system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is there any way that visible light could be strong enough to shine through an object we perceive as opaque?

I assume that radiation getting thru unshielded materials is the equivalent of this for non-visible light.

If not, why not?
gpt
Have you ever shined a flashlight through your hand? Certainly intense enough visible light can penetrate an opaque object, as long as it doesn't have an absorption coefficient of exactly 1.0 (which nothing has). However the problem is that for an opaque enough object the light might have to be so bright that the object heats up and is destroyed. That's because an object being opaque to visible light means that it absorbs visible light, and the energy of that absorbed light has to go somewhere (it goes into heat). So for example if you want to see through an opaque object, you can shoot it with a laser, and for many objects you will be able to see the laser light through the other side. But for more opaque objects (like a lump of coal) you would need a laser so bright that it would just light the coal on fire.