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From: bruck@actcom.co.il (Uri Bruck)
Subject: Re: Alien translation
Reply-To: bruck@actcom.co.il
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Date: Sat, 23 Dec 1995 09:00:47 GMT
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lpurple@netcom.com (Lance Purple) wrote:


>Chris Clayton <usfmcncg@ibmmail.com> wrote:
>>Fascinating concept.  Unfortunately, this seems to require an alien that
>>ought to be extinct.  If she/he/it takes up to 10 seconds to recognize
>>it's being approached by a predator, or a falling rock, it'll be dead.

>I think it could work; I had in mind an alien from a dark, murky world,
>where sight uses too much brain power (for reasonable size eyes) to do
>in real-time.  The alien would have incredibly acute hearing, including
>passive doppler sonar, to sense its environment; the bad visual system
>wouldn't be a handicap anyway, since predators would have it too.

>The falling rock is a good point. Maybe motion-blur would be the #1
>criteria, followed by "predator-colored", followed by everything else.

This is not so far-fetched. Terrestrial organismz with primitve eyes -
such as frogs, can ONLY see movement.
In fact, some years ago an experiment was done with humans, a picture
projector was place is such a way that it would follow the iris, i.e.-
the picture would have zero movement relative to the the eye, all
subjects reported that after a short time the picture disappeard. This
is also related to the fact that we constantly move our eyes and don't
keep them fixed or staring. (Lots of people will reply that they tried
staring at a fixed object and it did not disappear, well, that's not
really a controlled experiment- and the human visual system is
slightly more advanced than a frog's)
The point is that even our visual systems give a higher priority to
movement. So the above notion is quite reasonable
Uri


