eli5: if we hear sound by air vibrating into our eardrums and we see things by light interacting with our retinas, does that mean that if other alien civilizations exist that they have to have a extremely similar system to ours in orders to see and hear things the way we do
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They’d probably rely on similar-ish organs to detect vibrations in the atmosphere and light from their star, but it’s impossible to know for sure until you actually meet them.
We can’t say what their atmospheric density is like, or what their star’s emission spectrum would be. They may be tuned for a different band of sound and light that’s more prevalent on their planet, and unable to see/hear the bands we communicate with.
Earth’s atmosphere is helpfully highly transparent to the same band of light that we can see, which is helpfully also the Sun’s peak band. A thick methane atmosphere around a dwarf star may produce a much less useful “visible” band at ground level.
its possible, but you have to know that there are spectra of these things we can’t even sense, like ultrasonic, infrared, microwave, that some animals are proved to be capable of sensing.
Not necessarily. They will certainly need ways to detect stimuli of varying sorts and to respond to those stimuli, just as part of the logistics of beimg alive. They will also need a way to use these mechanisms to commumicate with each other, as part of the logistics of havimg a civilization. But beyond that, there isn’t really anything to dictate how similar those systems must be to our own. They might be similar, or they might not.
That said, it does seem quite likely that they’ll have something like eyes. Even just using Earth’s life as an example, the basic building blocks of eyes seem to have evolved completely independently, in wildly differing species, somewhere between 40 and 65 times. Unless a species evolves in a place with no light at all, this seems like something that would likely evolve elsewhere too.
For them to see and hear “the way humans do”, then yes, they would need similar optical and aural methods.
But the odds of that being the case aren’t particularly high, given that even on earth we have animals that see and hear in completely different ways to humans.
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