4 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology
To "see" like a human, you need a human sized eyeball and a relatively large optical processing center. Microbes can't fit these structures into a prokaryotic cell.
Comment by OpenPlex at 17/01/2024 at 19:33 UTC*
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Good point, and agreed, which is why my question avoids mention of human eyes. Microbes might need field of vision measured in nanometers or micrometers (for our purposes of viewing atoms), instead of a human field of vision of macro scale meters.
Dragonfly eyes[1] which have smaller eyes than humans seem to even have a wider field of vision than us, so we might be able to get creative here.
1: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.12914
Merely asking in the spirit of the OP that invites the creativity:
Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different..."
Also in the spirit of Einstein's approach[2], let's imagine 'what if' microbes could each somehow use their bodies as individual sensors and then coordinate to assemble into a larger sensor as a superorganism[3], if hypothetically an existing type of microbe could do so.
3: https://www.science-frontiers.com/sf133/sf133p08.htm
What would it take for such microbes to see atoms? Is it feasible? Within the realm of possibility?
Edit: reminder again that perhaps this question might need biology to team up with physics. 🥂
Comment by thenaterator at 18/01/2024 at 13:32 UTC*
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
While what you've said is fair, I think it misses the spirit of the question. For example to "move like a bike" you need two wheels and a series of gears to turn them. But plenty of other things "move" just fine -- unicycles, balls, walking organisms, etc.
Plenty of microbes (eukaryotic and prokaryotic!) can sense and respond to light, and in quite complex ways. For a simple example, here is a sketch of the "eyespot" of a single-celled alga[1].
