> it is hubris to think that after a few hundred years of studying a 4 billion year old dynamic object I'm afraid you missed my point: the age of the object is

> it is hubris to think that after a few hundred years of studying a 4 billion year old dynamic object I'm afraid you missed my point: the age of the object is irrelevant. That's why I was talking about the Moon which is also billions of years old. We don't predict how things will behave, simply based on a number of observations and then extrapolating (well, not if we have any choice). Instead we try to understand the underlying physical principles that cause the behaviour in the first place and make predictions based on that. The hubris is from you assuming you have a better understanding of the state of knowledge of the Sun than the people who actually study it. They know far better than you what we do and do not know.