“I cast 200 μg Luciferin.”
[Dice noises]
“Nat 15. Your abdomen glows and dims slowly and rhythmically.”
Comment on Lightning bugs!!
the_dopamine_fiend@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Bioluminescence is actual magic. I will take no calls on this matter.
Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world 2 months ago
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Pathfinder 2e literally has bioluminescence bombs that’s just jarred firefly juice that’s secreted by humanoid fey that resemble the bugs
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Nah, it legit is, though. Just because someone or most someones understand how something happens doesn’t mean it isn’t magic anymore. It just means that we have a hard magic system. We understand our magic so well that we’ve stopped seeing it as magical, but if you take a step back and take a look at the big picture it becomes clear that the world is magical, and everything around us is this amazing, often confusing, incredible tapestry of Wonder and awe. The world has just ground us down so much that we feel like wonder is strictly for children, that we’re not allowed to feel wonder anymore. Embrace the magic. Even if you know how it works.
notabot@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Sometimes I stop to think about the fact that a tiny electrical impulse in my brain can cause my fingers to move and press buttons on my keyboard, which in turn causes larger, but still small electrical impulses to trigger a shiny rock we trapped lightning in to do an immense number of calculations, to send a stream of further impulses to my network router, which sends them on to another router, and another, and on and on, each step might go via a wire, or radio, or the flashing of a tiny light, or even bounce off of a satellite in space and back to another router, until it eventually finds it’s way to a server, which does huge numbers of further calculations, then sends impulses back to me, and also to other servers, via just as remarkable a route, which in turn send impulses down wires and optical fibres and bouncing off of satellites until one of those streams of impulses gets to your router, where it gets sent on to your shiny lightning rock, which performs many calculations and causes a pattern of light and dark dots to appear in front of you, which cause a series of tiny electrical impulses in your brain, that you perceive have meaning.
The natural world is filled with magic and wonder, but this is a magic we designed and built ourselves.
M137@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I like going deeper, just imagining the stupid number of atoms, interactions and things even someone with vast knowledge about don’t truly understand. And to add more, I play games via cloud gaming, and even after thousands and thousands of hours with it, it blows me away all the time. An electric impulse in my brain sends a signal to my finger which then presses a button on a device that sends a signal to another device, computer, then another device, router, then many many other devices along the way to the server centre where a computer reacts to that signal and changes something in a stupidly complex simulation, then the visual, audial and haptic responses are calculated and sent through all those devices back to my screen and to my experience it seems instant. So many incredibly complicated things happening thousands of times every second and traveling thousands of miles back and forth and for hours on end with very few failures. It’s just astounding.
NotLemming@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I like to imagine what magic will be normal to future peoples. Probably most of what we can imagine and some extras.
miss_demeanour@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Spelling it without help is also magic, so I hear ya.
callyral@pawb.social 2 months ago
Magic exists but we call it science
samus12345@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.
samus12345@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Humans are bioluminescent, too! But it’s too dim for anything to actually be able to see, so it’s no fun.
Sculptor9157@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Is that “article” trying to say we’re exothermic and thus glow in the infrared?
meowMix2525@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Short answer: no
Long answer:
In scientific terms, the glow comes from chemical reactions within our bodies. These chemical reactions besides generating energy and producing heat also produce free radicals – atoms or molecules that have a lone, isolated electron. That makes these radicals highly reactive setting off a series of energetic chemical reactions as they interact with various fats and proteins in our cells. **The glow is produced when these reactions involve fluorophores – molecules that give off photons (elementary particles of light). **
Glitch@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Hell ya. Real magic is the feelings we felt along the way. Swimming in bioluminescent waters is one of my favorite life experiences
ieatpwns@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Fuckin bio-lights how do they work
Dasus@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The definition of magic I go by is “affecting consciousness in accordance with will”, and when you’re going to watch fireflies with the thought in mind to appreciate them aesthetically, then yes, they are actual magic.
norse-mythology.org/concepts/magic/
Magic produces change by working directly with consciousness. Its effects often spill over into the physical world, but this occurs only indirectly. This is, in an important sense, the exact opposite of what modern science does. Science causes changes in the physical world in accordance with the “laws” of the physical world. Magic and science not only work by different means; they also work toward different ends, and, in fact, this difference in ends accounts for the difference in means. This is why practitioners of magic don’t conduct laboratory experiments, and why scientists don’t intone chants before altars inscribed with emotionally powerful symbols. The apologists for the conventions of our own age often claim that magic is a “primitive,” immature groping toward science, and now that science has arrived, magic is obsolete. But science and magic are different enterprises altogether. Neither can entirely supersede the other. Indeed, as will be discussed below, magic is as alive and well in the modern world as it’s ever been – it’s just been brilliantly disguised
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Eh, its kinda the base level of the evolutionary tech tree.
gizmodo.com/glowing-deep-sea-squid-have-a-complex…
youtube.com/watch?v=DE89YY7zCio
Humboldt squid skin is bioluminiscent, but roughly akin to a flexible lcd or oled screen, with many different ‘pixels’ capable of being set specifically.
They likely have the ability to communicate by basically displaying different patterns of different colors and brightnesses and translucency, sorta like a human walking around with a sandwich board made of lcd screens, which they can control with a phone app.
They may very well have an entire language they can convey via sequenced or at least specific patterns.