Acoustic cameras can see sound (2023) [video]
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Note that this isn't exactly the same as getting more information.
Consider how terrible it would be if you were suddenly granted the ability to nitrogen gas: You would blindly stumble around in a dense fog before being eaten by a predator you never saw coming. Good filtering can almost be more important than good sensors.
I think that's also a great argument in favor of false-color/hyperspectral images of other planets: Why limit ourselves to the arbitrary wavelengths that were "chosen" just for Earth's atmosphere?
They're not arbitrary:
* These are the ones where the energy output of Sun's black body radiation peaks, giving the scene lighting.
* These are also the ones which coincide with many excited/base energy level transitions for electrons on molecular level, giving matter a color.
Perhaps it is a quirk of our universe that these two ranges coincide. I'm not sure if that's a given.
Heck, even our cosmically-close sibling-species have different perceptions, like flowers and insects that use ultraviolet signals and detection. Or animals that can easily detect light polarization.
Yes, we could see some IR and UF, but that wouldn't expand that spectrum dramatically. Visible light occupies a tiny part of total EM spectrum, so expanding it arithmetically still leaves you with a tiny subset.
Humans are actually quite good at seeing light polarization. I can easily do that with my laptop screen. I've found no use for it, though.
I hadn't considered acoustics being a whole class of use case for maintenance, but imagine if we had one of these in our pockets how much better our built environment would get, since everyone would be able to see issues & point them out. Visualizing the invisible is a powerful way to get change.
Also that train wheel example was a real missed opportunity to say 'squeaky wheel gets the oil'.
Are there any cases where blind people have recreated an environment they explored this way? (like how an artist could make a drawing of it) I guess that's at least twice as hard…
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3102086/
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/blind-people-echolocate-with...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation#Brain_areas...
For what it’s worth, for me, it’s not much different than moving around my various places with my eyes.
Like most people, when I see an obstruction with my eyes I don’t train my eyes on it and make a conscious decision to avoid it, I just “avoid it”. And when I know I need to go through a door, or down a hallway, it just kinda happens as if i had seen it with my own eyes. I don’t over concentrate on it any more than I would if the lights were on and I could see clearly.
The only “image” navigational image in my brain is an original Wolf3D screenshot.
It’s the same when I get up at night, even in a strange place. The shuffling of my feet on the floor is the sound I use fwiw.
I recently read the Dune book and was disappointed at how much of the "science" was just "because magic!"
Given the heady topics, and deeply layered study into human nature, I personally forgive the "because magic"
The story also includes some "unaddressed magic", like how come Rocky find Grace "at" (orbiting) Tau Ceti? Like we would instantly detect an alien space ship entering "our solar system" because "we're there too".
The Expanse novels & series and Hail Mary have ruined me for fantasy-science-fiction. I love the idea of having one big conceit and then building a universe that is as consistent as possible with everything from known physics to known sociology and psychology given that conceit.
For the expanse it was fusion drives and the protomolecule. For Hail Mary it was astrophage.
Just like the magical linguistic tools of Hail Mary, the Expanse broke this a bit too with things like spinning up the asteroids without ripping them apart. But, these are still two of the best hard science fiction out there. Sorry Cixin, Remembrance of Earth's Past was fantastic but it quickly devolved into fantasy.
One note, I always thought the spinning up asteroids part of The Expanse was particularly unfortunate because the plot would have worked just as well with giant spinning stations on the asteroid surfaces to let the belters live in limited gravity.
I thought the perfect energy absorption trait of the microbes was well thought out. Honestly something I could see being invented someday.
I like his content whenever it's linked, so I hope he's just "tired"
This is just how we look under artificial light in these circumstances.
(And (whisper it) unlike a good number of US male youtubers he's not wearing makeup.)
To me he looks well. Paleness doesn't kill, nor is it necessarily an indicator of illness.