“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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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.
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.
Edit: they went on to extrapolate that they don’t believe it is possible to harvest energy from quantum vacuum fluctuations for the same reason. Something alive would have done it already
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)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
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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Nature is wild. We have truly alien creatures on earth!
Eyes of Sauron!
