The Galileo question

It was a common argument at the beginning of the 17th century against the use of telescope in astronomy, that we knew the terrestrial circumstances, so it was possible to “correct a range of apparent instrumental distortions” [Steven Shapin: The Scientific Revolution, p. 73]. But in the case of heavenly bodies, the situation was different, since neither Galileo nor any other scientist had a reliable, new theory about the human vision. So there was no an opportunity to ascertain whether an astronomical observation was true or a mere optical illusion.
Despite of this problem, the astronomers of that age were able to work out some reliable hypothesis about the Solar System and its objects. To give an example, generalizing their mundane observations, they supposed, that the planets were fundamentally similar to the Earth, and there were mountains and valleys on their surfaces (for example, on the Moon). Obviously, these generalizations were misleading, when they tried to draw conclusions in connection with the Martian life and some other, not detectable phenomena, but it is remarkable, that their method in many cases worked.
It is not a surprise that our evolutionary past trained us to interpret usually correctly the terrestrial environment’s events – after all, it was a criterion of our survival. But this does not mean necessarily, that our mundane experiences should be extendable to the astronomical objects.
In other words: why the laws, which govern both earthly and the celestial world, can be interpreted in the same way, using our everyday experience as a starting point, while in case of quantum physics the situation is really different?
This raises two questions.

• It would be interesting to know whether intelligent species living under the surface of an ocean or in another strange environment could extend their abilities effectively to understand the world above the atmosphere.
• And it is another interesting question, whether it is a necessity that an intelligent being’s larger-scale environment can be relatively well described using their planet-based observations. 

After all, we cannot exclude the theoretical possibility of a universe where the differences between these two levels are as big as between the physics of the humans' and the quantum scale.