Human Sight
Not by me, originally on tumblr by multiple people (and an archive.org link to the post in case tumblr pushes a signup). Transcription originally done by u/ElliePlays1 on Reddit, cleaned up a bit by me.
Image Transcription: Tumblr [1/2]
manyblinkinglights
id wreak mayhem for a really good scifi where sight was considered as exotic and numinous as telepathy by the protag species
roachpatrol
#everybody else uses sonar or long whiskers and that thing with the sensing electrical impuses#meanwhile: humans can 'see' which is a thing which is like and yet unlike ordinary perception#it would also only ever come into play in the same frivolous 'VULCAN STRENGTH' sort of way as Spock's extra attributes#for maximum effort vision would be faithfully written as 100% an asspull in the best way
what the fuck dude this is awesome i want this too now
curlicuecal
Okay, but what about those deep sea fish that produce light at a wavelength that only they can see. Predators that can somehow sense toy in a completely indectable and unfathomable manner to you; they might as well be psychic.
manyblinkinglights
YES, EXACTLY-vision is SUCH an asspull?? Sometimes it's ""dark"" and we can't see anything.And also we're impired for plot reasons! Sometimes ALIEN WEAPONRY or otherwise-innocuous ship components are ""too bright"" and yet we yell and try to hide, subject to some sort of obscure, tortuous imperative. The rest of the time we can UNERRINGLY tell when anyone is trying to play pranks on us, the names and emotional/physical status of EVERY SINGLE BEING IN THE ROOM (or, when outside civilized warrens, ""line of sight"")- and yes, of course, can't forget about our nigh-mythical fighting arts revolving around insane dodging skills.
And SNIPING. And also, god, fuck-don't forget about completely arbitrary """"atmospheric disturbances""" (fog, smoke-the new "ionic interference") ALSO plottasactically rendering our abilities moot.
glimmerbulb
Plus, some people have some powerful Vision than others, but some people have a very short effective range of Vision. However, humans have come up with devices that "change the angles of refraction" of the "light" so that the naturally impaired have their skills enhanced-but they can always be knocked off their faces or be broken.
Also some people are terrible at normal Vision work, but have excellent night vision and are skilled at working under adverse conditions.
Oooh, and human art is almost entirely Vision based. Think about non-seeing aliens trying to access the majority of human art!
manyblinkinglights
IM!!! SCREAMING!!!! GLASSES. Glasses are SUCH another great Weird Alien Gimmick. God-you get all used to your Human friend and their bizarre abilities, you just start to really trust in and rely on them in tight places and problem-solving a little bit, then you get fucken marooned on a fucken planetoid somewhere and they just in this very small little voice, after you have pulled them from the wreckage and sat down to go over your options, inform you that they've lost their glasses.
roachpatrol
Oh my god and an episode where we’re up against Evil Humans and our heros turn to their humans like ‘you can see them, right, you can tell when they’re near? you can counter them?’ and our hero is genuinely shaken and worried— they’ve got high-tech military mechanical enhancers, the devices strapped to their heads let them see anywhere, they can operate in near-absolute ‘darkness’, they can operate in near-lethal ‘brightness’, they can see through walls— not doors, not glass, but walls.
Then we have a heroic scene where the crew’s human is the scrappy, desperate underdog for once instead of the cool and collected superbeing. It is super cool. The human and the captain probably mack wildly on one another in medbay after this. Roll credits.
gutterowl
Person 1: I dunno, dude. This ‘light’ stuff sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to me. I mean, how do we know it’s even real?
Person 2: Seriously, how can something be a wave and a particle? That doesn’t even make sense.
Mysterious Human: Even if you cannot perceive the light, you can feel its warmth–
Person 1: Oh my god, please shut it with the mystical hoo-hah. You’re insufferable.
roachpatrol
Mysterious, somewhat exasperated Human: the ‘light’ enters the sensitive paired apertures in our faces, passing through biological lenses and chambers to stimulate specific nerves we call ‘rods’ and ‘cones’. one set of nerves tells us the volume of light we’re perceiving, while the other estimates the wavelength frequency. the total input creates in our mind a continuous sonarscape of immense complexity, where we can perceive ‘textures’ that are impossible to understand with mere sound or touch. this is why my people’s communication devices are small, flat, silent boards: we ‘read’ the patterns of light they emit as language and ‘watch’ the patterns of light they emit as sonarscapes.
Captain: okay…. sounds fake, but okay…
gutterowl
And they just keep on making up new bullshit rules for how light works, like
Navigator: Warp drive engaged. We are approaching 90% of the Lorentz limit.
Human: What now?
Navigator: Oh, uh, it’s really complex, but lemme try. So, matter can only move so fast through space, right? Like absolutely, nothing can ever ever possibly go faster than like about 3 hundred million meters per second–
Human: Ah yes. The speed of light.
Navigator: …oh for fuck’s sake.
roachpatrol
Captain: My god! Time! Has… frozen!
Human: Fuuuuuuuuck.
Captain: What?
Human: Remember how light is a wave and a particle?
Captain: Yes, we mention this every episode.
Human: Yeah, light’s frozen along with everything else. I can’t see shit.
Captain: My god! Our sonar doesn’t work either! The soundwaves— they can’t propagate through this frozen air! We’ll have to use just our whiskers!
Human: Fuuuuuuuuck.
gutterowl
The fanfiction for this show has to be amazing.
“Shh. Don’t try to hide your needs, Captain,” Hue Mann soothed. “My sight has told me all about your traumatic memories of the war.”
“What?” Captain gasped. “But…how…?”
“The light knows all,” explained Hue. “Time slows down at the speed of light. It sees all of the past..and all of the future.”
“And what is it telling you now?” questioned the Captain.
Hue leaned in close. “It tells me, ‘Mate with them now, you lovestruck fool!”
“Damn you, Hue Mann. Damn you and your penetrating ‘eyes.’”
“Oh,” breathed Hue, voice husky and sexual. “That’s not all my eyes can…penetrate.”
em-kellesvig
goddamn, you people amaze me.
kowabungadoodles
I love the idea that the protag species has telepathy as ‘boring normal standard’ senses and they can’t understand why human thoughts seems so strange, fragmented, occasionally blank… until they realise that a great of human thought is ‘visual’ and so can’t be heard…
annlarimer
“Lori, what do your Human eyes see?”
“Coupla billboards, and it looks like it might rain.”
jacquez45
This keeps getting better
vassraptor
This is so cute. Your human crewmember is getting a crush on another human. Time to observe the humans’ weird yet endearing courtship rituals.
“Tell me all about them! What do you like about them?”
“Well, they have these amazing eyes…”
“Yeah? Better at the the wavemapping thing than yours?”
“…I don’t know how good their eyes are at seeing. They’re just this beautiful shade of brown.”
“Wait. You wavemap each other’s wavemapping organs? And have opinions about what nice frequencies they refract the waves at?”
“Yes? What’s so strange about this?”
“I thought your ‘vision’ was passive. Do you listen to each other’s ears too? And like the smell of each other’s noses?”
“Like you’ve never touched someone’s whiskers with your whiskers.”
“…That’s different.”
actuallyasisterofbattle
Hang on though, how do you explain photovoltaics if they don’t know what photons are?
tharook
That’s a point; any space-faring aliens would (reasonably) have to have a good knowledge of electromagnetism and electromagnetic radiation. (And, potentially wave-particle duality and other quantum physics.) They might even have their own ways of detecting and measuring it (photodiodes, CCDs, radio telescopes, whatever) despite not being able to perceive it themselves just as we developed ways to measure things we can’t detect (like ultrasonics, heat (infrared), radio wavelengths etc.).
So our vision might not necessarily be so mystical as telepathy to us, but more like how some species of fish are sensitive to EM fields as well as sonar mentioned above. But our eyes and brain can do a lot of processing, still, and have an advantage over other ways creatures might perceive their environment. Pertinently to space travel, sight works in a vacuum and (theoretically) infinite distance. Instead of a sophisticated EM sensor array, fleets could simply install a human and a window.
darael
There’s potentially quite an interesting plot there where our nonhuman protagonists are entirely familiar with electromagnetism in the abstract, in the same way that humans are familiar with magnetism despite not having (much) direct sensitivity to it, but it takes them a while to work out that it’s how we do that weird “seeing” thing we keep talking about,and even longer to get the hang of what frequency range we use to do it.
And they might still be baffled by optic lenses.
n1ghtcrwler
But think about the discovery of humans.
You have this space-faring race kicking around, doing their thing, discovering new worlds and civilizations. They have all this advanced technology to hide themselves from all known senses so they can enter into the lower atmosphere of a planet and observe for a bit, cloaked from being noticed until they’ve decided whether or not the new race is ready to be introduced to galactic society.
And they show up at this blue world way out on the edges of civilized space, and detect life, and drop into the atmosphere fully cloaked and ready to research, and suddenly a scientist sends out a distress message to the rest if the crew:
Millions of Earthlings have immediately begun observing them.
roach-works
i still love this thread and i want to further suggest: what if all those UFOs everyone’s been seeing all this time are just merrily zipping around under the assumption that we can’t fucking perceive them at all, because their saucer-shaped cloaking field hides them from just about every kind of sonar or radar or emp device.
and sure, maybe if some of us humans had a really, really complicated photon measuring machine and pointed it at just the right spot, we might be able to get a reading that light is behaving a little bit strangely, very briefly, in one tiny part of the sky (where most light comes from!) but those things are the size of a suitcase, so obviously we don’t have them.
except also those things are the size of grapes and we have two of them built into our skulls.
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