[astrobe_]

Tangential, but sometimes real images can also seem unreal. I remember seeing a photo of Earth and the Moon with the Moon on the foreground that looked like a bad CGI. But it was actually a photograph taken by a space probe. Or, one can think about those photos of the Apollo lunar module that looked "wrong" (and probably helped some conspiracy theories spread), but were obviously correct - just there's no atmosphere to speak of on the Moon, so no light scattering etc. That said often, space images actually use "false colors" [1]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-the-colors-in...

[Terr_]

Condensed rant: Humans are blind to the most common gasses on our atmosphere (N2, O2) and sometimes have difficulty perceiving its most common liquid (H2O). This is sensible, since otherwise we'd be helplessly wandering through "visible" fog to fall off cliffs or be eaten by giant carnivorous bats. Our "colors" are mostly a quirk of where we're from.

Now suppose some aliens arrived at our planet and said: "Wow, your planet is the most-boring we've ever seen, it's all just one N2-colored ball." We'd be a little offended! Clearly, the dumb aliens are looking at it wrong!

Flip that in reverse, and we have an artistic obligation to choose "good colors" for planets that maximizes their interesting features. We already did it for surface-views on Earth.

[inigyou]

We're living in a weak force superconductor. If we were living in an electric superconductor we'd see nothing because electromagnetic waves would be blocked from entering our eyeballs. Because we are living in a weak force superconductor, the weak force is blocked from entering our eyeballs (in fact it's blocked at all but sub-nuclear distances) and so we didn't develop weak force eyeballs.

If there's an alien living outside of the superconductor it probably has eyes that can sense all four components of the electroweak force, including the combination that we call electromagnetism, which is the only one that can pass through the weak force superconductor. Such a being would see the superconductor "material" as something like a block of red jello, only allowing one "color" to pass through and would be as surprised to see us there as we would be if we saw sentient beings inside a block of YBCu superconductor alloy.

Although we wouldn't have a way to see sentient beings inside a block of superconductor alloy, because we don't have any more long-range forces to probe it with, besides gravity. Our outside-weak alien could still see us with electromagnetism which is the one remaining long-range force we have, but that's disabled inside an electric superconductor too.

[avereveard]

these materials are transparent to light it is not a property of the human vision system that light goes trough N2

[7jjjjjjj]

These materials are transparent to some light. They absorb a lot of infrared and ultraviolet. The human vision system can see the light that isn't absorbed and as a result is abundant in our environment.

[inigyou]

The good news is that most stars have a spectrum very roughly similar to ours, so we can expect that aliens can probably see these wavelengths.