nothing, and this is true no matter how you try to spin it. Even if we were living in the matrix, that entirely speculative (and therefore can not be proven) theory implies that there is still something that exists - namely, the matrix. Belief in the reality of the world around us is what philosophers call a properly basic belief (you'll find this a lot in theist arguments for the existence of God). Lacking a sufficient defeater for this belief, it's reasonable to think that our reality is as we perceive it to be. The same thing applies to the cosmogony enterprise as a whole. I'm gonna cut this short due to time constraints so I can't get fully into it, but the bottomline is that [b]of course[/b] we're missing something, in the sense that there is something that we have yet to discover. Science would cease to exist if this weren't the case. There is still plenty of knowledge that we don't have, but this doesn't mean that the knowledge we already have is incorrect. It most likely will need some revising in the future, but there's no reason to think that 1k years from now, astronomers/astrophysicists will come to discover that the sun is in fact rotating around the earth, rather than the earth rotating around the sun. There just isn't any good reason to think that our 'missing something' could potentially lead to metaphysical contradictions in the way that we understand the world.

24 is the answer

True, the light that reaches us outside of our own galaxy and even more so outside of our local supercluster is incredibly lensed. Add the dark energy accelerating our Universe at unfathomable speeds and I honestly have no clue what to tell you. I think the most important step that will take us down the rabbit hole even farther is quantum physics and dark matter. Figuring out what dark matter is and how dark matter interacts with our current visible universe will certainly lead us to new theories even more far flung than the current ones being proposed now.

Are you stupid? The earth is flat.

#Checkm8Athiests

:| I feel like you are missing something very important, in your pursuit to not miss anything.

We most certainly are missing [b]something[/b]. For example: dark matter, what is it beyond something that should mathematically exist? To what degree does the insanity of quantum physics affect our massive universe? Then there's black holes, we know so insanely little about them beyond what we can observe with telescopes. The list of questions surrounding these is wall of text by itself. So we are certainly missing something, and I look forward to seeing how many more somethings we learn, and how many more somethings we discover we need to learn about as throughout my life.

The question isn't so much of "What if?" as it is just "What?" If there is anything we can take from history, it is that there will probably be no end to the search for knowledge. It would be ridiculous and, to be frank, quite irresponsible to ever take a position of "we're done here", regardless of scale or importance. Beyond that, it is quite likely impossible that we are right about our vision of the universe. This is especially the case when we haven't really come to any consensus of a vision yet at all. It's always sad to see the death of the love for adventure in people. To make a (perhaps not wholly correct) analogy, we should follow the example of the shark. Keep moving, or you will die. This death may not be immediately physical, but it is death nonetheless. Even backwards is better than nowhere at all.

Bro, this is OFFTOPIC. You're going to get shitposts. But I agree with you on that one. For all we know other stars don't exist and are only reflections of particle clouds.

I believe our astronomers are pretty accurate on their conclusions the only problem is we can only see what's in the observable universe. (Lucky for us it's expanding) but unless we can travel freely throughout space we can only conduct so many experiments. Which in turn leaves a giant gap with our understanding.

Daily dose of reality: [b][i][u]WE DON'T -blam!-ING MATTER[/u][/i][/b]