Blind astronomy

[cosmo-goblin]

I had a thought the other day.  What would science be like if we were blind?  Could we develop astronomy, and space travel?  Would we even know there were other bodies?

It's certainly possible to be an astronomer today, and blind - due to accident or from birth.  But imagine a species just like ours, on a planet with a moon and sun just like ours, but that had never developed eyes (or lost them before the advent of civilization).  What would it be like then?

[Just Jim]

I've read theories like this, like a species developing some form of radar, similar to a bat, instead of eyesight.  That could be a really precise way to "see", and also communicate, without having eyes.  But you need air of some sort for sound waves to travel, so I don't know if or how they would be able to "see" anything outside of their atmosphere.

Edited December 11, 2015 by Just Jim

[peadar1987]

It's possible, although it would be very difficult. There's no reason a blind being couldn't construct a device to take electromagnetic radiation and read it back to them in terms they could understand with one of their working senses. I'd imagine things would proceed a lot more slowly though. It would also be far harder to explain things like astronomy to the layman. You can't hear, smell, touch or taste the sky, how would you explain the concept of the cosmos to somebody like that?

[ment18]

1 hour ago, Just Jim said:

I've read theories like this, like a species developing some form of radar, similar to a bat, instead of eyesight.  That could be a really precise way to "see", and also communicate, without having eyes.  But you need air of some sort for sound waves to travel, so I don't know if or how they would be able to "see" anything outside of their atmosphere.

Bats use sonar but radar works fine in space.  I heard of a human that could use sonar because he was blind and his hearing compensated. 

What does blind mean though?  Can see the 'visible spectrum' or can't see EM Radiation?

If we couldn't see visible spectrum not mush would change, things would just look different.

1 hour ago, peadar1987 said:

It's possible, although it would be very difficult. There's no reason a blind being couldn't construct a device to take electromagnetic radiation and read it back to them in terms they could understand with one of their working senses. I'd imagine things would proceed a lot more slowly though. It would also be far harder to explain things like astronomy to the layman. You can't hear, smell, touch or taste the sky, how would you explain the concept of the cosmos to somebody like that?

I've seen some documentaries about how adaptable human senses are so this would work, but getting to that point would be very hard, I think. 

Edited December 11, 2015 by ment18

[cantab]

Do we have anything that behaves analogously to sight? By that I mean a sense that gives us an idea of some quantity that varies in different directions? If yes, it's likely we could convert the astronomical data into that form for display.

For example let's say we have bat-style sonar. Then a "sonar display" could work by listening for the pulse and artificially reproducing the echoesfrom the scene to be displayed. That scene could easily be generated from a camera, for example bright = close sound-reflecting object, dark = distant, not very sound reflecting stuff.

Resolution may be an issue, but that could be compensated for by blowing up the image more.

If, on the other hand, we have no senses like that whatsoever, then it becomes more difficult.

[Bill Phil]

They would have to build instruments that convert light to whichever method of input they use. Similar to how we can't see infrared, but our instruments can, and we then create images using the spectrum we see. Except in this case, astronomy would wait until they had that tech.

[PB666]

The electromagnetic spectrum covers several magnitudes, even though the visible spectrum is not that large, most stars have enriched spectrum in the visible range, which is prolly why we evolved em sensors in this highest output range. But this is very small it was the human mind, namely farady and maxwelll that joined thses various together into one continuoum. If we consider the CMBR, we have entierly scientist to thank for this level of understanding because we could never see this wavelength or the earliest stars with our eyes through a telescope. 

Our eyes sees the richest sensory information available. The data that pours in is fourdimensional withou the time aspect, there is x, z, color and relative intensity, much of the brain of some animals is devoted to processing this information. 

[cosmo-goblin]

I had a few ideas actually, based on a Big Bang Theory episode when they discussed what to send on an alien probe - they decided it would have to be tactile, based on the hypothesis that any intelligent species must have some sort of touch-based sense.  I think you could quite easily explain other worlds in terms of other lands - a land-based species would understand up and down, and would experience multi-layered landscapes, so it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to say that there are other lands millions of times higher up than anything on Earth; and tactile maps of the stars and planets have been produced, so they could certainly do that.

The problem is, how would you know they existed?  Newton split white light into a spectrum, and as PB666 mentioned, Maxwell and Faraday "simply" extended that spectrum beyond the visible.  Without being able to see any of the spectrum, we would start from a much weaker position.  We can feel infrared on our skin, but we only sense intensity; I don't think we can tell that there are variations in quality as well as quantity.

I just realised though that we would be able to discern tides.  It's possible that we could conjecture another gravitational body's influence on the sea; we'd notice that the cycle was linked to periods of warm and cold due to the Sun, but also that this wasn't the only factor.  I think we would be able to get as far as the Ptolemaic geocentric model of Earth, Sun and Moon.

Hmm, we would also notice that the Sun gave off warmth, but the Moon didn't.  Would a blind species be able to use this knowledge to develop a theory of spectrum, and figure out how to detect and analyse the waves?

[YNM]

Had we were blind, I suppose we won't really know about the Sun or Moon either ? Not even able to discern trees or shrubs or monolith (!) I suppose... I mean, no photo-receptors at all. Kinda hard to imagine making proper tools that way... It's a hard thing though, if abiogenesis is as real as possible then probably you should (at least) get some of plant's photoreceptors... Even simple organisms have them... Now, as molecules breaks off out of light naturally (as well), maybe getting a photoreceptor protein after a veerryy loong tiimee is inevitable (and so visual observation) ?

[peadar1987]

9 hours ago, cosmo-goblin said:

I had a few ideas actually, based on a Big Bang Theory episode when they discussed what to send on an alien probe - they decided it would have to be tactile, based on the hypothesis that any intelligent species must have some sort of touch-based sense.  I think you could quite easily explain other worlds in terms of other lands - a land-based species would understand up and down, and would experience multi-layered landscapes, so it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to say that there are other lands millions of times higher up than anything on Earth; and tactile maps of the stars and planets have been produced, so they could certainly do that.

The problem is, how would you know they existed?  Newton split white light into a spectrum, and as PB666 mentioned, Maxwell and Faraday "simply" extended that spectrum beyond the visible.  Without being able to see any of the spectrum, we would start from a much weaker position.  We can feel infrared on our skin, but we only sense intensity; I don't think we can tell that there are variations in quality as well as quantity.

I just realised though that we would be able to discern tides.  It's possible that we could conjecture another gravitational body's influence on the sea; we'd notice that the cycle was linked to periods of warm and cold due to the Sun, but also that this wasn't the only factor.  I think we would be able to get as far as the Ptolemaic geocentric model of Earth, Sun and Moon.

Hmm, we would also notice that the Sun gave off warmth, but the Moon didn't.  Would a blind species be able to use this knowledge to develop a theory of spectrum, and figure out how to detect and analyse the waves?

You probably wouldn't even know the moon was there. But you could explain light frequencies in terms of sound frequencies pretty easily, assuming you weren't also deaf.