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Peacock feathers can be lasers (www.science.org)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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“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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[–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

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. [Edit: eventually and with no useful guidance I managed to find This. Note how I linked it so others can learn about it. Still didn't find anything for RF. End edit.] (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)

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    You might want to do some research and update your beliefs. Yes, some have been found to absorb gamma and xrays.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    [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.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    That's quite some hostility and unhelpfulness.

    Anyway, after an overly difficult search (go enshitification) I did find this. So I have edited that part of my first post. The overall point remains though - life as we know it doesn't always make use of Every possibility, so lack of use (on earth anyway) does not mean lack of existence.

    Anyway, I was indeed wrong about two of my examples, so here's two more to replace them, of very similar nature:

    Nothing evolved to transmit or receive neutrinos or gravitational waves.
    Mostly because doing so for neutrinos would require being the size of a large building for receiving, or containing a nuclear reactor (oh hey, there's another thing life hasn't done) for transmitting. For gravitational waves that would be small city sized for receiving, or being star sized with uneven mass at high speed for transmitting.

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