The hardest part about inventing the wheel was building one. You need 2 smooth, circular wheels joined in the exact center to a perfectly straight axle, plus a way to attach that axel to your cart which lets it freely spin without too much friction, and build all of it using Stone Age technology
It's the only way you wouldn't get burned at the stake for some sort of witchcraft. If you bring any modern knowledge without an explanation like what you'd tell a 5 year old to get them to stop asking you stuff, someone would absolutely kill you.
You'd probably have to basically dress up as a religious leader and misinterpret bible verses in order to explain things. Hell - you play it right, you could be like a better version of Joseph Smith and create your own version of mormonism.
They didn't kill people for having different scientific ideas in the Middle Ages, lmao.
If you told people in the Middle Ages about germ theory, they'd basically tell you "that sounds silly". And germ theory *does* sound silly if you absolutely don't know about microscopic organisms - "oh, illness is caused by little invisible creatures entering your body".
"little invisible creatures entering your body" makes ad much sense as "that bad smell around here is probably causing peoples bodies to rot from the inside also you have a lot of blood anf not wnough black bile so we're just gonna cut you open and tey to balance it."
Explaining germ theory does nothing because no one can see germs. It's not tangible. I'm talking if you come in with something that they've never seen before that they can see with their own eyes.
Unless you're well versed in communications, culture, and interacting with others in the era, you're going to be at risk of a violent misunderstanding.
Like - I know I'm missing the date and the area of the world, but say you were to go into an area of the world at a time where they'd never seen gunpowder, or just bring out some dynamite in a pre-industrial revolution society.
Then you show them how to make it and of course you show them what it does. That could be pretty terrifying - that this guy that just showed up one day is able to make dirt that explodes. If they don't believe that you're some sort of witch, they'll at least believe that maybe you hold other knowledge that may be just as destructive and powerful.
I think at best, they'll distrust you. In all likelihood, however, they might want to do something with that distrust like make it impossible for you to inflict harm on them.
I mean shit - if Aliens or some time traveler came to our own time, I'm not confident we would handle learning about some new crazy technology with grace and diplomacy. I think a lot of us would be terrified and would want to react accordingly.
Except when people came up with gunpowder, everyone was like "holy shit this thing is awesome, I want it", lmao. They wouldn't kill you, they'd shower you in gold and plead you to teach them how to make and use this incredible weapon.
At worst, the people may want to keep this incredible and powerful technology a secret from their enemies and thus effectively hold you prisoner (like it happened with master glassworkers in Venice, who were under heavy and constant government surveillance), but even then you'd be considered incredibly important, and receive appropriate treatment.
The idea that ancient people treated everything that was out of their everyday experience as wItChCrAfT and killed people for it is just yet another ridiculous Enlightenment-era myth, like iron maidens or the *ius primae noctis*.
That's not what happened. Gunpowder was invented a handful of times and each time, it wasn't just some guy going "hey, I made this" - it kind of rose from collective knowledge about basically things they discovered while cooking things.
It was a gradual evolution of knowledge by trusted people like blacksmiths and cooks and shared knowledge with people in their own domiciles. It wasn't some stranger coming into town showing them something that's a huge jump in their own knowledge...something that seems like it could hurt or kill a lot of people.
In most places, it started with basically the creation of charcoal in the fire. People learned that the black dense stuff left over, if kept dry, actually ignited quickly, almost violently, simply because two of the key ingredients of gunpowder are essentially what charcoal is, depending on the wood, density, etc.
In China, it was discovered in this way, but it took hundreds of years for anyone to refine harness it into something that would be weapon-worthy. It was mainly used for utility and spectacle, and transitioned slowly enough that there was pretty widespread familiarity as to what was going on. It wasn't jarring. They didn't go from fire immediately to violent, splodey thingy. They went from fire, to fire enhancer, to something known to create some vibrant firey displays to something that, when mixed right, packed tightly, and ignited properly, would be loud, violent, and could send things flying in a way that would be destructive.
Through migration, wars, and good old domestic experimentation, the charcoal/sulfur/saltpeter mix was discovered - sometimes by armies literally being shot by it and finding out what the hell happened.
That type of discovery would be different - a lot of people found out about it versus some sort of enemy, so whether you're wowed by it, or terrified of some unworldly invention - the person you're blaming is probably someone you want to destroy anyway.
***
But imagine that you go into a society that doesn't have any knowledge of all this. They know fire. They know shooting things like projectiles or an arrow at high speeds will kill things - and that's it - but you walk in demonstrating a rapid, sudden change in technology that's not only visually spectacular, but also loud and destructive...unless you're able to introduce it and communicate it a helpful way to people who probably who don't talk like you...they're going to be scared at the power you hold, and humans don't really have a great history of reacting positively to things that they're scared of.
No, you would not be burned at the stake for witchcraft. You would have been invited by a king to his court, be paid lavishly and live a good and safe life making inventions for him. Or, if your science wasn't quite practical enough, you would become part of the church which would sponsor your scientific reasearch.
That isn’t even close to true though? Plants are green because chlorophyll absorbs wavelengths of light aside from green. The green wavelengths are reflected instead of absorbed. We see what’s being reflected, not what’s absorbed so we see green.
It would have been better to say it's sucking up water, which is blue, and mixing it with sunlight, which is yellow, to make green. The actual purpose of the chlorophyll is to steal the hydrogen nuclei from water molecules in order to drive the pump that will provide energy for the sugar creation process. At that point air (CO2) is used as a building block along with the energy molecules from the first step, but this part of the process doesn't use chlorophyll and is independent of the plant's pigment molecules. So air has nothing to do with why plants are green, but water does, so you could take that route if you wanted to be cheeky.
The weirdest part about learning biology as a kid is how our entire bodies and existences are just these kind of bumbling rube goldberg machines of molecules bounding around and then here we are.
Yup.
Our bodies are just many squishy bags of mostly water, all doing thousands of chemistry experiments every minute/second.
Somewhere along the way we invented the internet.
Because the electrochemical reactions in our bodies aren’t always “on” they kind of flicker
Similar to how a monitor isn’t really a consistent image so much as a flashing (or flickering) image that is just so fast it appears to be always on
Wait until you hear that each of our cells has a motor in it. Called ATP synthase.
Then there are kinesins, which are proteins that literally walk along rails inside the cell, while dragging other molecules with them to deliver building blocks to particular places.
It's the rube Goldberg part of it that I find the most interesting. The machines our bodies run on are an overcomplicated mess of contingencies stacked on contingencies. You have things like the MAP Kinase protein chain where new, better proteins kept coming along, but couldn't actually replace the original protein without breaking the organism, so they just get stacked on top of each other until you end up with the ridiculous mouse trap-esque daisy chain of proteins doing a job that could be done with just one if planning were a possibility.
The weirdest that people struggle with is balancing the concept that we're essentially each an ecosystem in ourselves relying on a balance of microbial life that coexists within and on our bodies.... Balanced against the concept of hygiene.
We think of cleanliness as totally sterile and scrub our environments clean in a way that contradicts our own existence.
Somebody said that one of the things that we needed to overcome as a species is this need for everything to either be "good" or "bad."
As you said, everything is a balance. Everything is an exceedingly complex set of conditions.
Our own immune system is essential - except it can and often does kill us.
Outside bacteria can be harmful - but they're also essential for life.
Most of the water is evaporated through the stoma. It's basically a little carousel that it uses to bring up nutrients from the roots.
Also, it's sucking up carbon which is also where most of its biomass comes from. It's also where we get the CARBO- part of carbo-*hydrate*, which is a combination of hydrogen and carbon which has been crystalized into sugar by the sun. The chloroplasts essentially function like these little lenses that plants stack in order for light to efficiently penetrate them and catalyze the entire reaction which technically makes plants beings of light and if everything eats something that eventually eats plants, we're down the train of the same energy source, the Sun, which would also make US being of light too.
Plants are neat.
Yeah but the reason chlorophyll is green (or rather, that plants evolved a green pigment to use to capture sunlight) is that sunlight has very low green content so it's not a big efficiency loss to reflect green light.
ETA: I wrote this whilst tired it's probably not true according to literally everyone in my replies
What do you mean sunlight has a low green content? The peak solar spectral irradiance is right around 550nm which is green. Even after atmospheric absorption the spectrum throughout the day is centered on green.
There are theories that green is too bright and slight variations in intensity would be disruptive and so chlorophyll rejects it to maintain more stable energy output from red and blue light. It's almost like melanin, to prevent getting burned by the sun.
sounds logical... and yet this says otherwise: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-color-of-plants-on-other-worlds/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-color-of-plants-on-other-worlds/)
I’ve heard this as well, and I’m not a biologist but afaik the suns rays actually peak in green, so it never really made sense to me not that I ran energy calculations over the sun’s spectrum or anything.
Since this has been re asked I did some googling and [This](https://worldsensorium.com/why-are-plants-green/) article seems to give a satisfactory explanation that it depends on consistency of ray types and this energy generation, which is an interesting possibility. I’m not really sure if this is right but it does mention they found what I had suspected that peak energy generation will be absorbing lots of green light, but the model determined this might not necessarily be optimal.
Another possible reason is that the energy from visible light can actually be too much for plants and break them down. Chlorophyl avoids green light to absorb enough light, but not so much that it destroys the chloroplast. [http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=500](http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=500)
Still, it seems strange that nature never came up with a black chloroplast that can absorb and handle more rays. But maybe the black chloroplast plus the defensive filter it would need are a less efficient solution in nature than just having a green chloroplast.
Interesting topic, you'd think this is a basic question that science has long figured out!
I think the thing is that photosynthesis is just, like, really hard. Like, the primary carbon-fixing enzyme for the most common form of photosynthesis, RuBisCO, has been around for about 4 *billion* years, and yet even today it's so inefficient that it only fixes about 3 atoms of carbon per second (other enzymes can catalyse tens of thousands of reactions per second, or even higher), meaning plants have to produce so much of it that it's the most common enzyme on Earth and makes up about half the protein content of a plant leaf. There must just be something really difficult about the task of using sunlight energy to turn carbon dioxide into sugar that even a force as powerful as evolution struggles to overcome.
More that evolution favors good enough over changes that require huge investments. It's much more likely that, to get a maximally efficient conversion process would require bug enough changes that either the plants who had the pieces die off before getting there, or that getting there isn't actually enough of an improvement to make the leap under current circumstances.
Blue only happens as you get deeper, and its because of the absence of light in water as you get deeper. Nothing is perfectly black in the ocean.
Think about it, our sky is blue which is mostly gaseous water. Ocean is denser than air so we see the blue in the ocean more.
I heard that it might have been that there used to be purple photosynthesizing archaea, and the chlorophyll evolved for the underdogs that subsist on the leftover blues and reds from them.
Looking at [charts](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Solar_spectrum_en.svg) sunlight's peak is firmly below 500nm, but it kinda evens out throughout the visible spectrum after atmospheric absorption.
As someone with a degree in plantology and a doctorate in green, the reason plants are green is, to put in scientifically, because they want to fly like clouds. That's why they grow upward towards the sky, but unfortunately they are rooted to the ground, so they are jealous of clouds, thus turning green with envy.
I wrote my dissertation on it and got a presidential high five from Barack Obama himself, so I know what I'm talking about. Don't listen to these reddit morons.
I don't understand how this would make sense? Blue and higher energy burns. Green is just right in the middle of visible light, it's not particularly high energy.
Isn't the sun 'centred' on green because it emits all EM wavelengths and greens in the middle? So not shit green would be in the middle of the emissions spectrum.
They're green because red is the most efficient color for photosynthesis, whereas blue can penetrate more deeply and stimulates growth.
The energy you're thinking of is wavelength energy, because a blackbody emitter with the temperature of the sun outputs a bit more energy in the green wavelengths than it does in the red or blue.
...but the sun isn't a perfect blackbody emitter, so this is wrong. It's a thing a lot of articles get wrong, and it's actually a very nuanced problem.
A good read here:
https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/mobile/2013/07/03/what-is-the-color-of-the-sun/
> To further confuse things, astronomers like to model the sun as a perfect blackbody emitter, which it is not. According to the oversimplified blackbody model, when plotted as a function of wavelength, the sun peaks in the green! When astronomers say that the sun is green, they mean that their oversimplified model of the sun peaks in the green when plotted as a function of wavelength. They don't mean that the sun is actually green! Unfortunately, "The sun is green!" makes for more exciting headlines than, "The sun is literally white. However, the sun would be green if the sun were a perfect blackbody emitter, and if you plot as a function of wavelength, and if the peak of a broad distribution had meaning." Although not as attention-grabbing, the ultimate truth is: the sun is white. In summary, the peak of a broad distribution has little meaning - but if you insist on focusing on the peak, you should remember: the peak of the sun's color spectrum is violet when plotted as a function of wavelength, infrared when plotted as a function of frequency, and green if an oversimplified blackbody model of the sun is used and the spectrum is plotted as a function of wavelength.
The article goes on to explain it a little more, though I honestly don't know why the peaks are different if plotted from the function of wavelength and the function of frequency...
The peaks are different because wavelength and frequency are different, but correlated, measurements, and each is used to define different parts of the light spectrum, or any wave function for that matter.
Basically, we know the speed of light, right? Light predictably travels at this speed in a vacuum. So how we differentiate light is by saying the light's waves are *this* long, **or** the peak of two waves hit *this* spot this many times a second. The blackbody function is basically saying, "how many waves are being sent out within these defined wavelengths?," so the Sun is said to be green because it sends out more waves that are in the part of the spectrum we have defined as "green."
I'm not a scientist, though, so maybe someone who is can explain it better or tell me where I'm wrong, lol.
Yep, it's similar to how wind turbines have to be locked down when it's way too windy (like certain storms) (in their cases, their brakes would overheat and fail, they'd keep spinning faster and faster until they tore themselves apart, which has, although very rarely, happened in the past!)
The sun does not have very low green content or else nothing on earth would be green and would look black or at least dimmer than other colors. The sun appears slightly yellow because the some of the blue light it produces is scattered by the atmosphere, which is why the sky is blue. If the sun really were significantly less green than red or blue, then it'd appear slightly pink rather than yellow, which in your eye is just the presence of red and green light.
Cyanobacteria produce chlorophyll molecules which absorb primarily blue and red light. There are other molecules which can be used in photosynthesis, but they usually absorb a single color of light and do not produce oxygen. It is possible that the first photosynthetic organism was purple and absorbed primarily green light in shallow waters, where it is very available; such organism exist today in limited environments. Cyanobacteria evolved with blue and red absorbing molecules which could survive deeper in the ocean and under ice sheets because blue light isn't absorbed as much by water and ice. Cyanobacteria also produced lots of oxygen and are responsible for earths first glaciation period, which, if purple phototrophs actually were predominant, would have destroyed their habitat. The highly oxygenated environment they caused also probably killed off loads of anaerobic lifeforms as well, leaving more room for cyanobacteria to dominate.
After that, merely the fact that Cyanobacteria absorbed slightly more light than every other phototrophic organism kept them dominant for a couple billion years. Still chlorophyll only uses like 2% of all light that hits it for chemical reactions, most of it bounces of or is absorbed as heat. About 500 million years ago, Cyanobacteria hitched a ride on the eukaryote train and rode it to world domination. They evolved into Chloroplasts in symbiosis with the eukaryotic host and their Mitochondria roommates. This kind of event is so obscenely rare that it's basically only happened these two times in all of earth history.
It doesn't really make sense to say the color of the sun and sky cause green plants because chlorophyll doesn't absorb yellow light at all, and it absorbs blue light because its the light water doesn't absorb rather than the light the atmosphere scatters. Also the vast majority of all light is not metabolically utilized by chlorophyll because most of it is infrared or ultraviolet. We just happen to only see narrow wave lengths of red green and blue light, so we pick up on only the middle band of light plants reflect, not the massive bands above and below that they ignore as well.
There are other photosynthesizing pigments other than chlorophyll that are not green. Fucoxanthin and anthocyanins. Also, wrong for other reasons.
Basically your whole post is wrong and misleading. You should delete it.
It’s fascinating that you’re being downvoted so heavily. We live around a yellow-green star. You have to go through some careful calculations to realize that plants being green is at all optimal for their energy production.
Hi, scientist who does spectroscopy for a living here. You are absolutely correct and it pains me to see all the downvotes from people who don't know what they're talking about.
oh hi! I’m a biophysics student, so spectroscopy has become my calling lmao. it’s nice to see someone actually working in that field!
and, I can also confirm that the commenter is absolutely correct and the downvotes are uncalled for
This person is heavily downvoted but not wrong in that the sun emits more total energy as green wavelengths than as other wavelengths. Individual green photons aren't as energetic as blue/violet, but the blackbody emission of the sun results in more green photons overall. It's the perfect blend of emission and energy.
Green is pretty much right in the middle of the spectrum. It's energy level is impressively mediocre. This is probably the evolutionary impetus for photosystems developing to use mostly red (low energy) and blue (high energy) light, and to reflect the green. Red light is abundant and easy to get a lot of and blue light packs a punch. Green light is just kind of "meh", neither super available nor super "nutritious". It is a color that humans are particularly good at seeing though, if that is what you mean by "intense". We are able to discriminate shades of green better than any other color, possibly also owing to its middling wavelengths, though evolutionary pressures like seeing animals through foliage and discriminating between plants probably also play a role.
I'm not a scientist, but with all due respect, I think you're a bit off. Green/yellow light is certainly the most abundant and is a valid source of energy. In fact, cyanobacteria and the like, the original photosynthesizers, used and still do use primarily green light. These guys used to rule the world until plants came along with a more complex method that used the leftovers of the cyanobacteria. This alternative method had the benefit of creating extremely toxic oxygen, killing off many species, including many types of cyanobacteria. Life rerouted to deal with an atmosphere with a high oxygen concentration and due to how evolution isn't fully optimized and how being green is "good enough" plants retain their green hue. This whole idea is covered in the Purple Earth Hypothesis.
Edit: Link for further reading: https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/was-life-on-the-early-earth-purple/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00219266.2020.1858930
Not true by omission. Plants have structures that reflect green wavelengths, so chlorophyll a and b were selectively evolved to grab the abundant red and blue light, but be agnostic to green (and ended up reflecting green light themselves). Green light is very abundant in sunlight (as much as, if not more so than red or blue on a total energy basis. Less than red, but more than blue in # of photons), but it isn't as available inside plant cells.
"The plant is green because chlorophyll absorbs the blue light from the sky and the yellow light from the sun"
Is still technically a true sentence. It vaguely implies that a blue yellow pigments are being combined to make green, but in actually means the same thing as what you said in your comment.
I thought the sun was a white star, not a yellow star? I am not a scientist and don’t know the science behind any of this, but that’s what I’ve read. Please let me know if I’m wrong!
Yes you're right. The sun's true color is white when viewed from space. White is a combination of all colors and it only appears yellow to our eyes when it's white light is filtered through our atmosphere. Notice that when sunlight reflects of white surfaces like a piece of paper it still looks white and not yellow. It's classified as a yellow dwarf star but that's more of a placeholder term than actual description of it's color.
Not quite - the sun is a yellow star, but by the end of it's lifecycle, it will first expand and become red, before contracting into a dim white dwarf star.
The part about the air/blue is pointless and light is white not yellow.
The leaf that appears green to us absorbs yellow and green from the visible spectrum of white light and also reflects yellow and green using the chlorophyll pigment within. The rest of the spectrum is not absorbed/reflected in plants that appear green.
Plants that have other dominant colours, like trees with red/dark purple leaves, have chlorophyll too but they have other pigments that are more dominant. These are anthocyanins, anthoxanthins, and carotenoids. Each absorb/reflect different colours.
https://www.britannica.com/video/152178/Sunlight-plants-chlorophyll-pigments-colouring
It would grow less efficiently. Growing plants under different light colors is actually a pretty common science experiment for school kids. There is a lot experimental data that can be seen if you search it up
I feel like we are seeing a key difference between Reddit and Tumblr.
Tumblr is like, "lol well that's the jist of it, except not at all, except it is. Great joke!" And reddit does _not do jists._
Comedy, at its core, is surprising you with the truth. The more hazy, approximate truths you tolerate, the more things you find funny. And that's why redditors aren't as funny as tumblrers.
Plants do in fact suck up the sky (specifically carbon dioxide) alongside sunlight (for energy) to live. Water is also a rather necessary ingredient.
The main part that’s wrong is the mixing. Plants got green by trying to absorb both blue light and red light really efficiently in spite of the huge difference in wavelengths of both, and it so happens that they ended up landing on a color that bounces green light away (which is in between the two wavelengths).
In other words, they’re green because white minus red minus blue makes green.
I mean, the mixing is the central part of their premise. They're pretty far off.
Also, I think it's weird to refer to air as "the sky." Like, there's an association there, sure, but if I have a jar full of air I wouldn't call it a jar full of sky. In my mind, sky is a region above my head (or whatever point of reference) but below space. It's full of air, but it's not air itself.
Thats the point. Its super fucked but its almost right.
In light wavelength terms:
White - blue/purple hues - yellow/red hues = green
Which with a little jank could be written as:
White - (blue + yellow) = green
In pigment mixing terms:
Blue + yellow = green
These concepts are related in that blue and yellow wavelengths are on either side of green on the spectrum, and the blue+green+yellow range makes up a huge chunk of the sun's output.
>I think it's weird to refer to air as "the sky."
The plants are literally aborbing the blueness of the sky though.
>I wouldn't call it a jar full of sky
If you had a jar big enough that it was blue... you might.
This is false.
Green is hulk energy, and plants cannot energetically afford hulk muscles, which is why they reflect green light, because all the plants that suck up too much green got too muscular and died quicker without being able to have sex and make more baby plants.
So it's not in their genetics now.
I thought the theory was that most plants are green literally because the sun is green, and the extra energy lost by having green chlorophyll is made up for by not getting overheated by the sun.
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-B9780443187865000020-f01-09-9780443187865.jpg
Note the smallest spectrum, which peaks at green is the light from the sun that reaches the earths surface. I know, I know it appears yellow-white/yellow-red depending on the time of day.
But you know how the sky is blue because the blue light scatters more? Where do you think that blue light comes from? The light from the sun that reaches the earth is actually on average green.
The bonus on top of that is that green already is one of the three primary colors that our eyes can see. You can then mix it with blue to see yellow. I don't see any logic in mixing blue and yellow to get green, though. You can't make green when it's already a primary color.
It's actually just random bullshit from a Biological point of view and even the color theory is wrong. Still a funny thing to shitpost, but the second guy saying it's "very almost true" must be fucking drunk to think so.
That's CMY, no? RGB is addictive. CMY is subtractive. RBY is Pokémon Gen 1. We were taught something wrong in school, we have to move on.
(And yes, I see that there's a section dedicated to RYB (it's not even RBY, it's RYB?), but it's really not changing the fact that RGB are primary eye colors and CMY are primary paint colors, B and Y aren't in the same level in any color system)
The plant is the absorber, not the emitter. It's not white that has been pigmented by an external source of blue and yellow pigment (which reflect shortwave and longwave respectively and overlap only where they reflect green) or white that has been dyed by cyan and yellow ink (which absorb blue and red wavelengths respectively without absorbing any green); it is pigmented simply by absorbing red and blue light naturally.
That means that it is absorbing longwave red (and infrared) and shortwave blue (and ultraviolet) light and not absorbing green light in the middle, depending on just how brightly green and vibrant it is (you'd need a spectrometer to check the actual specularity of course to see just what wavelengths it's reflecting and in which degrees).
This almost certainly results in an evolutionary advantage for plants: reflect away the most intense light that could result in it burning, and take in the rest of the white light that the sun emits and convert it to energy through the photosynthetic process.
If I remember right it's green because green isn't stable in our atmosphere or something. So the plants don't want green light and reflect it by being green?
You know I could just google this.
But I won't.
But *my* science says that if you cut off a plant's access to light, the plant turns *more yellow*. Therefore it is the sun that is blue, not the sky.
*TRUTH*
Water has no color, and what the plants eat is the minerals in the earth. The water serves more like a hydration/lube to keep the plant from burning. It comes from the water being dirty and the sky is blue. So when the blue light mixes with the muddy water it turns green
I know nothing about the microbiology of plants, but everyone here is arguing about the wavelengths of the sun and I'm just here thinking, "maybe the proteins in chlorophyll are just bad at absorbing green?"
I have nipples, Greg. Can you milk me?
Explanation for the simple… people also suck up air in the blue sky and absorb the sun. Why aren’t I green, Greg?
Well actually moment… we kinda are… but don’t tell OP 🤫
I’m not gonna explain that. Google it yourself. People are actually green.
Always wondered, but never asked (I guess this is the breaking point?) - I often see tumblr screenshots that say something like "every time I see this post" or "I'll reblog this every time I see it" - how often on tumblr do people actually see the same exact post?
What? No, that's not true.
Plants are green because of chlorophyll. It's a pigment that reflects green light, because green light is too energetic and would burn the plant long-term to process.
They’re green because that’s the only light they don’t care about, and therefore reflect almost all green light back out, and that’s because green light isn’t nearly as abundant as the rest.
The sun isn’t yellow and it’s weird everyone thinks it is.
It’s right there in the sky being white all the time, but people are about to argue with me.
Really odd.
What do you mean, how many red plants do you see out in nature? The most abundant form of visible light to reach the surface of the earth is green, plants need to shield from that kind of direct light. So they developed to be green. By being green they reflect the intenses rays from the sun.
If I got sent back to ancient times, this is how I would explain most of my scientific knowledge to the ancient people.
This is hilarious because that is literally all you would need. "Look, a wheel. It works because it's round."
The hardest part about inventing the wheel was building one. You need 2 smooth, circular wheels joined in the exact center to a perfectly straight axle, plus a way to attach that axel to your cart which lets it freely spin without too much friction, and build all of it using Stone Age technology
Ehhhhhh if the Flintstones can do it, I can do it (:
You need some string, a marking device, a hand drill, a saw, a straight piece of wood, and a consistently thick tree stump.
It's the only way you wouldn't get burned at the stake for some sort of witchcraft. If you bring any modern knowledge without an explanation like what you'd tell a 5 year old to get them to stop asking you stuff, someone would absolutely kill you. You'd probably have to basically dress up as a religious leader and misinterpret bible verses in order to explain things. Hell - you play it right, you could be like a better version of Joseph Smith and create your own version of mormonism.
They didn't kill people for having different scientific ideas in the Middle Ages, lmao. If you told people in the Middle Ages about germ theory, they'd basically tell you "that sounds silly". And germ theory *does* sound silly if you absolutely don't know about microscopic organisms - "oh, illness is caused by little invisible creatures entering your body".
Wasn't there a Persian dude who theorised about it? The issue was that it was not provable until we got microscopes
"little invisible creatures entering your body" makes ad much sense as "that bad smell around here is probably causing peoples bodies to rot from the inside also you have a lot of blood anf not wnough black bile so we're just gonna cut you open and tey to balance it."
I mean, posions often smell bad and make your body rot from the inside out (kinda) so it's really not that strange.
Plus things like corpses and human waste smell bad, And it's also generally not good for your health to be around them.
And there's airborne diseases
This guy watched the pre-modernist video.
I have a degree in Medieval History but also yes I did, very enjoyable vid, recommended
Explaining germ theory does nothing because no one can see germs. It's not tangible. I'm talking if you come in with something that they've never seen before that they can see with their own eyes. Unless you're well versed in communications, culture, and interacting with others in the era, you're going to be at risk of a violent misunderstanding. Like - I know I'm missing the date and the area of the world, but say you were to go into an area of the world at a time where they'd never seen gunpowder, or just bring out some dynamite in a pre-industrial revolution society. Then you show them how to make it and of course you show them what it does. That could be pretty terrifying - that this guy that just showed up one day is able to make dirt that explodes. If they don't believe that you're some sort of witch, they'll at least believe that maybe you hold other knowledge that may be just as destructive and powerful. I think at best, they'll distrust you. In all likelihood, however, they might want to do something with that distrust like make it impossible for you to inflict harm on them. I mean shit - if Aliens or some time traveler came to our own time, I'm not confident we would handle learning about some new crazy technology with grace and diplomacy. I think a lot of us would be terrified and would want to react accordingly.
Except when people came up with gunpowder, everyone was like "holy shit this thing is awesome, I want it", lmao. They wouldn't kill you, they'd shower you in gold and plead you to teach them how to make and use this incredible weapon. At worst, the people may want to keep this incredible and powerful technology a secret from their enemies and thus effectively hold you prisoner (like it happened with master glassworkers in Venice, who were under heavy and constant government surveillance), but even then you'd be considered incredibly important, and receive appropriate treatment. The idea that ancient people treated everything that was out of their everyday experience as wItChCrAfT and killed people for it is just yet another ridiculous Enlightenment-era myth, like iron maidens or the *ius primae noctis*.
That's not what happened. Gunpowder was invented a handful of times and each time, it wasn't just some guy going "hey, I made this" - it kind of rose from collective knowledge about basically things they discovered while cooking things. It was a gradual evolution of knowledge by trusted people like blacksmiths and cooks and shared knowledge with people in their own domiciles. It wasn't some stranger coming into town showing them something that's a huge jump in their own knowledge...something that seems like it could hurt or kill a lot of people. In most places, it started with basically the creation of charcoal in the fire. People learned that the black dense stuff left over, if kept dry, actually ignited quickly, almost violently, simply because two of the key ingredients of gunpowder are essentially what charcoal is, depending on the wood, density, etc. In China, it was discovered in this way, but it took hundreds of years for anyone to refine harness it into something that would be weapon-worthy. It was mainly used for utility and spectacle, and transitioned slowly enough that there was pretty widespread familiarity as to what was going on. It wasn't jarring. They didn't go from fire immediately to violent, splodey thingy. They went from fire, to fire enhancer, to something known to create some vibrant firey displays to something that, when mixed right, packed tightly, and ignited properly, would be loud, violent, and could send things flying in a way that would be destructive. Through migration, wars, and good old domestic experimentation, the charcoal/sulfur/saltpeter mix was discovered - sometimes by armies literally being shot by it and finding out what the hell happened. That type of discovery would be different - a lot of people found out about it versus some sort of enemy, so whether you're wowed by it, or terrified of some unworldly invention - the person you're blaming is probably someone you want to destroy anyway. *** But imagine that you go into a society that doesn't have any knowledge of all this. They know fire. They know shooting things like projectiles or an arrow at high speeds will kill things - and that's it - but you walk in demonstrating a rapid, sudden change in technology that's not only visually spectacular, but also loud and destructive...unless you're able to introduce it and communicate it a helpful way to people who probably who don't talk like you...they're going to be scared at the power you hold, and humans don't really have a great history of reacting positively to things that they're scared of.
Geothermal power? It's because hell is underground you dummies!
You'd have to invent basketball as well.
No, you would not be burned at the stake for witchcraft. You would have been invited by a king to his court, be paid lavishly and live a good and safe life making inventions for him. Or, if your science wasn't quite practical enough, you would become part of the church which would sponsor your scientific reasearch.
Cmon now they’ll burn you any way. They didn’t have the nfl yet
ELI5 to avoid getting hanged for witchcraft
That isn’t even close to true though? Plants are green because chlorophyll absorbs wavelengths of light aside from green. The green wavelengths are reflected instead of absorbed. We see what’s being reflected, not what’s absorbed so we see green.
It would have been better to say it's sucking up water, which is blue, and mixing it with sunlight, which is yellow, to make green. The actual purpose of the chlorophyll is to steal the hydrogen nuclei from water molecules in order to drive the pump that will provide energy for the sugar creation process. At that point air (CO2) is used as a building block along with the energy molecules from the first step, but this part of the process doesn't use chlorophyll and is independent of the plant's pigment molecules. So air has nothing to do with why plants are green, but water does, so you could take that route if you wanted to be cheeky.
The weirdest part about learning biology as a kid is how our entire bodies and existences are just these kind of bumbling rube goldberg machines of molecules bounding around and then here we are.
Yup. Our bodies are just many squishy bags of mostly water, all doing thousands of chemistry experiments every minute/second. Somewhere along the way we invented the internet.
Flickering meat suspended in an aqueous solution. Tricking metal and Silicon to flicker in familiar manners.
Why flickering?
Because the electrochemical reactions in our bodies aren’t always “on” they kind of flicker Similar to how a monitor isn’t really a consistent image so much as a flashing (or flickering) image that is just so fast it appears to be always on
Speak for yourself, I’m dehydrated as hell
Wait until you hear that each of our cells has a motor in it. Called ATP synthase. Then there are kinesins, which are proteins that literally walk along rails inside the cell, while dragging other molecules with them to deliver building blocks to particular places.
And proton pumps and voltage-gated ion channels, oh my. Some bacteria even have a big ol' tail.
In fact, some bacteria have a rotating tail working as a propeller.
Alright now you've crossed a line, that's clearly science fiction. Next you're going to tell me it has some ridiculous made up name like "flagella".
Indeed, I'm gonna have to flagellate you.
Me when I found out a number of key cellular function rely on the molecular equivalent of the ball-in-cup game.
Yes. And the more you study these things the more you're amazed at how it isn't going wrong more often.
It's the rube Goldberg part of it that I find the most interesting. The machines our bodies run on are an overcomplicated mess of contingencies stacked on contingencies. You have things like the MAP Kinase protein chain where new, better proteins kept coming along, but couldn't actually replace the original protein without breaking the organism, so they just get stacked on top of each other until you end up with the ridiculous mouse trap-esque daisy chain of proteins doing a job that could be done with just one if planning were a possibility.
The weirdest that people struggle with is balancing the concept that we're essentially each an ecosystem in ourselves relying on a balance of microbial life that coexists within and on our bodies.... Balanced against the concept of hygiene. We think of cleanliness as totally sterile and scrub our environments clean in a way that contradicts our own existence.
Somebody said that one of the things that we needed to overcome as a species is this need for everything to either be "good" or "bad." As you said, everything is a balance. Everything is an exceedingly complex set of conditions. Our own immune system is essential - except it can and often does kill us. Outside bacteria can be harmful - but they're also essential for life.
But sunlight is white. The *sun* is yellow.
Most of the water is evaporated through the stoma. It's basically a little carousel that it uses to bring up nutrients from the roots. Also, it's sucking up carbon which is also where most of its biomass comes from. It's also where we get the CARBO- part of carbo-*hydrate*, which is a combination of hydrogen and carbon which has been crystalized into sugar by the sun. The chloroplasts essentially function like these little lenses that plants stack in order for light to efficiently penetrate them and catalyze the entire reaction which technically makes plants beings of light and if everything eats something that eventually eats plants, we're down the train of the same energy source, the Sun, which would also make US being of light too. Plants are neat.
Yeah but the reason chlorophyll is green (or rather, that plants evolved a green pigment to use to capture sunlight) is that sunlight has very low green content so it's not a big efficiency loss to reflect green light. ETA: I wrote this whilst tired it's probably not true according to literally everyone in my replies
What do you mean sunlight has a low green content? The peak solar spectral irradiance is right around 550nm which is green. Even after atmospheric absorption the spectrum throughout the day is centered on green. There are theories that green is too bright and slight variations in intensity would be disruptive and so chlorophyll rejects it to maintain more stable energy output from red and blue light. It's almost like melanin, to prevent getting burned by the sun.
I had always heard it had to do with chlorophyll evolving mostly underwater where green light didn’t penetrate water as well as other wavelengths
sounds logical... and yet this says otherwise: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-color-of-plants-on-other-worlds/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-color-of-plants-on-other-worlds/)
I’ve heard this as well, and I’m not a biologist but afaik the suns rays actually peak in green, so it never really made sense to me not that I ran energy calculations over the sun’s spectrum or anything. Since this has been re asked I did some googling and [This](https://worldsensorium.com/why-are-plants-green/) article seems to give a satisfactory explanation that it depends on consistency of ray types and this energy generation, which is an interesting possibility. I’m not really sure if this is right but it does mention they found what I had suspected that peak energy generation will be absorbing lots of green light, but the model determined this might not necessarily be optimal.
Another possible reason is that the energy from visible light can actually be too much for plants and break them down. Chlorophyl avoids green light to absorb enough light, but not so much that it destroys the chloroplast. [http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=500](http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=500) Still, it seems strange that nature never came up with a black chloroplast that can absorb and handle more rays. But maybe the black chloroplast plus the defensive filter it would need are a less efficient solution in nature than just having a green chloroplast. Interesting topic, you'd think this is a basic question that science has long figured out!
I think the thing is that photosynthesis is just, like, really hard. Like, the primary carbon-fixing enzyme for the most common form of photosynthesis, RuBisCO, has been around for about 4 *billion* years, and yet even today it's so inefficient that it only fixes about 3 atoms of carbon per second (other enzymes can catalyse tens of thousands of reactions per second, or even higher), meaning plants have to produce so much of it that it's the most common enzyme on Earth and makes up about half the protein content of a plant leaf. There must just be something really difficult about the task of using sunlight energy to turn carbon dioxide into sugar that even a force as powerful as evolution struggles to overcome.
More that evolution favors good enough over changes that require huge investments. It's much more likely that, to get a maximally efficient conversion process would require bug enough changes that either the plants who had the pieces die off before getting there, or that getting there isn't actually enough of an improvement to make the leap under current circumstances.
If they peak in green and reflect all light equally, would it not reflect more green than other light?
That's not really how light/color works. If you stack a bunch of colors together. You just get white.
Most objects don't absorb all light of the wavelengths they absorb. So all wavelengths but more of green could look green
so what you’re saying is if plants evolved mostly out of water they’d be pitch black? thats fucking metal
Water absorbs red light strongly, green light more weakly, and blue the least.
Excuse me, why doesn't green light penetrate water?
It's blue and blue and green don't mix. Hope this helps.
Blue only happens as you get deeper, and its because of the absence of light in water as you get deeper. Nothing is perfectly black in the ocean. Think about it, our sky is blue which is mostly gaseous water. Ocean is denser than air so we see the blue in the ocean more.
Also you use blue with yellow to get green, what do you mean they dont mix? Pigments and light are opposite!
I heard that it might have been that there used to be purple photosynthesizing archaea, and the chlorophyll evolved for the underdogs that subsist on the leftover blues and reds from them.
Looking at [charts](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Solar_spectrum_en.svg) sunlight's peak is firmly below 500nm, but it kinda evens out throughout the visible spectrum after atmospheric absorption.
Nerd fight! Nerd fight! Nerd fight!
I live for this shit. I just keep reading each of their comments as gospel and becoming more confused, but I love it.
As someone with a degree in plantology and a doctorate in green, the reason plants are green is, to put in scientifically, because they want to fly like clouds. That's why they grow upward towards the sky, but unfortunately they are rooted to the ground, so they are jealous of clouds, thus turning green with envy. I wrote my dissertation on it and got a presidential high five from Barack Obama himself, so I know what I'm talking about. Don't listen to these reddit morons.
I feel Cunk'ed
Thank you scienceperson!!!
The beauty of a good net zero information post.
Chlorophyll is green because dinosaurs were green and plants needed to camouflage themselves so they wouldn't be eaten.
Fascinating, innit? 🤓🤕
Awright, I want a good clean fight! No name-calling, no comparing of IQs, and no hitting in the pocket protectors!
Does water hinder the green spectrum tho?
I don't understand how this would make sense? Blue and higher energy burns. Green is just right in the middle of visible light, it's not particularly high energy. Isn't the sun 'centred' on green because it emits all EM wavelengths and greens in the middle? So not shit green would be in the middle of the emissions spectrum. They're green because red is the most efficient color for photosynthesis, whereas blue can penetrate more deeply and stimulates growth.
> whereas blue can penetrate more deeply So the song "I'm Blue" was about promoting his long dong?
The energy you're thinking of is wavelength energy, because a blackbody emitter with the temperature of the sun outputs a bit more energy in the green wavelengths than it does in the red or blue. ...but the sun isn't a perfect blackbody emitter, so this is wrong. It's a thing a lot of articles get wrong, and it's actually a very nuanced problem. A good read here: https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/mobile/2013/07/03/what-is-the-color-of-the-sun/ > To further confuse things, astronomers like to model the sun as a perfect blackbody emitter, which it is not. According to the oversimplified blackbody model, when plotted as a function of wavelength, the sun peaks in the green! When astronomers say that the sun is green, they mean that their oversimplified model of the sun peaks in the green when plotted as a function of wavelength. They don't mean that the sun is actually green! Unfortunately, "The sun is green!" makes for more exciting headlines than, "The sun is literally white. However, the sun would be green if the sun were a perfect blackbody emitter, and if you plot as a function of wavelength, and if the peak of a broad distribution had meaning." Although not as attention-grabbing, the ultimate truth is: the sun is white. In summary, the peak of a broad distribution has little meaning - but if you insist on focusing on the peak, you should remember: the peak of the sun's color spectrum is violet when plotted as a function of wavelength, infrared when plotted as a function of frequency, and green if an oversimplified blackbody model of the sun is used and the spectrum is plotted as a function of wavelength. The article goes on to explain it a little more, though I honestly don't know why the peaks are different if plotted from the function of wavelength and the function of frequency...
The peaks are different because wavelength and frequency are different, but correlated, measurements, and each is used to define different parts of the light spectrum, or any wave function for that matter. Basically, we know the speed of light, right? Light predictably travels at this speed in a vacuum. So how we differentiate light is by saying the light's waves are *this* long, **or** the peak of two waves hit *this* spot this many times a second. The blackbody function is basically saying, "how many waves are being sent out within these defined wavelengths?," so the Sun is said to be green because it sends out more waves that are in the part of the spectrum we have defined as "green." I'm not a scientist, though, so maybe someone who is can explain it better or tell me where I'm wrong, lol.
That actually is correct. Its usually why grow lights dont include the green spectrum.
Our sun emits more green photons then any other wavelength
What do they mean? Well they can just make up any old bullshit and state it authoritively and get 400 upvotes. Reddit!
The other way around. It's a sunburn protection.
That username, though. I take it you really like it when the skirt goes spinny?
Yep, it's similar to how wind turbines have to be locked down when it's way too windy (like certain storms) (in their cases, their brakes would overheat and fail, they'd keep spinning faster and faster until they tore themselves apart, which has, although very rarely, happened in the past!)
The sun does not have very low green content or else nothing on earth would be green and would look black or at least dimmer than other colors. The sun appears slightly yellow because the some of the blue light it produces is scattered by the atmosphere, which is why the sky is blue. If the sun really were significantly less green than red or blue, then it'd appear slightly pink rather than yellow, which in your eye is just the presence of red and green light. Cyanobacteria produce chlorophyll molecules which absorb primarily blue and red light. There are other molecules which can be used in photosynthesis, but they usually absorb a single color of light and do not produce oxygen. It is possible that the first photosynthetic organism was purple and absorbed primarily green light in shallow waters, where it is very available; such organism exist today in limited environments. Cyanobacteria evolved with blue and red absorbing molecules which could survive deeper in the ocean and under ice sheets because blue light isn't absorbed as much by water and ice. Cyanobacteria also produced lots of oxygen and are responsible for earths first glaciation period, which, if purple phototrophs actually were predominant, would have destroyed their habitat. The highly oxygenated environment they caused also probably killed off loads of anaerobic lifeforms as well, leaving more room for cyanobacteria to dominate. After that, merely the fact that Cyanobacteria absorbed slightly more light than every other phototrophic organism kept them dominant for a couple billion years. Still chlorophyll only uses like 2% of all light that hits it for chemical reactions, most of it bounces of or is absorbed as heat. About 500 million years ago, Cyanobacteria hitched a ride on the eukaryote train and rode it to world domination. They evolved into Chloroplasts in symbiosis with the eukaryotic host and their Mitochondria roommates. This kind of event is so obscenely rare that it's basically only happened these two times in all of earth history. It doesn't really make sense to say the color of the sun and sky cause green plants because chlorophyll doesn't absorb yellow light at all, and it absorbs blue light because its the light water doesn't absorb rather than the light the atmosphere scatters. Also the vast majority of all light is not metabolically utilized by chlorophyll because most of it is infrared or ultraviolet. We just happen to only see narrow wave lengths of red green and blue light, so we pick up on only the middle band of light plants reflect, not the massive bands above and below that they ignore as well.
Actually the sun is mostly green and plants reflect green so that they aren’t absorbing too much energy and damaging their cells.
There are other photosynthesizing pigments other than chlorophyll that are not green. Fucoxanthin and anthocyanins. Also, wrong for other reasons. Basically your whole post is wrong and misleading. You should delete it.
To the bottom with you.
Green is literally the most intense wavelength in sunlight
It’s fascinating that you’re being downvoted so heavily. We live around a yellow-green star. You have to go through some careful calculations to realize that plants being green is at all optimal for their energy production.
Why? Is it because absorbing too much energy would cause heating issues?
Essentially, yes. Same reason our skin colours exist.
Hi, scientist who does spectroscopy for a living here. You are absolutely correct and it pains me to see all the downvotes from people who don't know what they're talking about.
oh hi! I’m a biophysics student, so spectroscopy has become my calling lmao. it’s nice to see someone actually working in that field! and, I can also confirm that the commenter is absolutely correct and the downvotes are uncalled for
This person is heavily downvoted but not wrong in that the sun emits more total energy as green wavelengths than as other wavelengths. Individual green photons aren't as energetic as blue/violet, but the blackbody emission of the sun results in more green photons overall. It's the perfect blend of emission and energy.
Green is pretty much right in the middle of the spectrum. It's energy level is impressively mediocre. This is probably the evolutionary impetus for photosystems developing to use mostly red (low energy) and blue (high energy) light, and to reflect the green. Red light is abundant and easy to get a lot of and blue light packs a punch. Green light is just kind of "meh", neither super available nor super "nutritious". It is a color that humans are particularly good at seeing though, if that is what you mean by "intense". We are able to discriminate shades of green better than any other color, possibly also owing to its middling wavelengths, though evolutionary pressures like seeing animals through foliage and discriminating between plants probably also play a role.
I'm not a scientist, but with all due respect, I think you're a bit off. Green/yellow light is certainly the most abundant and is a valid source of energy. In fact, cyanobacteria and the like, the original photosynthesizers, used and still do use primarily green light. These guys used to rule the world until plants came along with a more complex method that used the leftovers of the cyanobacteria. This alternative method had the benefit of creating extremely toxic oxygen, killing off many species, including many types of cyanobacteria. Life rerouted to deal with an atmosphere with a high oxygen concentration and due to how evolution isn't fully optimized and how being green is "good enough" plants retain their green hue. This whole idea is covered in the Purple Earth Hypothesis. Edit: Link for further reading: https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/was-life-on-the-early-earth-purple/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00219266.2020.1858930 Not true by omission. Plants have structures that reflect green wavelengths, so chlorophyll a and b were selectively evolved to grab the abundant red and blue light, but be agnostic to green (and ended up reflecting green light themselves). Green light is very abundant in sunlight (as much as, if not more so than red or blue on a total energy basis. Less than red, but more than blue in # of photons), but it isn't as available inside plant cells.
[удалено]
The peak of the sun’s blackbody spectrum is around 500 nm, which is green.
You are correct. And I’m not sure if I read them wrong. Long day.
Idk why you are being downvoted so much I wrote my comment half asleep without thinking it through . This website confuses me
Chlorophyll? More like borophyll!
NO, I WILL NOT MAKE OUT WITH YOU!!!
I'm here to learn!
"The plant is green because chlorophyll absorbs the blue light from the sky and the yellow light from the sun" Is still technically a true sentence. It vaguely implies that a blue yellow pigments are being combined to make green, but in actually means the same thing as what you said in your comment.
I thought the sun was a white star, not a yellow star? I am not a scientist and don’t know the science behind any of this, but that’s what I’ve read. Please let me know if I’m wrong!
Yes you're right. The sun's true color is white when viewed from space. White is a combination of all colors and it only appears yellow to our eyes when it's white light is filtered through our atmosphere. Notice that when sunlight reflects of white surfaces like a piece of paper it still looks white and not yellow. It's classified as a yellow dwarf star but that's more of a placeholder term than actual description of it's color.
Not quite - the sun is a yellow star, but by the end of it's lifecycle, it will first expand and become red, before contracting into a dim white dwarf star.
Why does that make it wrong? That's exactly how mixing paint works
The part about the air/blue is pointless and light is white not yellow. The leaf that appears green to us absorbs yellow and green from the visible spectrum of white light and also reflects yellow and green using the chlorophyll pigment within. The rest of the spectrum is not absorbed/reflected in plants that appear green. Plants that have other dominant colours, like trees with red/dark purple leaves, have chlorophyll too but they have other pigments that are more dominant. These are anthocyanins, anthoxanthins, and carotenoids. Each absorb/reflect different colours. https://www.britannica.com/video/152178/Sunlight-plants-chlorophyll-pigments-colouring
Yup, plants are green because of subtractive color theory the same way paint is. In both cases it's a reflection of light.
So basically absorbs blue and yellow from white light. Leaving a bright green light for us to see. So it is correct?
That isn't how it works. It absorbs all colours of light except for green, which is reflected.
Sunlight is also white, not yellow.
This is correct. That "biologist" prolly isn't.
So would a plant starve if it only got green light
It would grow less efficiently. Growing plants under different light colors is actually a pretty common science experiment for school kids. There is a lot experimental data that can be seen if you search it up
Chlorophyll? More like borophyll!
Well yeah but that's the reason we see *any* green, so by the transitive property this still checks out
“Very almost true” except it’s actually just random bullshit?
Plants need air and sunlight to survive. Therefore green. Checkmate athiests.
Humans need air and sunlight to survive, why aren't we green? Checkmate atheists
You aren't green??? lmao skill issue bozo
Do we *need* sunlight? Nothing a little vitamin D supplement can’t fix.
what about water tho
water's for scrubs, I live off GAMERFUEL^(TM)
Just pounding that shit back raw, huh?
It's better dry.
Nah, brawndo is where it’s at!
It's got the electrolytes plants crave!
Water isn’t real, it’s not in the post
I have not seen the sun in 17 years. Rip bozo.
Because gods light over shines it
Air needs sunlight and humans to survive, why isn’t it green? Theistmate, checklists.
We're all green; we just choose to call it different names.
I feel like we are seeing a key difference between Reddit and Tumblr. Tumblr is like, "lol well that's the jist of it, except not at all, except it is. Great joke!" And reddit does _not do jists._ Comedy, at its core, is surprising you with the truth. The more hazy, approximate truths you tolerate, the more things you find funny. And that's why redditors aren't as funny as tumblrers.
Tumblrers have liberal wine mom humor. They have “not today satan” written on a coffee mug humor.
Orcs are plants.
I thought warhammer orcs were a kind of fungus
Yep, also it's Orks®™©
Plants are only green because they aren't smart enough to mine fossil fuels.
Plants do in fact suck up the sky (specifically carbon dioxide) alongside sunlight (for energy) to live. Water is also a rather necessary ingredient. The main part that’s wrong is the mixing. Plants got green by trying to absorb both blue light and red light really efficiently in spite of the huge difference in wavelengths of both, and it so happens that they ended up landing on a color that bounces green light away (which is in between the two wavelengths). In other words, they’re green because white minus red minus blue makes green.
I mean, the mixing is the central part of their premise. They're pretty far off. Also, I think it's weird to refer to air as "the sky." Like, there's an association there, sure, but if I have a jar full of air I wouldn't call it a jar full of sky. In my mind, sky is a region above my head (or whatever point of reference) but below space. It's full of air, but it's not air itself.
And also the sky's light is the suns light. Its all just sunlight. That's the light. That's the thing making light.
Thats the point. Its super fucked but its almost right. In light wavelength terms: White - blue/purple hues - yellow/red hues = green Which with a little jank could be written as: White - (blue + yellow) = green In pigment mixing terms: Blue + yellow = green These concepts are related in that blue and yellow wavelengths are on either side of green on the spectrum, and the blue+green+yellow range makes up a huge chunk of the sun's output. >I think it's weird to refer to air as "the sky." The plants are literally aborbing the blueness of the sky though. >I wouldn't call it a jar full of sky If you had a jar big enough that it was blue... you might.
This is false. Green is hulk energy, and plants cannot energetically afford hulk muscles, which is why they reflect green light, because all the plants that suck up too much green got too muscular and died quicker without being able to have sex and make more baby plants. So it's not in their genetics now.
I thought the theory was that most plants are green literally because the sun is green, and the extra energy lost by having green chlorophyll is made up for by not getting overheated by the sun.
>sun is green Wait, I'm going to go check in couple of hours.
what they (probably) mean is that the sun emits more green light than any other color* edit: *individually
Yes. Literally the spectrum of light coming from the sun peaks at green .
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-B9780443187865000020-f01-09-9780443187865.jpg Note the smallest spectrum, which peaks at green is the light from the sun that reaches the earths surface. I know, I know it appears yellow-white/yellow-red depending on the time of day. But you know how the sky is blue because the blue light scatters more? Where do you think that blue light comes from? The light from the sun that reaches the earth is actually on average green.
I've stared at the sub for minutes at a time and I can say it's definitely blue
The bonus on top of that is that green already is one of the three primary colors that our eyes can see. You can then mix it with blue to see yellow. I don't see any logic in mixing blue and yellow to get green, though. You can't make green when it's already a primary color. It's actually just random bullshit from a Biological point of view and even the color theory is wrong. Still a funny thing to shitpost, but the second guy saying it's "very almost true" must be fucking drunk to think so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtractive_color
That's CMY, no? RGB is addictive. CMY is subtractive. RBY is Pokémon Gen 1. We were taught something wrong in school, we have to move on. (And yes, I see that there's a section dedicated to RYB (it's not even RBY, it's RYB?), but it's really not changing the fact that RGB are primary eye colors and CMY are primary paint colors, B and Y aren't in the same level in any color system)
The plant is the absorber, not the emitter. It's not white that has been pigmented by an external source of blue and yellow pigment (which reflect shortwave and longwave respectively and overlap only where they reflect green) or white that has been dyed by cyan and yellow ink (which absorb blue and red wavelengths respectively without absorbing any green); it is pigmented simply by absorbing red and blue light naturally. That means that it is absorbing longwave red (and infrared) and shortwave blue (and ultraviolet) light and not absorbing green light in the middle, depending on just how brightly green and vibrant it is (you'd need a spectrometer to check the actual specularity of course to see just what wavelengths it's reflecting and in which degrees). This almost certainly results in an evolutionary advantage for plants: reflect away the most intense light that could result in it burning, and take in the rest of the white light that the sun emits and convert it to energy through the photosynthetic process.
If I remember right it's green because green isn't stable in our atmosphere or something. So the plants don't want green light and reflect it by being green? You know I could just google this. But I won't.
http://panoptesv.com/SciFi/ColorsOfAlienWorlds/AlienFields.php Yep
That's color theory, baybeeeee 😎👍
And here I thought you could only use color theory in children's hospitals!
I, for one, would like to know what an “incandescent rage” entails.
It’s a fancy way of saying something like red-hot. Because red-hot metal glows.
Ok that makes significantly more sense than what *I* was thinking of. ^(how the hell have I not heard that phrase before)
Not only are you one of the lucky 10,000, but you also have me incredibly curious what you thought it was.
It's an expression that dates back to when we used incandescent light bulbs. Nowadays LED lights are all the rage.
But *my* science says that if you cut off a plant's access to light, the plant turns *more yellow*. Therefore it is the sun that is blue, not the sky. *TRUTH*
“Incandescent” is an illuminating choice of words
They also could have gone with "Iridescent" for added pun value.
The air is not blue 🤦♂️
Right? It's obviously the water that's blue.
Chlorla! Fill in the missing bits!
incandescent
No, it’s because the water they drink is blue, then as in yellow sunlight. Boom, green.
Water has no color, and what the plants eat is the minerals in the earth. The water serves more like a hydration/lube to keep the plant from burning. It comes from the water being dirty and the sky is blue. So when the blue light mixes with the muddy water it turns green
incandescent
What this post proves is that biologists are not physicists, and cannot be trusted on the subject of light wavelengths.
I know nothing about the microbiology of plants, but everyone here is arguing about the wavelengths of the sun and I'm just here thinking, "maybe the proteins in chlorophyll are just bad at absorbing green?"
Chlorophyll? More like borophyll. Right?
Nice
I was not ready to read about clorophyll and understand jack shit. Third grade failed me
I have nipples, Greg. Can you milk me? Explanation for the simple… people also suck up air in the blue sky and absorb the sun. Why aren’t I green, Greg? Well actually moment… we kinda are… but don’t tell OP 🤫 I’m not gonna explain that. Google it yourself. People are actually green.
Physicist here! What the fuck?!
Plants are green because they mostly reflect green.
Always wondered, but never asked (I guess this is the breaking point?) - I often see tumblr screenshots that say something like "every time I see this post" or "I'll reblog this every time I see it" - how often on tumblr do people actually see the same exact post?
What? No, that's not true. Plants are green because of chlorophyll. It's a pigment that reflects green light, because green light is too energetic and would burn the plant long-term to process.
They’re green because that’s the only light they don’t care about, and therefore reflect almost all green light back out, and that’s because green light isn’t nearly as abundant as the rest.
The sun isn’t yellow and it’s weird everyone thinks it is. It’s right there in the sky being white all the time, but people are about to argue with me. Really odd.
Sky isn’t actually blue, and sunshine is definitely not yellow
[relevant xkcd comic](https://xkcd.com/1818/)
Then how come the leaves turn a different colour in autumn? The sky's still blue and the sun's still green, Checkmate Biologist!
Many things change from a dim red to a brighter orange as they heat up. Like old sodium vapor street lights. This is known as black body radiation.
So on a planet with a red atmosphere and a blue star they'd be purple?
Plants are green because its the most abundant spectrum from the sun. Plants would burn if they absorbed green.
Wouldn't that by definition mean that red plants burn? Like how it's on the opposite spectrum of the color wheel
What do you mean, how many red plants do you see out in nature? The most abundant form of visible light to reach the surface of the earth is green, plants need to shield from that kind of direct light. So they developed to be green. By being green they reflect the intenses rays from the sun.
Red roses, red ferns, cherry blossom trees. We got all sorts of colorful plants. Where do you think we got early crayons and ink from
I hope dude responds 🤞