not if they get rid of their eyes to prevent their brains getting eaten
it does require a light sensing organ if you make it emit light though
Okay so I see alot of technological overcompinsation and really ridiculously evolutionary justifications so here’s my two cents.
evolution
The specices can evolve in caves
Blind cave fish lost eyes by unexpected evolutionary process | New Scientist , rogue planets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7CkdB5z9PY, planets with extreme amounts of cloud cover, or planets where going above ground is too dangerous for life, like too much uv radiation, or simply no atmosphere. I don’t really see anything that’s really stopping a species from simply not having eyes atleast in lightless environments.
metallurgy
Ignoring the underwater ones many can simply learn of fire by being near it when somthing catches. Some caves can be very easy to set things alight in and they could discover fire by simple banging rocks together as a game. Then they can just go the same route as humans did.
other thoughts
Why you need to make if emit light? And if you need for it to emit light you don’t need to sense it because thats the entire point of a blind creature making the camera in the first place. Just have the screen be movable pins or a series of moveble flaps.
I mean we already touch/mess with/look at things that can’t or can barley be seen with the naked eye, like atoms, quarks, currant computer hardware, most pictures of space from space telescopes (the’re too far away) and cells. Many of this can be fixed with microscops designed for their organs like maybe somthing heat based or pins conected in a way that enlarges an image (though it might be too heavy for the extremely delicate) or something based on echolocation. Precision isn’t really needed until you pretty much already have computers.
You don’t need a eye/brain eating parasite in order to to justify the existence of sightless organisms
Edit: ah this thread ended 11 months ago, I did not know that
In my opinion, a “blind” civilization is definitely possible, however it would be difficult for it to go into space considering that they couldn’t sense in any way what lies beyond their planet and it’s surroundings.
2 Likes
This is also a late reply but a blind species could happen but it would probably get outcompeted or not become very advanced (I wouldn’t call a collection of moles a civilization) and even if they somehow figured out how to make robotic eyes before they were evolved what optical lobe would it be plugged into?
but wait! what if they smeltal the meltal in the hydrothermical vents
they could make the eyes stimulate patches of skin with electricity, or (if they have echolocation) the part of their brains that maps the data from whatever they use to catch the sound into three dimensions. option 1 wouldn’t be very convenient, and would only allow feeling the light in black and white, but it still lets them process visual information
They would need to have technologie that requires sight to develop in order to gain sight.
it doesn’t ‘require’ sight, it’s just made much easier by sight. you can solder wires without eyes, and the biggest limitation is still just the wire thickness. the hardest part would be making the photodiodes and getting them in an orderly pattern so the people using the ‘eyes’ can actually have high quality ‘vision’. if you use thick enough wires to feel them all individually, you’d just need to take up like, a patch of skin as big as the back of your ribcage. that technology would require sight to advance though. you could also take the leaves of any plant with small leaves and connect them using a fungus you bred to be able to be used as an interface between things with no nervous system and metal that way it would organize itself and you wouldn’t have to research diodes to develop a technology that lets you see. if you bred the fungus to work as a direct interface between two organisms though, you wouldn’t even need wires.
An alien being can’t solder wires without sight, they first need to have discovered metallurgy and how to make soldering machines.
Also, if you want to make the brain perceive specific things you need microscopic stimulators that are highly precise in order to activate neuronal circuits in a specific way; “wires thick enough to be felt” aren’t going to do so, let alone add an entirely new sense.
At this point you might as well just say that they use psichic powers.
the wires are going into the skin and connecting to the thing that percieves the light. they are electrocuting the skin very lightly to let the organism use the ‘eye’. for that you could even just use wires connected to acupuncture needles, and stab the needles into a fatty area on the skin. the brain knows how to turn light electrocution of the skin into something you can learn how to map into a 2D image, as long as you can feel sensations with the skin.
it’s not any closer to psychic powers than connecting a prosthetic arm to a brain with a neuralink using stretchy, flexible wires the thickness of a cell(like axons) in place of bluetooth. fungi can use their hyphae as axons, can connect to sources of stimuli, and can route the signals they make with the stimuli to specific locations. though, the neuralink example is mind reading, while the fungus example is mind writing
Plenty of species don’t have eyes because they live in caves or in lightless environments, and light is not a requirement for sapienence. And why would an underground civilization not become very advanced?
Why would they need robotic eyes in the first place!? It’s like if an alien species was theorizing about humans and believed we needed to replace all our eyes because we couldn’t see in uv. or they decided obviously we need to hook up electroreceptive organs or heat pors to our faces cause how else could we possibly discover electricity or heat, because that’s how they did it! All I’m saying is all they need to do is invent cameras and have the interface translate the data into a series of push pins, flaps, heat, or whatever works for their senses, like how we translate colors we can’t see to colors we can, or how heat goggles work. They don’t need to create eyes and turn themselves into cyborgs, not to mention at that point they probably already conquered all the problems a sightless civilization would have.
Can’t you just use a stick with a bit of rubber at the end to sense where the wire is? I don’t think you give touch enough credit. I’m pretty sure the point where a wire can not be sensed by touch is also the point where the wire can’t be seen at all. Though I only work with spun thread so I can’t say much on the topic. But I do know that something has to be almost invisible to be unable to be sensed with touch.
Why can’t they discover metallurgy without sight? before I mentioned they could discover it because some caverns catch more easily than others, though in the post I didn’t adress the smoke, a sapient species can still design a lot before learning metallurgy, simply by carving stone and could perhaps go to surface because of overcrowding, that or the cavern they live in has a sky light. Either way it doesn’t seem to far fetched for a blind civ to use fire, since fire is hot and, therefore, can be easily sensed.
1 Like
Yeah I cannot for the life of me understand why more than two sentences were spent trying to install diodes into face nerves, like that is genuinely a horrible Idea. Here’s an example of a SO much easier method: a camera. Cameras work by using silver halides. If you use a plate instead of film your development process could end with a large scale etching or depositing some material over the plate, then you have a texture-to-brightness map. Also, how much do you need this? Like for stars and telescopes yes, that seems insanely hard (also inevitable krikkit situation but that’s fine), but you can get a lot done with no eyes I’d think, it would be an immense challenge, exceedingly unlikely to get exponential growth before you go extinct, but I think it sounds rather possible. You can make basically whatever if you can learn to smelt and I’m not sure how exactly you’d do that but like, the way we humans got here was far from intuitive, and cooking rocks is just something you’re gonna do if you have fire (for heating, cooking, drying, sanitizin, fun, to annoy people, whatever, and there’s a good chance you get some copper ore too hot). Plus what do lots of blind species have? Tiny mechanicql sensors on their faces! Little tendrils, whiskers, antennae, whatever moles have going on (they can see I think but not underground in the dark). If those are good at seneing 3d objects then a depth to texture/smaller depth map or something would be entirely understandable and not esoteric to the species, and a texture from color or luminosity map would be weird AF but not useless.
2 Likes
I would like to point out one of this first ways humans discovered how to make steel is when they put metal in fires and it would change color because of the carbon which strengthened it, yes there is always a chance they could discover it another way or not have to use it but this is another thing which would set a blind civilization back, also “Why would they need robotic eyes in the first place!?” I was just responding to someone else who say they would probably make them
2 Likes
What about the weight, the texture or feel? A blind species might not be able to see the change in color but they would still feel the improvement, if not, the change would be purely cosmetic.
I guess the argument of how much, if at all, a blind species would be set back by their blindness really depends on what set of senses we’re arguing about. Are we talking about a species that just has human senses minus sight? Or are we talking a creature who’s sensitive enough to feel the hairs on an ants back, or has a better sense of electricity, or some other sense that would compensate for a lack of sight. Honestly a comprehensive list of the setbacks a blind civilization would have would be helpful for keeping this discussion on track.
This is a link to an earlier reply that delt with the, not being able to see the sky, issue.
1 Like
Sorry I got a little confused (I was reading a book and steel and malachite were talked about at the same time) I meant humans first discovered copper because they smelted malachite and it changed from blue-green and it would have a change it texture but I imagine everything smelted would to, and it’s weight is a slightly lighter that before (3.8 gcm^3 to about 3 gcm^3 if smelted perfectly)
Next page
2 Likes