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I have an idea for a story where only 1 out of 500,000 people can see (population of around 4 billion), and those people are considered 'special' and thought to have magical powers. They aren't as wise as they are made out to be, though.

Here are the conditions for the planet:

  • Atmosphere similar to Earth's
  • Very, very bright sun
  • Rather hot, although of course it varies by region.
  • Mostly rural
  • Around 60% water (3% of it is drinkable)

Is a situation like this likely or probable? If not I might do it anyway, but I would prefer if there was at least some scientific evidence to back it up. This does not have to be based on hard science, however, as I would like for there to be at least a small amount of magic/mystery.

Note: these people are born blind

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    $\begingroup$ Romanian proverb: in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. (And I don't understand what you mean by "could it exist". It is not logically self-contradictory, it does not break the basic laws of physics; which means that it is possible. Whether it is likely or probable is an entirely different question.) $\endgroup$
    – AlexP
    Commented Mar 11, 2021 at 23:42
  • $\begingroup$ @AlexP Ah, thank you. $\endgroup$
    – Delta Diamante
    Commented Mar 11, 2021 at 23:52
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    $\begingroup$ There is a well-known story in the Arabian Nights where the inbitants of a city had been changed into colored fish: Muslims into blue fish, Christians into red fish, and Jews into yellow fish. By a sorceress. Who also hexed the king of that city transforming his legs into the pedestal of a stone statue. And it's a good story, and has been translated into many of the languages of the world. If the story is good, who cares whether the situation is likely or not? Logically self-consistent, yes, it must be. Physically possible or probable, not important. $\endgroup$
    – AlexP
    Commented Mar 11, 2021 at 23:58
  • $\begingroup$ @AlexP You have a very good point. I am considering just deleting this post instead of waiting for information. The story is supposed to be science-fiction, but lots of sci-fi stories are more fiction than science anyway. $\endgroup$
    – Delta Diamante
    Commented Mar 12, 2021 at 0:02
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    $\begingroup$ No, don't delete it. It's an interesting question, maybe you will get some interesting answers. All I meant was to avoid assigning too much importance to physical likelihood. $\endgroup$
    – AlexP
    Commented Mar 12, 2021 at 0:06

3 Answers 3

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Possible.

We don't have to prove it is real, only picture what could have happened.

To have decent vision in anyone, eyes needed to evolve. They were in use recently in evolutionary time. Yet now, the genetic code for eyes has been lost. Why is this?

In cave species, eyes are lost because it is too dark. On your planet, eyes were lost because it was too bright. Your sun is not very constant - life has had to develop adaptations to get around that. Deep, deep melanin pigment, resilience to changing temperatures, improved free radical scavenging to fight radiation exposure. But the eyes are a weak point. Left open, they develop cataracts and cancers, and serve the user very poorly. When closed, degenerated, covered in layers of pigment, even the cornea, they rapidly become a vestige.

This sun's ages of blinding bright flares don't last that long. Most species have a few members that are genetic throwbacks, capable of restoring new generations of sighted organisms when the long Bright is over. Their eyes develop slowly, as they did before the Bright, since the light of their sun, even in periods of peace, would make a formidable foe to the careless toddler.

Some of them endured near the entrances of caves, where their eyes give them an advantage. Since the advent of textiles, some hide their eyes behind cloth and live in the world of the blind. They have learned to remove their veils in the dawn and dusk, and navigate by the light of fire. Their powers of vision are not much more powerful than the elaborate echolocation other members of their species rely on. But they are different, sensitive to the glint of gold, the dark sheen of lead ore, all the heavy, resonating metals that the blind struggle so wretchedly to find and melt down without burning themselves so that they can flaunt their possessions in the faces of their lessers. And so the Sighted are a valuable commodity - wealthy if they can pass off their finds without explanation, and commanding a top price when captured and sold on the slave block.

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  • $\begingroup$ why not just have something kind of like what snakes did with evolution? by that i mean, for most members of the species, instead of completely undoing its evolution, they simply have a gene that prohibits the production of the proteins telling the body to produce a certain organ. this could be the eye itself (the hardest to stop) or just making the eyelids be fused together (much easier to do genetically), both have the same outcome: some people don't have functional vision, while others happen to carry a gene to stop what normally makes them blind. $\endgroup$
    – zackit
    Commented Mar 12, 2021 at 14:12
  • $\begingroup$ for the eyelid option, this would also mean they could tell light from dark depending on how much light pierced the skin, helping them navigate between dark and light areas $\endgroup$
    – zackit
    Commented Mar 12, 2021 at 14:24
  • $\begingroup$ @zackit: On Earth a master regulator like Pax6 could simply be lost, due to mutation in its own regulatory sequence. But your idea might work for a planet such as I described, particularly if the eyes have a disadvantage such as competing with hearing for space on the cerebral cortex. Even so, when such a mechanism was reversed, the eyes produced would not all be in good shape, because deleterious mutations in many other genes would have accumulated in the meanwhile. $\endgroup$
    – Mike Serfas
    Commented Mar 12, 2021 at 16:02
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Um.

In what way is "Yes, because eyes didn't evolve" not the answer?

So, yeah! Perfectly plausible. In the described world, the animals that evolved into people never evolved the capacity to "see" in the way humans approach the concept. They may very well have some kind of light sensing organ systems, but that doesn't mean they have to process "images" or cognitive tokens of real objects.

Evolution in a brightly lit world would seem to imply that seeking shade is a good thing, but visual acuity may not have been as important to the earliest animal life forms.

In this world, people who can "see", the 1 in 500000, may just be those who can distinguish shadows or fuzzy shapes better than their peers.

The only "scientific evidence" you really need is that, on Earth, light sensitive patches evolved into eyes; while on your world, they did not.

As for your subquestions: there is no way to accurately predict how "probable" or "likely" this will be. We have only one instance of (sophont) animal life anywhere in the universe, and it has been given the gift of sight.

Understanding the nature of the created order, I think it's likely that other people --- creatures that are aware of themselves, aware of their environment, and aware of the nature of the universe --- will be able to "see" in an analogous way. That doesn't mean everyone will. It could very well be that in the universe you are proposing, the fundamental nature is different. It could be the people in your world, if they inhabit our universe, rely on some other sensory system to "see" the world around them.

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    $\begingroup$ "We have only one instance of animal life anywhere in the universe, and it has been given the gift of sight." Molluscs? Earthworms? Sponges? Jellyfish? $\endgroup$
    – chasly - supports Monica
    Commented Mar 12, 2021 at 0:32
  • $\begingroup$ @chasly-supportsMonica -- Better? $\endgroup$
    – elemtilas
    Commented Mar 12, 2021 at 1:42
  • $\begingroup$ "In what way is "Yes, because eyes didn't evolve" not the answer?" In many. Evolution didn't provide eyes in its present-day form. It evolved in a hundred million steps from light-sensitive cells which could only provide a sense of "there's light somewhere outside" to the incredibly sophisticated vision system we now have. So maybe some "humans" of this world have a mutation which allows them to see better than their peers, but not anything as stark as "seeing" vs "being blind". $\endgroup$
    – Rekesoft
    Commented Mar 12, 2021 at 8:42
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Yes, it's possible if you play around with the definition of blindness: for bees we human are all partially blind, because we can't see the UV part of the spectrum that they can see. Same for rattlesnakes, which can see some IR while we cannot. And I remember some time ago a user here telling how they were born with a much higher sensitivity to light, such that they could see well in the night and were forced to wear sunglasses almost always during the day to avoid being blinded.

Do you see where I am going? (pun intended). Those outliers people have simply a broader sensitivity, both in terms of spectral gamma and light intensity, than the rest of the population, which is to all effects blind or partially blind.

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