Eyesight and Wavelengths

I thought about something recently. Every living thing around us can be traced back, through the tree of life (evolution), to a common ancestor. You, a stray cat, a jellyfish, a flea, some random bacteria, and a strawberry, all have a common ancestor from a long time ago.

Without going into too much details, creatures that can see their surroundings can do that by receiving photons of light on the retina. The brain analyzes the photon's wavelength (it's energy) and associates a color to it. This is how we can see. Creatures can see in or around the 400-700 nanometer wavelengths. During the course of evolution, there has been an incentive for early creatures to be able to see these wavelengths, most likely to discern plants and trees.

What could me mind-bogging is that evolution on other planets may very well not have given the same range of wavelengths to the creatures there. There is nothing that I can think of that could prevent an intelligent being from outer space to see in our near-infrared range (for example, at 1200-1900 nanometers).

You would show him something on the laptop, but the LCD screen would be black for him. If the ink in a book does not absorb the specific photons, the text would not appear. If the pages do absorb them, the whole page would be dark.

This would create some very interesting problems to solve.