Why do you think this? We know how the sun works, how much nuclear fuel it has, and what life stages a star goes through as it uses up fuel, and how that life cycle changes based on size. We know the sun will stop shining, depending on your definition of that, in about 10 billion years. We know these things from studying THOUSANDS of other suns in various parts of their life cycle. We can make predictions on stars we observe, and watch them come true, which is the only valid judgement of a theory or model.
You not knowing something (like statistics) doesn't mean nobody knows it.
Ironically, the thing we actually created (LLMs) is much more poorly understood than the one we haven't (solar system). We do have centuries of data and a great assortment of really well understood models of how the solar system works, and we understand the math really well. There are no mysteries in orbital mechanics and we can foresee sunrises for the next few billion years.
You're muddying the waters willingly. This is intellectually dishonest.
Categorically it's the same problem. I just don't give any more credence to "centuries of data on orbital mechanics" for the purpose of this discussion about the the epistemological understanding of whether the sun will continue to exist or not at some specified point in time in the future.
Is it more likely based on track record/history that we'll still have a sun in 50 years than improved LLMs? Uh likely yes. I never argued one was more or less likely than the other. I only argued that the same logical reasoning/argument is used to come to the conclusion that we'll have a sun in the future as it is to deduce that LLMs will probably improve.
So unless you call epistemology dishonest, I'm not being dishonest. I'm pointing out something that people commonly glaze over in their practical day to day lives. I pointed it out because someone challenged my argument that LLMs will improve by saying essentially "well we don't know that". Of fucking course we don't. But we don't know that in the same way we don't know that the sun will rise tomorrow. That's all I'm saying. You're just missing the nuance and I don't know why you're resorting to calling it intellectually dishonest.
Fusing two atoms is not "a sun", sorry. It's the reaction that happens in the sun, sure, but it doesn't tell us how anything at a macro level about the sun (or gravity for that matter). That's all observation and theory until we can fly into one or recreate one that exhibits the same macro-level behavior.
For all we know there's something important we haven't observed about the sun's ability to consume its available fuel (whatever that mass is) and what happens to the exhaust products that could cause the sun to cool far sooner than we think. Who knows /shrug... not that I don't hope we've got it right in our understanding.
It's a lot more than two atoms, and all the various experiments leading up to them being weaponisable gave us all the info we need[0]. If we didn't know how the sun worked, the bombs wouldn't bang.
This by itself should be enough to pass the test of:
>> Have we experimentally recreated a sun and verified any of the theoretical models we have?
in the affirmative.
I mean, it's not like science requires 1:1 scale models.
> (or gravity for that matter)
Neither cheese, which is a similar non-sequitur.
[0] Including the fun fact that the sun is a "cold" fusion reactor, in the sense that it's primarily driven by quantum mechanical rather than high-energy ("thermo-nuclear") effects.
I'm not sure if this was first noted before or after the muon-catalysed fusion research.
Physics: the only place where someone looks at ten million K and goes "huh, that's cold".
Why do you think this? We know how the sun works, how much nuclear fuel it has, and what life stages a star goes through as it uses up fuel, and how that life cycle changes based on size. We know the sun will stop shining, depending on your definition of that, in about 10 billion years. We know these things from studying THOUSANDS of other suns in various parts of their life cycle. We can make predictions on stars we observe, and watch them come true, which is the only valid judgement of a theory or model.
You not knowing something (like statistics) doesn't mean nobody knows it.