Playing with benefits of seeing infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths as a semi-hard science fiction "power".
I love psychic powers in science fiction even if they only became a staple due to Arthur C. Clarke's fixation on them and a at the time genuine lack of knowledge as to whether they were slightly possible. So I'm trying to insert one into my semi-hard sci fi world that revolves around certain individuals being born with a tangle of nerves in their brain that allows them to see and UV, IR, and visible light as a single sort of vision. I'm aware that in real life there are structural reasons as to why ours can't really see outside of the visible light spectrum, and there are extra rods and cones in these people's eyes that compensate for that fact.
The issue I'm having is that I can't really think of any applications of the ability beyond being able to effectively see through objects and potentially tell what type of object they're looking at given its blackbody radiation and what other wavelengths it's emitting. In other words, boring shit for a military focused sci-fi. Interesting and mildly useful but nothing really plausibly "oh shit" or "badass".
Are there applications of such vision that I'm not seeing or am I better off just exploring another biological ability found in the animal kingdom? I first thought of using electricity generation and even made a post about it on this subreddit as I was inspired by The Power, but I recently added FTL to my world and that combined with the "space witch" vibes of the electricity generation ability made me go in a "harder" direction for my "psychic" ability.
Thoughts?
Posted Jan 4, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC