While blue light helps regulate circadian rhythm and boost memory and cognitive function, excessive exposure can lead to digital eye strain, retina damage, and age-related macular degeneration. Everything in a dark room appears black because there is no visible light to strike your eye as you gaze at the surrounding objects.īlue light, or blue-violet light, has shorter wavelengths and more energy than any other visible light. Black is the absence of the visible light spectrum wavelengths. This is why visible light-or the mix of the rainbow of colors-is also referred to as white light. What about white and black? White is the result of a mixture of two or more colors of light. For example, a strawberry reflects the wavelength of visible light that appears as red. A prism separates visible white light into separate wavelengths, and each color that appears-red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet-is a characteristic of the distinct wavelengths.Ĭertain colors are seen as objects around us and absorb some light and reflect the rest, depending on the properties of the object.
To understand how visible light is broken into various wavelengths, take a cue from Isaac Newton and shine a light through a prism. Our eyes are sensitive to a narrow band of electromagnetic waves known as the visible light spectrum. The question is – What can't we see? What Is Visible Light? In fact, our eyes can visualize all colors of the rainbow through reflected light, but the colors we see are part of a very narrow band of wavelengths on the light spectrum. While rods help with vision in low light, cones help us see the world in color. On the other hand, I have to admit that it’s cagey.Our eyes are one of the smallest organs in our bodies, yet there are more than 100 million tiny cells-called rods and cones-inside the retina alone that are responsible for responding to light. So the zoo hypothesis seems more than a little forced. Indeed, we seem to prefer the opposite: On Earth, we interfere with one another’s cultural development all the time. Let’s face it: The prime directive has never been in fashion with us.
BRIGHTER 3D CANT SEE LIGHTS FREE
In addition, the idea that all extraterrestrials are keen to keep the evolution of our planet free and natural sounds odd, self-centered and a bit too altruistic. How would you do that, even if you’re a highly advanced alien? And Ball’s idea requires a galaxy-wide compact to keep all evidence of intelligent inhabitants - radio signals, laser flashes end even the construction of easily detected megastructures - from being visible by earthlings. Still, the zoo hypothesis is dependent on Earthly life being really important - our existence is apparently significant enough that it dictates the behavior of societies that might be millions or billions of years more advanced. The aliens of the galaxy have somehow arranged things so that our planet is shielded from them by one-way bars: They can observe us, but we can’t observe them. The MIT astronomer was proposing that we’ve failed to make contact with aliens not because we’re unworthy, but because we are worthy - the way endangered eels are.īall went further, proposing that we may live in a metaphorical zoo - a kind of cosmic Eden. It may occur to you that Ball’s idea sounds something like Star Trek’s famous “prime directive,” which forbade spacefaring members of the Federation from doing anything that might interfere with other cultures or civilizations, even if that interference was well intentioned.
Diversity is something that everyone in the cosmos is assumed to value, so life-bearing worlds should be left to their own evolutionary development. They’ve kept their distance not because we’re imperfect, but because of our right to pursue our own destiny. It was because these otherworldly sentients have agreed to a hands-off policy.
In 1973, MIT radio astronomer John Ball published a paper in which he suggested that the lack of success in uncovering cosmic company wasn’t due to a lack of aliens.