Don't wake me up

hey, are we maybe chewing gum at the never seeing your friend again party.

and then a little later on he learns that it had nothing to do with sound at all! purely by chance this composition of xenonite lets light pass through it! and humans have this special organ that lets them detect invisible radiation to such a fine and accurate degree they use it to navigate a room and sometimes to communicate with each other, without even needing technological augmentation!* at one point when looking at planet adrian grace is like wow, i know from our readings this planet has a surface, but the atmosphere must be really dense, i can't see anything past the clouds! and rocky is like YOU CAN NORMALLY SEE PLANET SURFACE FROM SPACE QUESTION??

(*mostly. giving movie grace glasses makes this retroactively very funny)

and then there's an initial smaller taumoeba leak before the catastrophic one (not due to the xenonite, due to a lot of stuff around the ship breaking during the adrian mission), which mostly just succeeds in draining the hail mary's non-vital power system and turning all the lights off

which drops grace's ability to navigate his own ship to zero

Rocky’s radar is amazing because he can “see” through walls, he can “see” the insides of bodies, and his sense is full 360 degrees all the time, unlike eyes which have to be pointed a specific direction. He has a much better sense of space and can easily find hidden objects. When eridians “watch” each other sleep, it’s different from humans watching something because they don’t even have to be in the same room as someone in order to watch them. Rocky could be in the next room, working on stuff, and still have sleeping Grace fully within his scope of radar.

But human sight! Sure, we can only see the surface of things, and if the light goes out we’re useless. But!!! We can see things that are 2D. That’s crazy to Rocky, that we can see things that can’t be touched or heard. We can see color, which gives us a wealth of information about things that eridians are entirely unaware of. Grace explains that humans can walk through a forest full of thousands of textures and easily spot out edible fruit because it’s a bright color. And the distance on sight! It’s incredible. Grace explains the concept of lighthouses, and how one small light can guide ships from miles away through a deafening storm. No eridian could hear that far, and even if they could, the noise of the storm would drown it out. And then there are the stars. Humans can see stars!!! Erid only learned about stars recently but humans have known about them since the very beginning because they can just look up and see across the vastness of space with no technological help. They can see the other planets in their solar system. They can see their own star so powerfully that they can’t even look directly at it. No eridian can hear their own star. And when they’re in space, Rocky is totally blind because sound doesn’t travel through a vacuum - but light does! Grace can see just as well in space as on Earth!

Also, and this is a big one: humans can turn off sight. Grace doesn’t think it’s that cool, but Rocky explains that there’s no way to stop using radar. There’s no way to block out sound completely. Humans can cover their eyes and see nothing if they want to. No distractions, no stimulation. That’s amazing.

I also love the idea of Grace explaining the concept of “see-through” to Rocky and telling him about all the types of transparent materials earth has developed over the years. And there are naturally transparent materials, too! Rocky is very excited to learn that water is transparent.

rocky is both touched by the sentiment and disturbed by human medical practices

inspired by this grace quote:

Nothing to see here. Just two bros discussing heart surgery 😳🫀