Certain kinds of science fiction portray alien spaceships as dark and ill-lit, usually to some sort of dramatic effect. There is, of course, a perfectly ordinary explanation: depending on their drive system, spaceships will probably work on a power budget. Lights will therefore most likely be narrow-spectrum - there's no point wasting power on frequencies the eye cannot see.
Even some of our fluorescent lights today have a band spectrum: they produce R+G+B light rather than white (while others in the same group may be white-light), when power consumption is of minor importance. How much more, then, on board a spaceship?
If our eyes are even mildly mismatched with the aliens, their lights will seem dim to us and our lights to them - or we will not see them at all. We will be unable to use their displays and instruments. Their carefully colour-coded uniforms will be indistinguishable to us, while we see differences that weren't meant to be there.
So, next time you see an alien, dark corridor, or the dim red lighting of a Klingon Bird of Prey, remember - they're probably brightly lit.
⇦ The unsustainable Open Source | ⇨ Coup d'état in a Group Mind; or, War in the Collective |
