I like to point out that we are blind to the extraordinarily common "colors" of nitrogen gas and water vapor, blindness which is beneficial, because otherwise we'd constantly stumble through fog until we go over the edge of a cliff or get eaten by a tiger.
Yet if some aliens insisted that our planet was a very boring featureless nitrogen-colored ball, we would probably object that their viewing strategy is naive and incorrect.
We are born seeing the universe based on pragmatic decisions about signal versus noise. Our evolved tuning utterly fails in new places, so we should pick new tunings.
Vox_Leone · 2d ago
To the unaided human eye, space is largely a muted void. Stars pierce through the darkness like pinholes in velvet, but much of the grand tapestry—the swirling colors of nebulae, the fiery birthplaces of stars, the delicate filaments of distant galaxies—are invisible. Our vision, evolved for survival under a sunlit sky and on a green-blue Earth, isn’t tuned to perceive the vast electromagnetic chorus the universe sings in.
Although space may appear subdued to our eyes, that doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful—only that we need to borrow better eyes to truly see it
pestatije · 2d ago
Images are not real, whether astronomical or not...the colours coming from your display or printout have a very different spectrum from that of the real object
Yet if some aliens insisted that our planet was a very boring featureless nitrogen-colored ball, we would probably object that their viewing strategy is naive and incorrect.
We are born seeing the universe based on pragmatic decisions about signal versus noise. Our evolved tuning utterly fails in new places, so we should pick new tunings.
Although space may appear subdued to our eyes, that doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful—only that we need to borrow better eyes to truly see it