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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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.
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