Jul 22 2009Neato: Human Bodies Produce Visible Light

FIRST

SECOND
WOW!
so I can be like that dude from watchmen

hardcore watchmen fans just fainted in happiness

this is pretty cool, this mean that there might be an organism somewhere on earth that has eyes sensitive enough that it can detect organically emitted light.

great.. just one more way we will be more inferior when it comes down to the great battle between humans and machines.. we effing glow.

ha! great halloween costume, show up naked, call people who don't get it infirior.

Wait a second... this is not a legitimate photo. I noticed when I saw the hands weren't attached to anything.

Now this is some Glowing...
http://driftwood-x.mybrute.com

So that is why some people seem to have a glow about them. ha.

Oh, no! Tom Cruise was right! Aw, damn, now I have to change religions...

ehh I'm as white as they come so not only do I already know I glow in the dark, people around CAN see it. What now scientists? I beat you to the punch!!!

so wait... if the light isn't visible... does it really still count as visible light?

and #5 is (alive) correct. After I get my cybernetic body my robotic brethren and I will have no trouble overthrowing you glowing monkeys!

(except you GW, i'll save you. We'll need somebody to work on the cloned dino farms and everyone knows dinos can't stand robots)

That's awesome.

IMO, another piece of the puzzle of life.

One day we'll figure it out.

Actually, we'll probably die of an asteroid before that, but still.

you need to go super saiyan before your light becomes visible.
OVER 9000!

we can haz predator vision?

or black body curve, well gray body curve in our case... look it up, it's kinda obvious...

Hey there.....I'm a bit new here, what's the big deal with posting the first comment on these things? Seems kinda.....fruitless to me.

FAKE!!!!

This is a complete photoshop job. You can tell its a fake because the shadow's are all wrong.

This is exactly like that scene in the movie Never Back Down where Max put some drinks and sandwiches on the Underhills tab. Later when the underhills caught on they were angry. But otter's wife fixed everything.

So how does light we can't see count as visible light?

First time here. Love it!

& yes it's so amazing that we "glow"

Move over nightlights

this is great for psychics all over. auras are reeeeeal.

my man babies glow under black light so i know its real

I have to call B.S., #22.....I did my own research when I worked at a laser tag arena and I must argue that knuckle children do not glow under black light.

23rd what do you mean "uranium rod me one more time for old times' sake?"? that sounds a little gay. are you a gay robot?

frak!!!! im 24th and 25th

I call bs. Your eyes are a pretty efficient photon detectors if allowed to acclimatise to darkness. If this story were true you could sit your ass in a pitch black room and watch yourself flashing. Look THAT shit up. Your eyes are better than any detector you can stick on a robot. Grey body source we may be but that simply means we emit Energy at frequencies the same and longer than our temperature not shorter..
Doylems

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

@26 Actually, your eyes are pretty inefficient detectors... you've got to be trollin'. Not to mention the fact that your eyes are incapable of integrating for any good length of time AND they're non-linear detectors (which is why stellar magnitudes are in a seemingly stupid 2.5*log system). In any case, you can calculate the flux at a given wavelength for a black body at ~300 k, it's a high school physics problem.

You can even calculate how many x-ray or radio photons we're likely to emit over a human lifetime or how many humans you'd need over how long to get a single gamma photon. mmm statistics.

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0026-1394/30/4/029

I've written a post outlining a calculation that shows how many visible photons we emit, but it thinks I've used a bad word. I will therefore use this post to figure out what the heck the filter thinks is a bad word:

emission
str
erg
ergs
planck
LBL
flux
pi
IR
watts
blackbody
greybody
blueward

Well?

Oooo let's keep trying

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mod6.html

AH-HA it doesn't like one of my links... BUT WHICH ONE

@26 For a blackbody: blueward of peak emission, there is still flux even though it falls off quite sharply. You aren't completely wrong, in that the detectable visible light we emit must be from flourescence, not blackbody radiation, given the minute number of photons emitted blueward of a blackbody peak:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law

Let's do the calculation for a 300 k blackbody (good enough to first order). We can calculate the total intensity of light emitted across the visible spectrum (~400-700 nm, for a conservative estimate). Let's use this handy online calculator that LBL has given us:

NB: apparently Geekologie thinks a link from berkeley labs is a bad word... not sure what string in there is... So the link I WANT to link is the FIRST link for this google search:

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=blackbody+calculator&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

Assuming a surface area of ~1.83 m^2 = 1.83*10^6 mm^2

And let's just do total flux (4pi str), & 400 - 700 nm = 14285 to 25000 cm^-1.

Order of magnitude we end up with about 10^-22 watts, or 10^-15 ergs/second. Not very bright. Assuming an average photon energy of about 3*10^-12 ergs, this means we only get about one visible wavelength photon every 1000 seconds... incredibly minute, mostly undetectable.

The closer you get to the IR peak of several microns, the higher the flux gets... where we glow on the order of several hundred watts. Unless you heat us up a few more hundred degrees, then we'll glow in the optical. Awww yea.

I love science geeks. Now get back to work and make me a pleasurebot!

wat about that deep sea fish (i mean really deep in the ocean) that looks like a freakin monster but has a light bulb lookin lure about its head so other fish are like hey wats that and then PEW PEW

theres some organically/chemically emitted light for u bright enuf we can all see

@ 35

*sigh*, GFS is too enthralled with his addiction. Time for an intervention! I'll bring the chips and salsa and STOMPY can bring the chair and Ollie can bring the taser. GW is just going to watch.

@37

http://2amgraphics.com/webimages/playbot.jpg

@37
ohhh, i know just the chair!
http://technabob.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/hubo_fx1.jpg

Now I know why I always wanted to be in the Disneyland Main Street Electrical Parade.

http://bootelicious.mybrute.com

I don't mean to sound like a know-it-all but everything actually emits light. Anything that moves actually produces light (which includes our electrons). For instance, as something approaches the speed of light, it produces more and more light and would theoretically reach infinity if the moving object reached the speed of light. This is a really nerdy example but think of what it looks like when a ship from Star Trek goes to warp speed. There's a big burst of light. Pretty neat IMO.

Does everyone glow the same color?

@41
most nerds know that any electron that changes its energy state emits a photon, this article is reffering to metabolic and biological functions that actually cause electrons to get into an excited enough state that when they come back down to ground state, the emitted photon is in the visable spectrum, instead of say, the infrared, or even d-bag spectrem you seem to be spending time...

"...there might be an organism somewhere on earth that has eyes sensitive enough that it can detect organically emitted light..."

If so, it would have to dwell in absolute darkness. Its retinas would burn out in sunlight.

>_< math... It's too early for that shit.

GW is sleeping again

I assume you stop glowing when you die.

Lies... GW isn't sleeping... Didn't you hear about the two semi loads of Corona and Modelo Especial that were stolen in south Florida?? GW was busy last night....

its a good i r eggineer, i can't spel or have use of grammar to safe my live

every one needs a bosom for a pillow.

Um...Predator?

um....ur point?

umm....WAKE UP GW!

Grab a brush and put on a little make up

Well... this is what i've spent my morning gawking at
http://www.webtvhub.com/crazy-harry-potter-fan-videos-nerds-go-nuts-for-boy-wizard/

I've been gawking at mynuts wondering if the gravitation pull from their sheer mass is enough to capture any of my body's emitting light, that way the robots can't see me with their infrared camera's.

Wakie Wakie! Eggs and Bakey!

http://www.frigginrandom.com/images/penguins-are-perverted/

Ten bucks the GW makes a reference to his hangover in his first post today.

@GW

http://www.frigginrandom.com/images/here-have-some-gay-sauce/

I'm cool with producing visible light, as long as I don't sparkle in sunlight..

http://img.moronail.net/img/1/7/1417.jpg

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

I"M YOUR ALARM BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

Wakey Wakey, hands off snakey

We shou've had 2 new posts already, made fun of 5 firstards and condemned 14 mybrutes to hellfire already...

Slow day...

Wait... people glow in that movie? So let me get this straight... its a movie about abstinent vampires in posh clothes who sparkle in the sun like they're covered in glitter!? No wonder this is crack for almost anything with internal genitalia....

http://img.moronail.net/img/1/7/1417.jpg

you its funny, GW goes to sleep thinking everythings great everythings fine, he wakes up the next day and he is hungover.

It's because I snuck into his room and put an IV of moonshine straight into his jugular....

Stop complaining, I can't count the number of times I slep untill noon.

@50: "mine's on the 45" - gay song, I can't believe we're singing it together.

@Everyone else: the weak light emitted by all living things is called the Force. Get with the program, you dicks.

@68

For some reason it was stuck in my head this morning. Although, the lyrics in my head went, "Everyone needs a titty to suck on. Everyone needs a titty."

Couldn't agree more, although I think in your case it would be a robo-titty, which is where our ideologies differ.

@furf
As you've stated we're not black body radiators or cavities and visible light is a chunk away from IR and well, well down the flux curve ; ).

Yeah Yeah I should have probably read the yahoo article before calling BS...

However...even a black body cavity of about 1m3 at 300K will only emit a visible spectrum photon every 1000 years.

They say that the light level is 1000 times less than our naked eyes. Our eyes trigger at about 90 photons /s so they are saying that they are seeing in 20 minutes about 108 photons in the visible spectrum at the surface of the skin (1 every 11 seconds). This seems like an pretty high count above baseline as indicated by your 1 per 1000 seconds. I still wouldn't say that they would glow.

I blame fluorescent markers added to our foods to help the robots in their quest for human enslavement. And who do you think you are bringing intelligent posts to geekologie ; ) you'll make Daisy Dasingtons head explode.

I have a hunger that only GLOWING hand can satisfy!!!!

why should the existence of an infinitesimally small amount of light cast doubt on its existence? i can't see an electron... or love haha.

It's the midi-chlorians!

God made us in his own image. The Word says that He is light, so it is only natural that we shine.