this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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They'd have really big eyes. Depending on the wavelength they can see, they might be nearly all eye.
If they were able to see a significant chunk of it at good acuity they'd have to be so big I doubt they could survive in a gravity well thanks to the square cube law of surface area. Be more like living space stations. If they were distributed organisms like a mycelium or Aspen colony, maybe they could survive actually visiting Earth, but they'd be really big. Processing that much data over large areas would mean they are very sophisticated thinkers but with a very high latency so slow.
One fun implication of these building sized to tens of kilometer sized eyes is that am sources would look like a one color light source getting brighter and darker while an fm source would slightly shift colors. Going to earth would be like going clubbing with strobes and disco lights thrown everywhere.
Edit: the 2 comments below give a pretty good explanation as to why the following comment is not correct. Original comment, as always:
I don't see why they'd have to have big eyes. We use massive radio telescopes for sensitivity, not for the spectrum range. AM radio is in the order of 100 meter wavelengths, but handheld devices can receive it. Wavelength isn't really the defining factor as much as being able to handle the frequency of the data over the time required. Wavelength is not how tall the wave is, amplitude is.
Handheld devices can receive it, but to actually "see" with it you need a very large aperture(iris) and a "retina" with many of those antennas that respond to different wavelengths. The overall structure of an eye capable of seeing would be massive, not because the signal is faint or you can't "fit" the amplitude in the aperture but because that's what you need for acuity and to actually have meaningful angular resolution. Those long waves have more limited angles to fit in a given eye diameter. For something like AM, we're talking a very big structure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution
θ ≈ λ/D where θ is the angular resolution, λ is the wavelength, and D is the diameter of the aperture
As you can see, increasing the wavelength by orders of magnitude means you need to increase the aperture by orders of magnitude to get the same angular resolution.
I realize now I was thinking of data in the time axis rather than the width/resolution direction
Massive singular radio telescopes are used to pick up individual signals from one direction, and can't do imaging alone.
Sure you can pick up long wave radio with smaller antennas, but not without trade-offs. They often need long coils, and to make up the remaining difference you need to very precisely control electric resonance, and you lose efficiency (you pick up less energy from the radio waves). You definitely can't do imaging with just one.
Just look at how big NFC and Qi coils are, they can't practically be made smaller at those wavelengths, or else you lose too much energy!
Massive radio telescope arrays spanning the globe uses the massive distance to create a tiny amount of angular resolution, just enough that with months of processing you can image a black hole a few light years away with some thousands of pixels. Compare to how your phone can run deblur algorithms on a fraction of the power over far more pixels, because the angular resolution makes such a huge difference (blur radius is infinitely smaller)
Also, amplitude is signal strength. That's only tall on a chart.
Alright, I think I can see I was picturing data in the wrong dimension. The data for an AM radio, in a very human-like interpretation, is running along the time axis rather than actual width across the available sources. It'd take multiple radios to "see" multiple frequencies.
You've described the reasons why aliens that see in the radio spectrum would never evolve in the first place. Aliens from a particularly cool star might have their vision attuned to infrared, but no place that's warm enough to have liquid water would be cold enough to make radio waves more useful than infrared.
Yeah and even functional infrared eyes need to be at least twice the size of ours if not over ten times for more far thermal ranges. Anime eyes. The classic 20/20 D&D infravision would require eyes the size of basketballs, lol. Dark elves would put the innsmouth look to shame.
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