this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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“I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans,” Dawson says, “some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process.”

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[–] kalkulat@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

RF is pretty low on the EM totem pole when it comes to energy. There's plenty of IR to use, which is just above RF... and it's available 24/7.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Sure. But RF can go through dense bush or a forest even better than audio if it's high enough power - and without alerting any non-RF animals like audio would.

Or imagine animals with actual radar for finding prey. IR is good for that (I know snakes use it) but again radio could penetrate cover, and yet nothing uses it like that.

The main point though, is that RF exists despite non-use by life (excluding human technology of course). The same likely applies to dark matter and dark energy whatever they end up being.

[–] kalkulat@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

OTOH (I was just reading the other day), cats can't even see red (looks grey to them) ... only green and blue. Looks as though higher-freq visible light worked just fine for Feliformia. The organs/antennae needed to send and/or receive RF would be highly ungainly for speedy smaller predatory mammals.

Who knows - maybe some of the dinosaurs -did- use RF?! High EMF from solar CME's might have burned out their receptors.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Heh, that would be neat. Maybe that's what stegosaurus plates were: a MIMO array.