Sunday, July 5, 2009

Aliens and Pictures

It is extremely interesting that our eyes can be so very effective in sorting out spectral information even while they are so easily fooled. I don't exactly know what our eyes do in order to get spectral information but if you stop and think about it for a second it is really pretty amazing that we can fool our eyes into seeing any color we like simply by combining three wavelengths of light with different intensities. It is a rather profoudnly odd thought to realize that all of our nice colorful pictures might turn out to be completely unrecognizable for some alien species whose eyes work on a slightly different heuristic in order to extract spectral data from whatever they are looking at. Line art and the like would no doubt still be recognizable and print would also probably be easily seen correctly (if not understood) but a picture of a flower would likely be percieved by some other entity as some strange color distorted and possibly totally unrecognizable blob of primary colors.

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