If you think counting is hard normally, try writing anything that embeds a Lua interpreter (indices start at 1).

American here, this is just as stupid and dangerous as it sounds. The idea is that it’s very easy to check for pedestrians before turning but literally almost no one even looks. Even if the crosswalk light is lit they don’t notice and just plow right through.

To answer you actual question since my other response completely missed your point, I don’t know if it’s actually possible to properly describe light and color as a one dimensional signal.

I think we need at least two dimensions to describe it properly. Frequency and amplitude. Amplitude is needed to describe how intense/bright the light is and frequency describes what color the light is. Technically there is also polarization which could be thought of as another necessary dimension.

We could likely simplify it just down to the frequency and consider amplitude and polarization to be constants.

But since color is a really a property of the specific kind eye we talk about, and not universal truth, we get kind of stuck on how we could explain it to aliens which possibly have very different eyes or don’t even have eyes at all.

We have to accept that colour is a pretty subjective thing and not a universal truth.

The idea of frequency (vibration) itself though is very likely a universal concept that would be well understood by any human like intelligence in the universe. So we have something to work with.

We can maybe explain how OUR eyes work pretty well just by using frequency alone (just one dimension).

To explain this to an alien with no eyes, the best analogy would be one based on a sense they might have, such as hearing. We could describe the different colors as different pitches of a sound. Just as our ears perceive a low-frequency sound as a low pitch (like a bass drum) and a high-frequency sound as a high pitch (like a piccolo), the different frequencies of light waves correspond to different colors.

Red light has the lowest frequency of the three. Its frequency is approximately in the range of 400 to 484 THz. This corresponds to a wavelength range of about 620 to 750 nanometers (nm).

Green light falls in the middle of the visible spectrum, between red and blue. Its frequency is approximately in the range of 530 to 600 THz. This corresponds to a wavelength range of about 500 to 565 nm.

Blue light has a higher frequency and shorter wavelength than both red and green. Its frequency is approximately in the range of 620 to 670 THz. This corresponds to a wavelength range of about 450 to 485 nm.

We could put this in a neat one dimensional table:

400 - 484 THz,
530 - 600 THz,
620 - 670 THz,

We could of course encode this data into binary (ones and zeros).

What it really all comes down to is that the universe is full of things vibrating (slight over simplification, photons oscillate not vibrate) at different frequencies and amplitudes. We have organs that turn vibrating air molecules into sound and we have organs that turn vibrating photons into vision.

Living things often develop organs that let them turn these abstract vibrations into useful inputs that their brains can do stuff with. Things like color and sound are really more a property of biology than physics/math. So explaining them in terms of pure physics/math is pretty challenging.

Hope that was a kind of interesting answer at least.

Note: Im tired and misread your question as something like “how can non-human creatures/aliens tell the difference between colours?”. I wrote too much now to delete this haha.

That gets super weird because a “color” is a pretty subjective concept. It’s really just photons (light) vibrating at certain frequencies. We developed special organs for detecting certain frequencies (eyes) when we were still fish-like things living underwater. Because of that we can mostly see colors that propagate through water fairly well. There are whole classes of color we know exist but can’t see (ultraviolet and infrared).

It gets even weirder because some HUMANS seem to not even see colors the way western people do. The Himba language has a single word, “buru,” that covers what Western cultures consider both green and blue. This makes it more difficult for them to quickly differentiate between a blue square and a group of green squares in a visual test. The Himba language has many words for different shades of green that Western languages do not, which allows them to easily distinguish between subtle variations of green that are very difficult for English speakers to see. So colors are also a cultural/linguistics thing that extends beyond pure science.

To start breaking away from human centric stuff and get into aliens, we should look at other animals which evolved eyes separately from humans. Eyes actually evolved several times in completely separate animal lineages (convergent evolution). But the cool thing is that some animals who also have eyes, see colors in fundamentally different ways because they have different cones and brains.

The eyes of mantis shrimp and birds for example evolved completely separately from the eyes of humans and for different reasons. We don’t share a common ancestor which has eyes.

Birds and some insects are often tetrachromats, possessing four types of cones. They can see colors in the ultraviolet spectrum, which is invisible to humans. This allows them to see patterns on flowers and other organisms that are used for navigation or to attract mates.

Mantis shrimp have the most complex color vision known, with up to 12 types of photoreceptors. Scientists are still trying to understand exactly how their brain processes this information.

Many animals have light-sensitive organs that are not even considered eyes. This is known as extraocular photoreception, and it serves a variety of purposes beyond image formation.

Octopuses and Cuttlefish have an ability to change the color and texture of their skin for camouflage. It turns out that their skin contains the same light-sensitive proteins (opsins) found in their eyes. This “dermal light sense” allows their skin to respond directly to light, helping them to match their surroundings without the need for input from their brain.

Flatworms have eyes that are sensitive to light and dark, but they also have other light-sensitive cells scattered across their bodies. These cells help them to sense light well enough to get around but not much more.

So light doesn’t even neasesarily need to be a “visual” thing at all. It really just comes down to having some sensory organ that can detect photons.

Carl Sagan, and E. E. Salpeter, proposed a hypothetical ecosystem of creatures living in Jupiter’s atmosphere. I think this could be a jumping off point for thinking about real “alien” eyes. Especially because Jupiter could not be more different than earth.

Their paper didn’t specify the details of the creatures’ eyes, but it did suggest a possible visual system. Given the low light levels in the atmosphere, they would likely be highly sensitive to visible light, which is primarily sunlight reflecting off the clouds.

Sagan and Salpeter imagined three types of lifeforms:

Sinkers: These are microscopic organisms, like bacteria or plankton, that live on organic molecules and drift down into the deeper, hotter layers of the atmosphere. They likely would not have complex eyes, but instead, would have simple photoreceptors to detect light for photosynthesis.

Floaters: These are gigantic, balloon-like creatures that could be miles wide. They would maintain buoyancy by heating the gases inside their bodies and would graze on the smaller sinkers. Their eyes would probably be large and highly sensitive to capture as much light as possible in the perpetually cloudy environment.

Hunters: These are agile, jet-propelled predators that would feed on the massive floaters. Their eyes would need to be exceptionally well-developed for navigating the turbulent atmosphere and for tracking their enormous prey from a distance.

It is highly unlikely that these hypothetical creatures would see the same colors as humans. Their vision would be fundamentally different, tailored to the unique lighting conditions and atmospheric composition of Jupiter.

Since Jupiter is much farther from the sun, the intensity of sunlight is significantly lower than on Earth. FWIW though, Jupiter does produce a bit of it’s light. The planet’s thick atmosphere, which contains large amounts of methane and ammonia, absorbs red and orange light, and scatters blue and green light. This gives Jupiter its characteristic red and orange color bands, but the light that would be available for vision would be predominantly in the blue, green, and ultraviolet ranges.

Instead of seeing a broad spectrum of colors like humans, these creatures might have a specialized form of color vision focused on the parts of the spectrum that penetrate the atmosphere best. This calls back to the idea that human eyes evolved underwater and that’s why we can mostly see the frequencies that propagate well through water. They might be very good at differentiating subtle shades of blue and green, and even be able to see into the ultraviolet spectrum, which is abundant in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere due to the sun’s radiation.

Sagan also mused on the possibility of using radio waves for communication among these creatures. This would be a more effective form of long-distance communication than vision in an environment with limited light and atmospheric turbulence.

So to wrap this up and get to the point of your original question, aliens could possiblity see colors like we do but would very likely not. It’s even possible they would detect light with an organ more like “ears” than eyes. Where instead of “seeing” sound, they “hear” it like flatworm or octopus “feels” it.

IMO just explaining the concept of lift is probably good enough for a basic but proper explanation.

An answer in the same style as the one in the comic would be more like “Airplanes fly because they go into the air”.

Yes!

Humans typically have three types of cone cells, each sensitive to a different range of light wavelengths. They are called “short,” “medium,” and “long” wavelength cones, but are usually known by the colors they are most sensitive to:

Blue Cones (Short-wavelength): These cones are most sensitive to shorter wavelengths of light, which correspond to the color blue and violet.

Green Cones (Medium-wavelength): These cones are most sensitive to medium wavelengths, which we perceive as green.

Red Cones (Long-wavelength): These cones are most sensitive to longer wavelengths of light, corresponding to the color red and orange.

The brain determines the color we see by comparing the signals it receives from all three types of cones. An object that appears red, for example, is reflecting light with longer wavelengths, which primarily activates the red cones. An object that appears blue is reflecting light with shorter wavelengths, which activates the blue cones. The brain then interprets these different signals to create our perception of color.

Does everyone’s brain interpret these colors the same way though? That’s another interesting question that I won’t dive into now, but the answer is basically for sure “no”.

OpenAI was just sued over this.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/26/tech/openai-chatgpt-teen-suicide-lawsuit

To be clear I’m not asserting that this kid was autistic.

If have some terrible news.

These people are everywhere now. The brain rot is unreal.

This is an actual answer IMO. But I don’t think most people actually just know this stuff. Someone asking a question like that in casual conversation probably could use an explanation like this.

I feel like I’m coming off a jerk here but I just think appealing to taxonomy without actually giving any background info or further reasoning is a kinda boring and only a surface level way to answer the question. It doesn’t really give the asker much new insight into the topic.

You answer “ARE lizards dinosaurs” and the answer is valid. But you dont really answer the “why” part of the question (IMO). Someone without a good understanding of taxonomy wouldn’t really gain anything from this answer.

To me this is just A is not B because A is not B, according to the list of As and Bs. Without actually understanding the reasoning we’re just left with rote memorization.

iMO a better way to answer “Why aren’t lizards dinosaurs” could be:

The classification of animals is based on shared ancestry, not just physical appearance. The reptile class split into two major groups after the Permian period:

Archosauria, dinosaurs and modern crocodile.

Lepidosauria, modern lizards.

But how do we know they split?

A distinguishing feature that sets modern lizards apart from dinosaurs is their gait. Lizards have a sprawling gait. Their legs extend out to the side of their bodies, and they move with a side-to-side motion.

Dinosaurs, on the other hand, had an upright stance, with their legs positioned directly beneath their bodies, similar to mammals.

I’m sorry to inform you that all dolphins are in fact whales.

Source

Found the programmer haha.

Only sane response in this thread.

Holy brainrot batman.

Ok I’ll admit I misread the original post as “why aren’t koalas bears?”.

But yeah you’re right this does actually answer the question in the OP.

Edit: nevermind I didn’t misread. This doesn’t answer the question of WHY koalas are not bears. Taxonomic classifications have logic and reason behind them. So a proper answer would be that bears are placental animals with a longer gestation period. Whereas marsupials have a shorter gestation period and keep their young in a pouch. I’m sure an actual zoologist could give an even more enlightening answer.

My problem is just that this shows no critical thinking skills at all.

The answer given here basically amounts to “they are classified differently because they’re classified differently.”

This a perfect demonstration of rote memorization mixed with a lack of critical thinking.

The answer “they’re marsupials” doesn’t actually answer the question at all. It’s just regurgitation of information.

The Penn and Teller episode is what originally gave me this idea. Im not sure if this is really true and it’s not hard to just do the bare minimum to recycle things correctly so I just do it. But I try not to let the idea of recycling justify over consumption or excessive waste.

Isn’t recycling basically bullshit fed to us to make us feel more comfortable with over consumption and waste products?

From what I understand, very few things are actually recyclable in a profitable way and are thus not actually recycled but sent off to SEA to be “recycled” in their landfills instead of ours.

Hang out more in leftist/anarchist circles. Any community which supports trans rights very likely also supports the idea that males get sad and need help as much as any other gender.

Math nerds are going to have a field day with this statement haha.

Anecdotally I pay over 200% the cost of my father’s mortgage to rent a home in a lower cost of living area.