This changes everything...

[ShanguiFriendlyGhost]

My life will never be the same. Ultramarine Neptune, no!


https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/ne...t%20planet

[stevebowers]

Depicting planets in true-to-life colours and intensities is extremely problematic. Neptune, for example, is bathed in sunlight which is 200 times less intensive than the light that illuminates Earth. So what would a human eye see in those conditions? Neptune would almost certainly look dark blue, but not very different to the colour of Uranus seen under the same conditions.

Consider as well the colours that would be visible when looking at a epistellar jovian world. Many such worlds are covered in silicate clouds which have a very low albedo; yet a human observer would see the surface of such a world as a brilliantly illuminated ball, due to the intensity of sunlight. To get a reasonable idea of the colour of such a world, a human baseline observer would need very efficient optical filters, which would significantly change the appearance of the world in many ways.

Similarly the colours of nebulae and aurora phenomena are generally very subtle; the bright greens and blues we see in photographs are barely perceptible. When I saw an aurora it just looked greyish since it didn't stimulate the colour receptors in my eyes. Except, at one point, when the aurora switched over to a deep red colour, a phenomenon known as a 'blood aurora' in some circles.

[Drashner1]

If we're going to consider this in the context of OA, there is also the question of why the colors of the 'visible spectrum' are the only ones we need to be concerned with? Plenty of Terragen clades and/or other sophonts with the right augments can see beyond the baseline human idea of 'visible light'. So a world or other thing that is very dark or dull to us might be incredibly vibrant to them. Going only slightly further afield, baseline human notions of 'real time' are equally idiosyncratic and so other beings might view what we consider to be extremely long exposure times as perfectly normal. More brownie points still if we consider that to many Terragens limiting oneself to only a single block of the EM spectrum and perception of time (instead of many simultaneously) is incredibly limiting and merely a lifestyle choice.

Just some thoughts,

Todd

[stevebowers]

A suitably augmented sophont could also adjust the perceived lighting intensity and saturation at will, which would allow them to detect subtle variations in colour and shade that would be invisible to human eyes. By recording the levels of light at particular wavelengths they could analyse and reproduce the results with considerable accuracy.