Maybe the world is fine...

[notyourutopian]

Eleanor Lamb shared a photo. 6/6 near Recollé

So I've been thinking about this a lot, and I don't think blue and green are actually gone. I mean, we can't see them anymore, but I'm wondering if it's more like colorblindness than them actually changing the whole world. Because, think about it. If blue were actually gone, they sky wouldn't be gray. The sky would be red. That's how light and our atmosphere work. We see it as blue because of refracted red light. I remember reading about it forever ago in a science textbook. And if green were gone, we'd already be seeing the smaller plants starting to die, and they aren't, right? So they clearly still are...photosynthesizing. So. I'm not sure the world changed. I think this time it was us. And I can't decide if that's better or worse.

Comments

[trivialization]

Forget plants, they'd survive on red light anyway. The proof is in front of all of us; we're discussing this on RGB screens that don't just display in red.

[notyourutopian]

Yes but plants are green because they are photosynthesizing.
In theory, if they aren't green, they are not eating.

I hadn't thought about the screen thing.
Though, I guess it's more like Red-grey-grey now.

[trivialization]

It all depends on why they aren't green. If the light and optical properties of materials stayed the same and the only change was to their structure so that they reflect in grey that might be true. But in the more direct cases where green is no longer reflecting from unchanged materials or light is no longer being emitted in green wavelengths it doesn't matter to the plants; they are still absorbing red light.

But we can rule out changes to materials or reflective properties as sole causes because we also perceive emitted light as grey, and we can rule out a wavelength gap because we still perceived mixed wavelengths the same way.

And because the sun didn't blow up on day one.

So yes, the easiest answer is that it's a matter of our own perception. But you seem to have realized already that the easy answer brings its own discomforts.

[notyourutopian]

This is all biology a bit out of my 'only took bio 2' reach, I think.

Easy answers are almost always full of problems.

...
Could a light change actually make the sun blow up?

[trivialization]

The sun part is me going on two classes too so probably not. Probably (hopefully) never going to have another chance to seriously propose that as an indicator, though.

Idea is if black bodies just stopped emitting their blue and green components and everything else stayed the same it'd change the radiation pressure inside stars. So, at a guess, they'd contract a bit past their new equilibrium point and eject enough material to, well, make our other worries inconsequential.

But putting aside that we're amateurs the real problem is that none of this has to have one cause. Everything last month... how much had to change, to operate in unfamiliar ways, for civilization not to collapse while every worker on the planet was too small to use their equipment? Parsimony is useless. It's satisfying to say we've pared away other possibilities and concluded it's all in our minds, but the 'other possibilities' can be layered as much as is required.

[notyourutopian]

Yeah.
I have zero idea how to even begin to explain the shrinking thing.
Or the growing thing.

but it was really odd that nothing happened, wasn't it
like

why didn't the planes fall out of the skies when their tiny pilots couldn't pilot them