by Maggie Masetti and J. Allie Cliffe
Pretend you are from an alien civilization that can only detect the color green. You have just landed on Earth. What would things outside look like? For example, to the left is what a tree would look like if you could only see green and to the right is how it would look to a human.
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If you could only see the tree as it appears on the left, what information
about trees would you be missing? Think about it as you try this next
example.
Suppose you were a biologist studying and trying to understand a flower -
possibly tulips. And suppose also that you could ONLY detect things that
were green. What parts of the tulip would you know about if you could only
detect things that are green?
You miss a lot when you have an incomplete picture! Click on the image for
more information!
Plant biology would be so different if we could only detect things that
are
green! Do you think that we would understand as much as we do about plants?
Flowers are an important part of a plant and are in fact one way they
reproduce themselves. If we could not detect flowers it would be difficult
to know how plants reproduced! We could probably
not see plant roots either, which would hinder us from learning how plants
get nutrition. We couldn't even see soil, so we wouldn't know what the
plants were getting their nutrition from!
There would be large gaps in our knowledge of plants and how they work. A
similar situation exists in astronomy.
Look at the below image of a field. This is what it would resemble if you
could only see green. Try running your mouse over the image.
| For instance, because of X-ray telescopes, we know that most of the mass of a cluster of galaxies consists of hot gases that emit X-rays but are invisible at optical wavelengths. Because we can't see X-rays, we had no way of knowing this until we thought to look at the skies with electronic eyes. If we hadn't learned about these hot clouds of X-ray emitting gas, we wouldn't know how galaxies form and evolve! |
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Seeing only green gives us a very incomplete, and even incorrect, picture of things around us. This is analogous to humans only being able to see the Universe in optical light.
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