“I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans,” Dawson says, “some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process.”
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Actually a very cool article, thanks for the share
The final quote that you *helpfully added in is great.
I once read an offhand remark online that said effectively “if Dark matter was real and dark energy was real, we could observe that energy being used by life but we don’t”
Strikingly astute observation imo.
There are tons of phenomena or technologies that exist but aren’t used by life. The most famous is probably the wheel (with an axel, rolling a whole body doesn’t count, nor does cellular machinery).
As far as I know no living thing has selected for transmitting or receiving radio frequency radiation, nor X-rays or gamma rays. (I’m sure electric eels and such put out some RF, but only as a side effect. They aren’t using it for communication or sensing for example)
RF is pretty low on the EM totem pole when it comes to energy. There’s plenty of IR to use, which is just above RF… and it’s available 24/7.
Sure. But RF can go through dense bush or a forest even better than audio if it’s high enough power - and without alerting any non-RF animals like audio would.
Or imagine animals with actual radar for finding prey. IR is good for that (I know snakes use it) but again radio could penetrate cover, and yet nothing uses it like that.
The main point though, is that RF exists despite non-use by life (excluding human technology of course). The same likely applies to dark matter and dark energy whatever they end up being.
OTOH (I was just reading the other day), cats can’t even see red (looks grey to them) … only green and blue. Looks as though higher-freq visible light worked just fine for Feliformia. The organs/antennae needed to send and/or receive RF would be highly ungainly for speedy smaller predatory mammals.
Who knows - maybe some of the dinosaurs -did- use RF?! High EMF from solar CME’s might have burned out their receptors.
You might want to do some research and update your beliefs. Yes, some have been found to absorb gamma and xrays.
[citation needed]
I was very careful to phrase that with ‘selected for’ because of course things absorb radiation. That’s how bones are visible in X-ray radiology. But that doesn’t mean it is something they evolved specifically to do.
Go read
You don’t need me to research things for you and provide you search results
I’m pretty sure you’re capable of entering a search query and reading on your own
It takes less time than writing your wrong opinions
To be clear, it’s not that they shoot laser beams from their feathers as some sort of mating ritual or defense mechanism (which, honestly, is probably how I would have used my own laser feathers, if I had them), but that there are strikingly identical nano structures that can reflect back a little bit of laser light, under laboratory conditions:
After staining the feathers with a common dye and pumping them with soft pulses of light, they used laboratory instruments to detect beams of yellow-green laser light that were too faint to see with the naked eye. They emerged from the feathers’ eyespots, at two distinct wavelengths.
Nature is wild. We have truly alien creatures on earth!
