[ashrk]

Seems like there's either a speed of light and things can happen before we see them, or light's transmitted instantaneously. Doesn't make sense to talk about light's speed if the thing producing the light doesn't "happen" until the light reaches the observer.

[jschwartzi]

I'm not sure what you mean here. Talking about the "speed of light" makes perfect sense when there's a propagation delay between when the light is emitted and when it is perceived by an observer. And how can something be said scientifically to occur if it hasn't been observed yet? Whether or not things are actually happening but we can't observe them is moot, because it's not possible for us to observe them before we see them.

I'm not sure where the confusion is, except that you're trying to apply a common-sense notion of "time" and "events" as things that happen independently of the observer. But in fact Special Relativity makes some very bold statements about how integral the observer is to the process of observing both time and events.

I can understand the desire to apply common-sense definitions to things, but please understand that "event" and "observer" and "time" have very rigorous definitions in science, and that these definitions are constructed into a system of equations(a model) which has great predictive power but which does not always line up with common-sense notions of these words.

[Retra]

I think the confusion here is related to the idea that you can infer something happens even if you cannot observe it happening. If you know it takes light 8K years to reach you, and you can right now see a countdown process which will go off in 4K years, it is reasonable to assume the event already occurred in the process frame of reference. Of course, the certainty of that hinges on the inevitability of the process, but that could viably be on the same scale as the certainty of a direct observation itself.

Basically, our ability to accurately predict the future is not confined to events in our own frame of reference, so the difference between what is known to have happened and what is predicted to happen need not be very large.