notyourutopian: (Thoughtful)
Eleanor Lamb ([personal profile] notyourutopian) wrote in [community profile] retrospec2017-06-05 12:18 am

Maybe the world is fine...

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.
trivialization: (credibility gap)

[personal profile] trivialization 2017-06-07 04:56 am (UTC)(link)
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.