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.
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