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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[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

[citation needed]

I was very careful to phrase that with 'selected for' because of course things absorb radiation. That's how bones are visible in X-ray radiology. But that doesn't mean it is something they evolved specifically to do.

[–] Krudler@lemmy.world -1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Go read

You don't need me to research things for you and provide you search results

I'm pretty sure you're capable of entering a search query and reading on your own

It takes less time than writing your wrong opinions

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

That's quite some hostility and unhelpfulness.

Anyway, after an overly difficult search (go enshitification) I did find this. So I have edited that part of my first post. The overall point remains though - life as we know it doesn't always make use of Every possibility, so lack of use (on earth anyway) does not mean lack of existence.

Anyway, I was indeed wrong about two of my examples, so here's two more to replace them, of very similar nature:

Nothing evolved to transmit or receive neutrinos or gravitational waves.
Mostly because doing so for neutrinos would require being the size of a large building for receiving, or containing a nuclear reactor (oh hey, there's another thing life hasn't done) for transmitting. For gravitational waves that would be small city sized for receiving, or being star sized with uneven mass at high speed for transmitting.