That star gradually getting bigger is kind of menacing *without* the smooth jazz, but *with* the smooth jazz it feels like the star is trying to seduce me
That's actually a great idea. I imagine the peoples of this world would build an immunity to such pollen as seasonal allergies like ours with that much pollen would be a huge survival weakness, but man, can you imagine if, instead of just releasing pollen willy-nilly during spring, the plants evolved to have reproduction events, like how ants have nuptial flights? Sounds like it's visual narration time! _The weather's been warming up and rain has been misting down over the past few days. The wet season is here. The flowers have bloomed and people spend their days outside in anticipation for the annual big moment. The twittering birdsong ceases as the little animals sense the incoming change in weather and seek shelter, while you and your neighbors leave yours to watch. With a sudden howl, the current of winds kick up and the plants release their spores and pollen all in a rush, and a wave of golden particles sweeps through the sky. The land grows dim and amber as the sun's familiar red light is obscured and tainted. You can only sit there and gape in awe. You come out to see the pollen sweep every year, yet it still amazes you every time..._ It sounds both beautiful and gross. I'd imagine it'd be mostly beautiful myself, though. That is, if I was resistant to the pollen allergies that would be torturous if there were a pollen sweep IRL.
I grew up in a place where heather covered the hills and mountains around instead of grass or moss, so when it was the right time the hills would be purple, and when the heather was not flowering it would be brown.
Ewa is the best for culture building. Even in a hard(-ish) science fiction realm, her magic ideas are an excellent source for what the natives believe. And if you think those superstitions would subside as technology and science advance… I’d have to suggest you get out more!
Ewa is incredible with her poetic and beautiful yet believable and uneasy concepts. The God of the Journey is an amazing video about religion in a generation ship going to a distant planet
There is a sci-fi book by a german author who described a possible ecosystem on a planet around Proxima Centauri where organisms have bioluminescence to radiate off the excess energy during solar flares. Kind of like optical brighteners convert UV light into visible light.
Stanislaw Lem. He was Polish and wrote "The Magellanic Cloud" which featured that. The book's portrayal of bioluminescent lifeforms near Alpha Centauri with an intelligent stone-age species would together with "Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson (with the portrayal of a remote-controlled body by a paralyzed man) inspire the movie "Avatar". Lem would also pen the novel "Solaris", a sci-fi classic that has seen multiple films and stage-plays.
@@robertcorbell1006 I like Lem, but he was not whom I meant. And I also found out the author I thought of isn't German at all. I don't know why I thought that. He's American. It's Brandon Q. Morris and the book is called "Proxima Rising".
@@johannageisel5390 Googled the guy and it seems he wrote a whole trilogy around the exoplanet Proxima B. He portrays a seed-ship powered by lightsail and the intelligent, transhuman, AI protagonist of his previous novels is now the father of the new Adam and Eve via science. It takes its cues from other books such as "Parasite Planet" (also set around Proxima Centauri) and "Deathworld", but is mostly original in that the sci-fi is as hard as it gets. Looks neat. :)
Oh heck that book sounds like that would be great inspiration for my own project, though things may be different between the two it still has a similar situation XD
@@rockclanhawkstar1454 I have so far only read the first one. The ideas are neat, but I found the writing style and characterization wooden. Could be the German translation, though.
Plant color may also just be a complete evolutionary accident. After all there's the idea that the earth used to be covered in purple halobacteria (which capture the most abundant wavelengths of light) and early chlorophyll based algae evolved to capture the light that was left over from the halobacteria. Then when oxygen became abundant and wiped out halobacteria green algae took its place: ruclips.net/video/IIA-k_bBcL0/видео.html
I don't know if you were paying attention cause both artifexian and this video are stating convergent fact : the purple algae they spoke of in the PBS video is exactly one of the strategy that Edgar spoke of : absorbing the most abundant kind of light instead of reflecting it. So the PBS video is actually completing what Artifexian spoke of : according to the purple Earth hypothesis, earth's "sun eaters" autotrophs developped both strategies. The only point of Artifexian's video that the purple Earth hypothesis actually contradict is the reason why the second strategy ended up chosen : the second strategy was chosen because the original most abundant autotrophic halobacteriae blocked the first strategy for the surviving autotrophs not because it's "too dangerous to absorb the most abundant colored light". Note that Edgar said that you can justify using either strategy for your world building project so it's not even that big of an issue. P.S. However it's quite probable that for plant life around bigger stars they'd still want to protect themselves from too energetic wave lengths.
@@tonio103683 My point is that modern chlorophyl using life isn't using either of the strategies mentioned in the video. Absorbing the light not being used by halobacteria isn't either of the strategies gone over in the video because it's color is being determined by other life not directly by the sun. Plus now that halobacteria is no longer abundant green chlorophyl is basically just a vestigial feature, not something present because it's trying to absorb some particular amount of the suns energy. It's also worth noting that depending on where they live photosynthesizing life can function in environments with orders of magnitude differences in the amount of available light, so color may not even matter that much once you get a pigment that's good enough.
@@vakusdrake3224 My point is that it amounts to the same : Purple is first taken cause it's efficient and then green is taken to eat the "remains" (since green is complementary to purple) and kept around because it's efficient enough. The hypothesis doesn't really contradict that green or purple is the most efficient under our star it just gives a stronger explanation why what seems a bit of the less optimal strategy was chosen. Yes, but the main environment where they might develop is where light is the most abundant, so under direct sunlight. That they adapt somewhat to that sunlight seems to be logical (even if it could be wrong). If the plants develop in an environment where certain type of light is blocked, it could very well happen that wild surprising colors end up being chosen.
@@tonio103683 If what we actually observe is that plants are the opposite color you'd expect based on the suns spectrum, then that is still a rather substantial change to the model proposed in the video. Since it suggests some portion (possibly the majority) of the time plants may end up the exact opposite color you'd expect for evolutionary reasons. Additionally given chlorophyl eventually succeeded because it was much more efficient than preexisting pigments, that suggests plants could in principle be nearly any color depending on what highly efficient pigments evolved first. Plus it's worth noting that plants are actually kind of terrible at photosynthesis given with tweaks to rubisco we can increase the efficiency of their photosynthesis enough to get 40% higher yields. So there's likely a lot of flexibility in terms of plants being able to have certain aspects of their photosynthesis be extremely inefficient provided they're still better than the competition overall.
I like how stylized the animation is these days. Having the screen set on that scenery for so long made me realize just how much can be done with geometric shapes.
Who else remembers this: "RUclips, Edgar here, and Welcome to Artifexian! Here, you will learn everything you ever wanted to know about worldbuilding, and then some!" The old Artifexian intro.
Just a small correction - we see the sky as blue, because there is no 'purple' colour at the blue end. There is in a _rainbow_ because the second-order rainbow overlaps the first. We imported the colour names to the spectrum, but in a *photograph* of a light through a prism, the 'violet' is a very dark blue with no reddish tint.
A "double rainbow" is when the second order rainbow is visible. As we can see, the second order rainbow does not overlap the first. It's clearly outside the first order rainbow, and its innermost band is red, so they'd have to be completely overlapping to mix the red of one with the blue/violet of the other.
@@awfuldynne the violet end of the light spectrum is actually deep blue. Violet changed its meaning over time. Nowadays it means a mixture of blue and red light. When the light spectrum was first discovered and named, it had no association with a red tint. Visible purple light does not exist, that is a myth created by color name meanings shifting. Where we see purple, it's always a mixture of red and blue light, so either a rainbow has no purple at the end of its blue side or the second order overlaps the first.
@@buwumet No. _Indigo_ is/was deep blue. The "blue" end of prism-split light is, clear as day, a shade of purple that cannot be mistaken for blue, except presumably by the colorblind.
Depending on how you set up your prism it may be hard to see the violet because we have very little sensitivity to it; but it's distinct from a mix of blue and red in the same way yellow light is distinct from a red-green mix even if they're identical to our eyes.
As vegetation (or at least decidious trees) have several pigments for the different seasons, would it be too unlikely for vegetation around a somewhat regular variable star to develop a system that allows it to change pigments depending on the amount of radiation emmited by the star?
I think this might be possible. And altough I'm working with a single-star-system, this would be a great development for double-star-systems as the radiation (like the colour of the sky) might change depending on the position of the stars. This combination of changing sky-and plantcolour depending on which star is closer might actually make up for plenty of interesting cultures. Gues my elementals need to leave earth towards a tiny planet now :D
@@angeldude101 It could work for a particularly volatile red dwarf, you'd need to be careful not to kill off all life on the planet when it does flare up though
I'm hijacking your comment to ask everyone a question - regarding plants on Earth (or around G-stars). According to this, plants here are green to reflect the powerful green light. With the other strategy, they would be brown-red, to absorb green light. I just did a quick search and found that the occasional red leaves (not autumn, but live summer leaves) typically occur in places of strong sunlight (as in, the same plant may have green leaves in the shade). How does that make sense? Are those sun leaves trying to absorb even more light, while the green leaves in the shade want to block it? It sounds backwards.
Wow, this was so interesting and even though I almost didn’t know anything about the topic before, I think it was nicely summarised and described. Your Videos give me the spirit to look into specific worldbuilding topics I previously considered to difficult for me or even didn’t think of before. And I adore your video style.
What you were saying about green skies. I read a book years ago called “Ark Liberty” that does exactly that. The ozone layer was wrecked from pollution so scientists seeded the atmosphere with floating algae ,turning the sky green.
@@danthiel8623 how would they know what properly displaying red looks like then? My device has the same issue, colors are completely fkd, anything too dark shows up as green and it has a lot of burn in
Ooh, idea! A binary system, with a star and a black hole. The skies regularly get dimmer and brighter in time with the seasons. The only problem is the time dilation. Due to the black hole, time goes slower, so a few billion years there and all the other stars die.
I read the title real fast when I clicked on this video so at first I was confused that it was an Artifexian video and then when Ewa started talking I was literally like :O I really like that little waterfall scene I think it's pretty. Watching all the colors changing was very relaxing and it was cool to see how a culture could develop practices based around changing sky color. :-)
Siranush same. I always thought I was committing a sin by not letting my plants just evolve to _use_ the UV deathrays that hit the my planet, Rayleigh whenever the sun rises high enough
I love this video so much. It answers - with clear presentation - so many questions I had about skies and the plants. It even shows a supercontinent and wind patterns.
You probably have quite a bit of leeway in picking plant colour. (as long as you stay inside a safe AMOUNT of radiation to be absorbed vs reflected) It's generally believed that chlorophyll is a somewhat happy accident that is hard to evolve away from. (a local maxima) If photosynthesis had to evolve from scratch again, it might well be a different colour.
@@mateuszjokiel2813 True. And still are. I actually *have* a culture of purple sulfur bacteria. (By sheer coincidence, I'm more of a plant guy than a microbe guy.)
Forgive if I'm wrong, but I think they may have gotten the plant color explanation backwards. To my understanding, plants aren't the colors they absorb, but rather they appear as the colors they reflect back into our eyes, so a yellow plant would be absorbing only blue wavelengths while reflecting green and red, while a blue plant would be reflecting blue and absorbing green and red.
Your graphics are simply breathtaking, your explanations are clear and accurate. I'm so happy you focused your talents on the noble art of scientifically informed world building.
Fantastic video, as always! I was just starting to research this stuff yesterday, so this is going to serve as a really good jumping block into my next worldbuilding rabbit hole.
I'm shocked I found her shortly BEFORE you recced her. XD I wish you'd had a bit of dialogue about her world idea though. She presented it, but it would have been interesting to hear a discussion about it.
Love the idea of the sky changing color when the suns eclipse each other. It could create some really cool culture. Is there a way to know how often your stars would eclipse each other though?
Though I was familiar with the idea of plants of an M Class habitable world having black pigment as opposed to our more familiar green tints from some alien life documentary that I've long since forgotten the name of, the notation of different plant colors and even competing plant color theories does give off an interesting worldbuilding thought on how the stellar environment is like. However, nothing quite says "alien skies" quite like the cyclical changing of the sky's color throughout the local year, especially if its combined with Tatooine suns regularly eclipsing one another and seasonal particulates of the air. One could almost get away with a moonless habitable world (assuming such a thing is plausible) just by the color of the sky. Heck, the "months", for lack of a better term, could instead be named after colors instead. Either way, excellent video as always and thanks for the inspirations.
Isn't a satellite required to stabilize the rotational axis? I don't think a changing obliquity would be very conductive to life evolving, even if you could get away with "seasons" based on sky colour...
Hey! I'm studying physics at college and work for the university. My boss is the lead astrophysicist here and so I get to learn some stuff from him. One idea I had would be to use some sort of tiny Notch-filter like particle that aligns to the planets magnetic field, creating differently colored skies all around the world, and strong winds would also turn those particles, changing which colors they block out and thus temporarily changing the color of the sky. Maybe something like that could be incorporated to create seasonally changing skies? A thick layer of notch-filter-like nano-particles which are rotated at different angles depending on the speed and direction of the wind, thus, with changing seasonal winds, the rotation of the particles would change and, due to how notch filters work, the color which they block out. Or you could use a highly photothermally active gas in the sky, and then use the concept of thermal blooming: the gas adsorbs light, heats up, becomes less translucent, and as the light can progress it anymore and is reflected, it cools down again and becomes translucent again, so the light can re-enter the gas and heat it up again, starting over the cycle. Or you could use the so called "Raman effect" - which would make the light become less and less energetic and thus the wavelengths longer the thicker the atmosphere is. Or you could use variable stars! Their habitability isn't too well studied so we don't know whether such a star could host life, but since we also don't know whether it can't, a sci-fi story could explore that idea and have a planet orbit a star that changes in brightness and temperature (and thus color) over time! Or, if you want to get REALLY crazy, you could place your system close to a very massive object, near black hole level massive, and then have redshift happen in the light when the sun and the planet move away because of the object's gravity, and blueshift when they are moved towards each other, causing periodically changing sky colors.
Mysteri0usChannel I love these ideas. For the first one, have you considered nano-scale cuboidal prisms as an atmospheric dust? I get that you’re talking about dielectric filters but that’s structural coloration, kinda like thin-film interference, right? If you just had a mineral that cleaves up into prisms at just the right size you wouldn’t need to keep them perfectly aligned to the poles (which seems impossible given the turbulence of a moving atmosphere). Another possibility is to give these particles a biological origin. Diatoms, for instance, create their shells in near-perfect geometric structures with nano-scale features, creating more than 6 billion tons of extremely regular silica crystals each year on our planet. And if you’re set on a porous dielectric, single celled life could handle that for you long as you give em a reason. Diatoms, it seems, build and shape the pores in there shells for some sort of selective diffusion, but it is not well understood.
YO MY GIRL EWA HITTING UP THE VID WITH THE COOL SHIT. actually though you both were so great in this video and I hope you keep producing content for years to come.
Dang man this is really helpful. I am making a Scifi fantasy setting that's a flying space whale. And originally I was thinking of having the atmosphere just blue like earth, but after thinking how the atmosphere would be shaped along with its blue crystal like star I thought it wouldn't make sense for that.
Considering that the alien world I'm building is a planet sitting in outer habitable zone of a k-type orange dwarf, I find the idea of the native plant life having the same green color as earth's to be pretty funny
Not too long ago, a hurricane had hit the Gulf coast, mostly hitting around Texas and Louisianna, but parts of it had swept over central Arkansas as it was losing strength. During normal daylight hours, the sky had a yellow/orange tinge to it.
Personally, I'd expect it to be somewhat like Autumn ("Fall") in our world, with seasonal variation in plant colour, though this would be contingent on the orbit of the stars.
@@appleislander8536 Or perhaps seasonal dominance of two plant lineages - one evolved to absorb the wavelengths of light from one star, and one evolved for the wavelengths from the other. So when the light from one star is dominant, those plants are active and it's their 'summer' while the other lineage is dormant, like in 'winter'. And all on top of any regular seasonal variations the planet has. It could make for some fascinating overlapping ecosystems.
@@lyreparadox plants would grow taller during one of their seasons, covering the lower ones that need shielding and forming some weird simbiotic relationship.
Thanks so much for posting this. I’ve been searching for explanations for outlandish sky colors for so long. Cool video and good illustrations to help get the point across!
In the animations where the sun "grows", when it looks "smaller", it's actually high mass and radiates shorter wavelengths, and when it looks "bigger", it's low mass and radiates longer wavelengths. I got confused the first time I watched this and just realized this now, so I'm leaving this comment in case anyone else is confused.
(6:55 -- might want to avoid having videos flash/strobe like this, for those viewers with epilepsy, or possibly post a warning of some kind) Absolutely love your content! :) Never realized how tricky it would be to have a green-tinted sky...
A planetscape color randomizer would be a neat tool for worldbuilders. Like you could have all the variables completely random, or have the ability to "lock" certain variables like star type, planetary mass, human habitable atmosphere, etc.
Any one idea is likely to have been thought of before by someone, but the endless combinations will keep creatives busy forever. Then in real life we'll learn more about exoplanets and weird things no one ever thought of before.
The big problem with black for plants around M-class stars is that those planets would almost certainly be either tidally locked to the star (or in some kind of very long day due to a resonance orbit), and "black" would mean they'd face some serious heat stress while sitting in direct sunlight continuously. They'd probably need to either take the lightest color they could do photosynthesis with, develop some kind of internal thermal mitigation (maybe they cool themselves with deep root water reservoirs? Or the steady winds on such a planet?), or simply have an entire life-cycle in the daylight that isn't long by our standards.
:0 the colors i was thinking of for my world were almost exactly the ones given as default in the color calculator!! Also my FAVORITE worldbuilding youtubers in one video?? AMAZING
My con world orbits a low f type star and has a pale blue sky. Plant life on this world is yellow and red to absorb the most star light possible, making it look like an eternal autumn. There an equatorial valley surrounded in the north by a chain of very active volcanos, and in the summer the winds carry hot ash clouds over the region. Making the sky a dark grey with an ominous red sun.
Toq The Wise I’m not great at weather, but would it work like that? I love this idea I just want to think it through. If you’re at the equator, the pressure is low and the temperature doesn’t change much. Actually, at the equator there is no “summer” and “winter” for them except what the volcanoes do. But the volcanoes do get seasons so that definitely works. And yeah, I know, even if they weren’t that far north there could easily be a whole bunch more planet with interacting pressure zones and all of this is easy to write off but humor me. If the sun hits the north and warms the air above that region up, would that lower difference of temperature make it less likely to swoop down to the equator? Or would the warmth create a pressure increase and cause it to get sucked down the Hadley cell even harder? Is it the amount of energy or the difference in energy that makes the wind blow?
@@applesauce3873 My point is that by the time the plant felt the solar flare it might be too late. I think they might need some advanced warning, to avoid being destroyed frequently.
10:25 I know that this is REALLY late, but I just had a cool thought about how plants could adapt to a flare star. What if they had a sensor that could detect a change in their environment, like you said, and when those sensors are triggered, the plant tells its chlorophyll equivalent to change to white or die too be replaced by/swap out with another chlorophyll equivalent? Essentially, the plants would go through a sudden change from black to white. Once the flash is over, they return to their normal black color. Kinda like a much quicker version of how some animals' fur colors change depending on the season, but extremely faster. This change could also be an alert system for creatures that can see, telling them to seek shelter. Intelligent creatures that can have a culture would then associate white with fear, danger, and death. White may be used to signify a dangerous area, it could be used on flags to ward off other civilizations, and if could be used in funeral services as a color of mourning, or maybe it's adorned by powerful people like dictators and monarchs. If a disease causes paleness, people may fear it like the black death in our world. If albinos exist, their birth may become an omen of bad luck in the family's future. It could also be a sign of beauty, the same way some people romanticize our own symbols of death. The simple act of the plants changing from black to white could shape an entire culture.
Just south of BC we're also getting skies tinted by wildfires. I don't think we ever had violet skies as far south as the Seattle area, but between wildfires in BC and California we spent the last two summers with pink skies and a deep red sun and moon. Predictions were saying it could become a yearly occurrence similar to Ewa's monsoon skies example.
Yay. World Building Notes! I started following her a few months ago and she has some very intriguing world building tales. PS: Can you do a video on how an "Earth like" planet's moons can have different colors? Other than bright gray I mean.
Yeah, Ewa’s work is super interesting. On the moon note, I assume the moons for earth-like planets are too small to have an atmosphere, so no colored gases, but does that eliminate oxidation? Mars is famous for its red iron oxide, and it doesn’t have an oxygen rich atmosphere. Is there any reason why a moon couldn’t be formed of the same stuff? Minerals rich in metal oxides can have different colors: copper oxide alone giving us vibrant blues, greens, purples, reds, and browns. Perhaps it has to do wish planetary formation from the accretion disk: maybe the gravity of the planet hogs all the heavy metals leaving only dusty grey silicates to form moons? This is totally a perfect question for Artifexian This is why I love worldbuilding, I learn so much in the research
Like ... in every video you just throw in some example planets that are just based on the _one_ concept you're trying to bring across. And every single one of them is so f*cking creative and interesting to explore that you could write a Dune-style novel series set on this planet. That just blows my mind.
Took me a while to find this video again since I didn't save it the first time like a dummy dum. I'm using this as a reference for an alien world to figure out the color scheme, even though it's more fantasy oriented. This is a great video by the way!
I'm so glad you guys did a video together. You should do more! My only complaint here is that you didn't account for ambient scattering in your examples, which would throw off the colors that you actually see in the image.
I do have a dissenting opinion regarding the effect of scattering in thicker atmospheres: Scattering is the main reason the sky has colour at all. If you look directly at the Sun (not recommended) it appears yellowish because some of the blue wavelengths have been scattered out of the direct line from the Sun and into other directions, away from the viewer. Meanwhile, the rest of the sky is blue because that represents light that's been scattered from OTHER ray paths towards the viewer. The sky turns red near the sun during twilight because at that point you're seeing light that's only been scattered a little, meaning the redder wavelengths, while bluer wavelengths have the opportunity to be scattered multiple times in the thicker atmosphere. However, the twilight sky is still blue (albeit blue fading towards black) and sometimes even noticeably violet-tinged away from the sun, because at those angles, you're looking at photons that would have simply passed through the upper atmosphere and sailed off back into space if they hadn't been scattered towards the viewer. As a result, I don't think a thicker atmosphere would result in the sky in general turning to a warmer colour, but to something more spectacular: a permanent twilight-like effect. The sun would be reddish even at high noon, with a halo of sunset colour around it, but further away from the sun this would transition through an orange-yellow-white sequence into a bright blue (as the only light coming from parts of the sky away from the sun would be light that's been heavily scattered - ie, bluer wavelengths). This twilight effect would be further enhanced during actual twilight, possibly including a patch of purple on the sky opposite the sun.
Chris Weekes excellent observation. I don’t think artefexian actually took the time to directly claim contrary, but he did kinda leave that scenario unfinished. I saw someone else ask “what would sunset look like on that planet?” Aardvark I didn’t know whether it’d be even more dramatic because of the further increased tangent distance or less dramatic because of a flattened ratio of tangent to radial distances. You cleared that up for me. Now I have to re-examine my decision to go with the latter to let my planet Rayleigh get torched by farUV except for a couple hours as the sun rises or sets...
That star gradually getting bigger is kind of menacing *without* the smooth jazz, but *with* the smooth jazz it feels like the star is trying to seduce me
Look out! I think that G-class star likes you.
"The star starts sashaying towards you to the beat of the smooth jazz, what do you do?"
@@farmerboy916 ask "ya like jazz?"
Shall I write that story?
That would happen to me if danny didn't exist.
Would be interesting to see a sky tinted by massive clouds of plant pollen. I'd probably die from seasonal allergies, but the beauty would be worth it
Same here.
Bring a Hazmat suit, then you can enjoy the beauty without the sneezing, coughing, and slow asphyxiation...
@@theapexsurvivor9538 I will keep that in mind next time I visit another planet
That's actually a great idea. I imagine the peoples of this world would build an immunity to such pollen as seasonal allergies like ours with that much pollen would be a huge survival weakness, but man, can you imagine if, instead of just releasing pollen willy-nilly during spring, the plants evolved to have reproduction events, like how ants have nuptial flights? Sounds like it's visual narration time!
_The weather's been warming up and rain has been misting down over the past few days. The wet season is here. The flowers have bloomed and people spend their days outside in anticipation for the annual big moment. The twittering birdsong ceases as the little animals sense the incoming change in weather and seek shelter, while you and your neighbors leave yours to watch. With a sudden howl, the current of winds kick up and the plants release their spores and pollen all in a rush, and a wave of golden particles sweeps through the sky. The land grows dim and amber as the sun's familiar red light is obscured and tainted. You can only sit there and gape in awe. You come out to see the pollen sweep every year, yet it still amazes you every time..._
It sounds both beautiful and gross. I'd imagine it'd be mostly beautiful myself, though. That is, if I was resistant to the pollen allergies that would be torturous if there were a pollen sweep IRL.
Ooo, yeah!
I have officially fallen in love with "bioluminescent sky algae"
I grew up in a place where heather covered the hills and mountains around instead of grass or moss, so when it was the right time the hills would be purple, and when the heather was not flowering it would be brown.
Damn. sounds beautiful.
Were Is that place?
@@darkunor6687 northern england in the peak district, although scotland is more famous for it
@@RugnirSvenstarr sir, you are a very lucky person
this sounds so beautiful... thank you for this mental image
That whole city description is soo goood, sounds so poetic.
I mean of course Ewa’s planet has a vibrant city with interesting cultural practices. She’s friggin genius.
Ewa consistently creates incredibly unique and culture-rich worlds, they're my muse 😂
Ewa is the best for culture building. Even in a hard(-ish) science fiction realm, her magic ideas are an excellent source for what the natives believe. And if you think those superstitions would subside as technology and science advance… I’d have to suggest you get out more!
Ewa is incredible with her poetic and beautiful yet believable and uneasy concepts. The God of the Journey is an amazing video about religion in a generation ship going to a distant planet
If you like the description you should subscribe to her. She is a awesome worldbuilding RUclipsr.
There is a sci-fi book by a german author who described a possible ecosystem on a planet around Proxima Centauri where organisms have bioluminescence to radiate off the excess energy during solar flares. Kind of like optical brighteners convert UV light into visible light.
Stanislaw Lem. He was Polish and wrote "The Magellanic Cloud" which featured that. The book's portrayal of bioluminescent lifeforms near Alpha Centauri with an intelligent stone-age species would together with "Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson (with the portrayal of a remote-controlled body by a paralyzed man) inspire the movie "Avatar". Lem would also pen the novel "Solaris", a sci-fi classic that has seen multiple films and stage-plays.
@@robertcorbell1006 I like Lem, but he was not whom I meant.
And I also found out the author I thought of isn't German at all. I don't know why I thought that. He's American.
It's Brandon Q. Morris and the book is called "Proxima Rising".
@@johannageisel5390 Googled the guy and it seems he wrote a whole trilogy around the exoplanet Proxima B. He portrays a seed-ship powered by lightsail and the intelligent, transhuman, AI protagonist of his previous novels is now the father of the new Adam and Eve via science. It takes its cues from other books such as "Parasite Planet" (also set around Proxima Centauri) and "Deathworld", but is mostly original in that the sci-fi is as hard as it gets. Looks neat. :)
Oh heck that book sounds like that would be great inspiration for my own project, though things may be different between the two it still has a similar situation XD
@@rockclanhawkstar1454 I have so far only read the first one.
The ideas are neat, but I found the writing style and characterization wooden.
Could be the German translation, though.
Atefexian:
Blah blah frequency blah science blah research astronomy blah meteorology refraction
Wordbuilding Notes:
UNLEASH THE SACRED BELLOWS
So, basically Artifexian is like Robert L. Forward of worldbuilding youtube and Worldbuilding Notes is like Ursula K. Le Guin.
sacred bellows go *swoosh*
I figured the idea was the sacred bellows weren't actually doing anything, it was just seasonal winds that the people thought they were influencing.
@@beautifulnova6088 Yes, that is the idea. They're a religious ritual, not actual magic.
@@Candlemancerokay okay but what if yes magic?
3:32
When a star dies
*F Star*
_Lmao!_
O B A F G K M
9:46 you mean
@@MineCraft-qw2ow it do be like that
a man of culture
Plant color may also just be a complete evolutionary accident. After all there's the idea that the earth used to be covered in purple halobacteria (which capture the most abundant wavelengths of light) and early chlorophyll based algae evolved to capture the light that was left over from the halobacteria. Then when oxygen became abundant and wiped out halobacteria green algae took its place: ruclips.net/video/IIA-k_bBcL0/видео.html
I don't know if you were paying attention cause both artifexian and this video are stating convergent fact : the purple algae they spoke of in the PBS video is exactly one of the strategy that Edgar spoke of : absorbing the most abundant kind of light instead of reflecting it. So the PBS video is actually completing what Artifexian spoke of : according to the purple Earth hypothesis, earth's "sun eaters" autotrophs developped both strategies.
The only point of Artifexian's video that the purple Earth hypothesis actually contradict is the reason why the second strategy ended up chosen : the second strategy was chosen because the original most abundant autotrophic halobacteriae blocked the first strategy for the surviving autotrophs not because it's "too dangerous to absorb the most abundant colored light". Note that Edgar said that you can justify using either strategy for your world building project so it's not even that big of an issue.
P.S. However it's quite probable that for plant life around bigger stars they'd still want to protect themselves from too energetic wave lengths.
@@tonio103683 My point is that modern chlorophyl using life isn't using either of the strategies mentioned in the video. Absorbing the light not being used by halobacteria isn't either of the strategies gone over in the video because it's color is being determined by other life not directly by the sun. Plus now that halobacteria is no longer abundant green chlorophyl is basically just a vestigial feature, not something present because it's trying to absorb some particular amount of the suns energy.
It's also worth noting that depending on where they live photosynthesizing life can function in environments with orders of magnitude differences in the amount of available light, so color may not even matter that much once you get a pigment that's good enough.
@@vakusdrake3224 My point is that it amounts to the same : Purple is first taken cause it's efficient and then green is taken to eat the "remains" (since green is complementary to purple) and kept around because it's efficient enough. The hypothesis doesn't really contradict that green or purple is the most efficient under our star it just gives a stronger explanation why what seems a bit of the less optimal strategy was chosen.
Yes, but the main environment where they might develop is where light is the most abundant, so under direct sunlight. That they adapt somewhat to that sunlight seems to be logical (even if it could be wrong). If the plants develop in an environment where certain type of light is blocked, it could very well happen that wild surprising colors end up being chosen.
@@tonio103683 If what we actually observe is that plants are the opposite color you'd expect based on the suns spectrum, then that is still a rather substantial change to the model proposed in the video. Since it suggests some portion (possibly the majority) of the time plants may end up the exact opposite color you'd expect for evolutionary reasons.
Additionally given chlorophyl eventually succeeded because it was much more efficient than preexisting pigments, that suggests plants could in principle be nearly any color depending on what highly efficient pigments evolved first.
Plus it's worth noting that plants are actually kind of terrible at photosynthesis given with tweaks to rubisco we can increase the efficiency of their photosynthesis enough to get 40% higher yields. So there's likely a lot of flexibility in terms of plants being able to have certain aspects of their photosynthesis be extremely inefficient provided they're still better than the competition overall.
@@vakusdrake3224 Well then, i hope he'll tackle your remarks in the next FAQ video.
The key thing is to judge the atmosphere by the content of it's character.
But then it turned out that the content of its character was ALSO that of an unpalatable chlorine, sulfur, and methane that is hostile to life.
My two favorite RUclips worldbuilders/conlangers? Together in one video? I don't remember dying, but it looks like I'm in Heaven
That's the biggest mood rn you have no idea.
Whoooo
Truee
Yeaah
Mom and dad.
I like how stylized the animation is these days. Having the screen set on that scenery for so long made me realize just how much can be done with geometric shapes.
I love your voice. Dost particles are my favorite particles
Who else remembers this:
"RUclips, Edgar here, and Welcome to Artifexian! Here, you will learn everything you ever wanted to know about worldbuilding, and then some!"
The old Artifexian intro.
Oh my god this brings me back!
Yay! I hope next one will be about vegetation on the planet. Desert, tropical forests and such.
That would be nice.
But if not, Stoneworks has videos about deserts and swamps/wetlands.
ruclips.net/channel/UClnWLqdyrQ-hcDYW5kQQ6vQvideos
I hope so too, I felt this video kind of short chanɡed plants, I mean he didn't even mention flowers, the most colorful part of the plant.
Noo biblaridion's gonna copyright
Just a small correction - we see the sky as blue, because there is no 'purple' colour at the blue end. There is in a _rainbow_ because the second-order rainbow overlaps the first. We imported the colour names to the spectrum, but in a *photograph* of a light through a prism, the 'violet' is a very dark blue with no reddish tint.
:-O I am shocked by that cognition! You can't take purple out of the nature - you just can't! ;-)
A "double rainbow" is when the second order rainbow is visible. As we can see, the second order rainbow does not overlap the first. It's clearly outside the first order rainbow, and its innermost band is red, so they'd have to be completely overlapping to mix the red of one with the blue/violet of the other.
@@awfuldynne the violet end of the light spectrum is actually deep blue. Violet changed its meaning over time. Nowadays it means a mixture of blue and red light. When the light spectrum was first discovered and named, it had no association with a red tint. Visible purple light does not exist, that is a myth created by color name meanings shifting. Where we see purple, it's always a mixture of red and blue light, so either a rainbow has no purple at the end of its blue side or the second order overlaps the first.
@@buwumet No. _Indigo_ is/was deep blue. The "blue" end of prism-split light is, clear as day, a shade of purple that cannot be mistaken for blue, except presumably by the colorblind.
Depending on how you set up your prism it may be hard to see the violet because we have very little sensitivity to it; but it's distinct from a mix of blue and red in the same way yellow light is distinct from a red-green mix even if they're identical to our eyes.
As vegetation (or at least decidious trees) have several pigments for the different seasons, would it be too unlikely for vegetation around a somewhat regular variable star to develop a system that allows it to change pigments depending on the amount of radiation emmited by the star?
Possibly. The main issue is that solar flares are shorter and more abrupt than seasonal changes.
I think this might be possible.
And altough I'm working with a single-star-system, this would be a great development for double-star-systems as the radiation (like the colour of the sky) might change depending on the position of the stars. This combination of changing sky-and plantcolour depending on which star is closer might actually make up for plenty of interesting cultures. Gues my elementals need to leave earth towards a tiny planet now :D
@@angeldude101 It could work for a particularly volatile red dwarf, you'd need to be careful not to kill off all life on the planet when it does flare up though
I'm hijacking your comment to ask everyone a question - regarding plants on Earth (or around G-stars). According to this, plants here are green to reflect the powerful green light. With the other strategy, they would be brown-red, to absorb green light.
I just did a quick search and found that the occasional red leaves (not autumn, but live summer leaves) typically occur in places of strong sunlight (as in, the same plant may have green leaves in the shade). How does that make sense? Are those sun leaves trying to absorb even more light, while the green leaves in the shade want to block it? It sounds backwards.
@@AethuvielThink of it as the plant equivalent of a tan. The red-purple pigments are protecting the underlying cells from excess radiation.
Holy shit! My 2 favorite worldbuilders are collaborating!
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Hi Ewa
Ikr, epic
Completely different flavors, but both epic imaginations.
AnkhAnanku yeah. I watched her videos and realized how much it would help me in my magical worlds
Hi ewa
Wow, this was so interesting and even though I almost didn’t know anything about the topic before, I think it was nicely summarised and described. Your Videos give me the spirit to look into specific worldbuilding topics I previously considered to difficult for me or even didn’t think of before.
And I adore your video style.
What you were saying about green skies. I read a book years ago called “Ark Liberty” that does exactly that. The ozone layer was wrecked from pollution so scientists seeded the atmosphere with floating algae ,turning the sky green.
I need to watch this again on a device that doesn't have problems displaying red.
Caca you biatch!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Or you are slightly color blind? Maybe
@@danthiel8623 how would they know what properly displaying red looks like then? My device has the same issue, colors are completely fkd, anything too dark shows up as green and it has a lot of burn in
Ooh, idea! A binary system, with a star and a black hole. The skies regularly get dimmer and brighter in time with the seasons. The only problem is the time dilation. Due to the black hole, time goes slower, so a few billion years there and all the other stars die.
I read the title real fast when I clicked on this video so at first I was confused that it was an Artifexian video and then when Ewa started talking I was literally like :O
I really like that little waterfall scene I think it's pretty. Watching all the colors changing was very relaxing and it was cool to see how a culture could develop practices based around changing sky color. :-)
Those eyes you put in turned this video into a horror movie. Also, your guest suddenly talking was kinda shocking.
Marvel: Infinity War will be the largest crossover in history
Artifexian and WorldbuildingNotes: Hold our beers
Nice but overused
I still remember the star types from Oh Be A Fine Gungan, Kiss Me from that one video years ago.
A “B-Scenario M-Star” is a mood a vibe and a trip all in one
I like how you said "Got it? Cool, let's world-paint", because of the subject of the video.
But then he went ahead and called the dooblydoo a "description box" >.>
I have been awaiting this collab for far too long.
That moment when the reasoning for your planet's purple plants is actually correct-
Siranush same. I always thought I was committing a sin by not letting my plants just evolve to _use_ the UV deathrays that hit the my planet, Rayleigh whenever the sun rises high enough
I love this video so much. It answers - with clear presentation - so many questions I had about skies and the plants. It even shows a supercontinent and wind patterns.
You probably have quite a bit of leeway in picking plant colour. (as long as you stay inside a safe AMOUNT of radiation to be absorbed vs reflected) It's generally believed that chlorophyll is a somewhat happy accident that is hard to evolve away from. (a local maxima) If photosynthesis had to evolve from scratch again, it might well be a different colour.
In fact, photosyntheric bacteria used to be reddish-purple.
@@mateuszjokiel2813 True. And still are. I actually *have* a culture of purple sulfur bacteria. (By sheer coincidence, I'm more of a plant guy than a microbe guy.)
Forgive if I'm wrong, but I think they may have gotten the plant color explanation backwards. To my understanding, plants aren't the colors they absorb, but rather they appear as the colors they reflect back into our eyes, so a yellow plant would be absorbing only blue wavelengths while reflecting green and red, while a blue plant would be reflecting blue and absorbing green and red.
Yes, he explained strategy 2 (plants that are the complementary colour to the star’s peak output) first.
I remember seeing comments about these guys collaborating, I'm so glad it happened
This is insanely cool and as an artist I am SO hyped with all of this information. Thank you so much for sharing!!
Good tip. Don't stare at the star
Alternia in a nutshell
Your graphics are simply breathtaking, your explanations are clear and accurate. I'm so happy you focused your talents on the noble art of scientifically informed world building.
In your animation where you show skies around different stars, is the star growing due to the closeness the planet has to be to be habitable?
Yes.
I’m pretty sure it’s because of the size of the star
@@demon_xd_ Wrong. M type stars are the smallest
@@danielgrizzlus3950
Oh
@@danielgrizzlus3950 didn't realise that until now, whoops
Fantastic video, as always! I was just starting to research this stuff yesterday, so this is going to serve as a really good jumping block into my next worldbuilding rabbit hole.
This is definitely the oddest and coolest RUclips rabbit hole I’ve ever found
I'm shocked I found her shortly BEFORE you recced her. XD
I wish you'd had a bit of dialogue about her world idea though. She presented it, but it would have been interesting to hear a discussion about it.
This is such a great worldbuilding tool -- thank you for making this!
Holy shit airborn biolumenesent plantlife is the fucking craziest shit ive ever heard and I've never more quickly added something to a story
I always love what worldbuilding notes comes up with! This as great
Artefexian, WorldbuildingNotes, and Simon Clark! Excellent!
This was really helpful! I'm writing a sci-fi novel that takes place on another planet, and this helped me figure out what everything looks like.
Love the idea of the sky changing color when the suns eclipse each other. It could create some really cool culture. Is there a way to know how often your stars would eclipse each other though?
could run a simulation on the orbit of the multiple stars and their planet to see when one would eclipse the other.
Though I was familiar with the idea of plants of an M Class habitable world having black pigment as opposed to our more familiar green tints from some alien life documentary that I've long since forgotten the name of, the notation of different plant colors and even competing plant color theories does give off an interesting worldbuilding thought on how the stellar environment is like.
However, nothing quite says "alien skies" quite like the cyclical changing of the sky's color throughout the local year, especially if its combined with Tatooine suns regularly eclipsing one another and seasonal particulates of the air. One could almost get away with a moonless habitable world (assuming such a thing is plausible) just by the color of the sky. Heck, the "months", for lack of a better term, could instead be named after colors instead.
Either way, excellent video as always and thanks for the inspirations.
I remember it mentioned on the History Channel series The Universe. Don't know the episode though.
@@merrittanimation7721 It's probably the episode about extrasolar life.
Isn't a satellite required to stabilize the rotational axis? I don't think a changing obliquity would be very conductive to life evolving, even if you could get away with "seasons" based on sky colour...
@@entropyzero5588 Which is why I put down the notation "if such a thing is plausible"
The demonstration animations were a stellar touch, love it, and that unexpected collab was the cherry on top.
Yay!! Super collaboration!
dream crossover! thank you both!
this video seems better as a reference during world building than as a source of entertainment
AW YEAH HIT US WITH THAT WORLDBUILDING KNOWLEDGE
Hey! I'm studying physics at college and work for the university. My boss is the lead astrophysicist here and so I get to learn some stuff from him. One idea I had would be to use some sort of tiny Notch-filter like particle that aligns to the planets magnetic field, creating differently colored skies all around the world, and strong winds would also turn those particles, changing which colors they block out and thus temporarily changing the color of the sky.
Maybe something like that could be incorporated to create seasonally changing skies? A thick layer of notch-filter-like nano-particles which are rotated at different angles depending on the speed and direction of the wind, thus, with changing seasonal winds, the rotation of the particles would change and, due to how notch filters work, the color which they block out.
Or you could use a highly photothermally active gas in the sky, and then use the concept of thermal blooming: the gas adsorbs light, heats up, becomes less translucent, and as the light can progress it anymore and is reflected, it cools down again and becomes translucent again, so the light can re-enter the gas and heat it up again, starting over the cycle.
Or you could use the so called "Raman effect" - which would make the light become less and less energetic and thus the wavelengths longer the thicker the atmosphere is.
Or you could use variable stars! Their habitability isn't too well studied so we don't know whether such a star could host life, but since we also don't know whether it can't, a sci-fi story could explore that idea and have a planet orbit a star that changes in brightness and temperature (and thus color) over time!
Or, if you want to get REALLY crazy, you could place your system close to a very massive object, near black hole level massive, and then have redshift happen in the light when the sun and the planet move away because of the object's gravity, and blueshift when they are moved towards each other, causing periodically changing sky colors.
Mysteri0usChannel I love these ideas.
For the first one, have you considered nano-scale cuboidal prisms as an atmospheric dust? I get that you’re talking about dielectric filters but that’s structural coloration, kinda like thin-film interference, right? If you just had a mineral that cleaves up into prisms at just the right size you wouldn’t need to keep them perfectly aligned to the poles (which seems impossible given the turbulence of a moving atmosphere).
Another possibility is to give these particles a biological origin. Diatoms, for instance, create their shells in near-perfect geometric structures with nano-scale features, creating more than 6 billion tons of extremely regular silica crystals each year on our planet. And if you’re set on a porous dielectric, single celled life could handle that for you long as you give em a reason. Diatoms, it seems, build and shape the pores in there shells for some sort of selective diffusion, but it is not well understood.
Wow, the feeling when you find out two of your favorite world building RUclipsrs made a video together
YO MY GIRL EWA HITTING UP THE VID WITH THE COOL SHIT. actually though you both were so great in this video and I hope you keep producing content for years to come.
I love her so much!! I can't believe you guys did a collab together!!
[running down stairs]
[kicks door open]
I CAME AS SOON AS I HEARD!
EDIT: oh my god i'm top comment
Here's a tissue, clean yourself up.
Same
@@the_Kutonarch Do you have another one left?
@@magiv4205 I have a whole box just for you, enjoy!
@@the_Kutonarch thanks lmao
I thought this video was about colour theory for art, but the science behind this is just as cool
i do my nails based on the the sky, tree branch silhouettes & stained glass. i enjoyed this video a lot
The crossover we've all been waiting for
Dang man this is really helpful. I am making a Scifi fantasy setting that's a flying space whale. And originally I was thinking of having the atmosphere just blue like earth, but after thinking how the atmosphere would be shaped along with its blue crystal like star I thought it wouldn't make sense for that.
Considering that the alien world I'm building is a planet sitting in outer habitable zone of a k-type orange dwarf, I find the idea of the native plant life having the same green color as earth's to be pretty funny
just discovered this channel and im in LOVE
Not too long ago, a hurricane had hit the Gulf coast, mostly hitting around Texas and Louisianna, but parts of it had swept over central Arkansas as it was losing strength. During normal daylight hours, the sky had a yellow/orange tinge to it.
It's awesome to see you doing a partner episode with Worldbuilding Notes! Both channels have some very high quality content.
your videos just jump right in without any nonsense, i love it
What happens to the colour of plant life if we have changing sky/star colour? Like you mentioned with a double star system for example.
Personally, I'd expect it to be somewhat like Autumn ("Fall") in our world, with seasonal variation in plant colour, though this would be contingent on the orbit of the stars.
@@appleislander8536 Or perhaps seasonal dominance of two plant lineages - one evolved to absorb the wavelengths of light from one star, and one evolved for the wavelengths from the other. So when the light from one star is dominant, those plants are active and it's their 'summer' while the other lineage is dormant, like in 'winter'. And all on top of any regular seasonal variations the planet has. It could make for some fascinating overlapping ecosystems.
@@lyreparadox plants would grow taller during one of their seasons, covering the lower ones that need shielding and forming some weird simbiotic relationship.
Thanks so much for posting this. I’ve been searching for explanations for outlandish sky colors for so long. Cool video and good illustrations to help get the point across!
In the animations where the sun "grows", when it looks "smaller", it's actually high mass and radiates shorter wavelengths, and when it looks "bigger", it's low mass and radiates longer wavelengths. I got confused the first time I watched this and just realized this now, so I'm leaving this comment in case anyone else is confused.
(6:55 -- might want to avoid having videos flash/strobe like this, for those viewers with epilepsy, or possibly post a warning of some kind)
Absolutely love your content! :) Never realized how tricky it would be to have a green-tinted sky...
thanks for putting the script in the description! I have limited data at the moment so i can't watch videos, so that's very helpful.
A planetscape color randomizer would be a neat tool for worldbuilders. Like you could have all the variables completely random, or have the ability to "lock" certain variables like star type, planetary mass, human habitable atmosphere, etc.
How could I have missed this. Two of my favourite worldbuilding RUclipsrs in a colab?! :O
Every time I see a video on worldbuilding I realize every idea I had and thought was somewhat original actually wasn't
Any one idea is likely to have been thought of before by someone, but the endless combinations will keep creatives busy forever. Then in real life we'll learn more about exoplanets and weird things no one ever thought of before.
I'm A.E. Stephenson, and this colab video made my entire MONTH.
The big problem with black for plants around M-class stars is that those planets would almost certainly be either tidally locked to the star (or in some kind of very long day due to a resonance orbit), and "black" would mean they'd face some serious heat stress while sitting in direct sunlight continuously.
They'd probably need to either take the lightest color they could do photosynthesis with, develop some kind of internal thermal mitigation (maybe they cool themselves with deep root water reservoirs? Or the steady winds on such a planet?), or simply have an entire life-cycle in the daylight that isn't long by our standards.
:0 the colors i was thinking of for my world were almost exactly the ones given as default in the color calculator!! Also my FAVORITE worldbuilding youtubers in one video?? AMAZING
goddamnit, im still trying to make my first system, and you keep talking about new and cool stuff that i now have to add.
I'm digging this epic smooth jazz
My con world orbits a low f type star and has a pale blue sky. Plant life on this world is yellow and red to absorb the most star light possible, making it look like an eternal autumn. There an equatorial valley surrounded in the north by a chain of very active volcanos, and in the summer the winds carry hot ash clouds over the region. Making the sky a dark grey with an ominous red sun.
Toq The Wise I’m not great at weather, but would it work like that? I love this idea I just want to think it through.
If you’re at the equator, the pressure is low and the temperature doesn’t change much. Actually, at the equator there is no “summer” and “winter” for them except what the volcanoes do. But the volcanoes do get seasons so that definitely works. And yeah, I know, even if they weren’t that far north there could easily be a whole bunch more planet with interacting pressure zones and all of this is easy to write off but humor me.
If the sun hits the north and warms the air above that region up, would that lower difference of temperature make it less likely to swoop down to the equator? Or would the warmth create a pressure increase and cause it to get sucked down the Hadley cell even harder? Is it the amount of energy or the difference in energy that makes the wind blow?
Plants on a flare star's planet might undergo a chemical reaction in their outer layers, rapidly changing color to protect themselves.
Monody those plants would need an early warning if the flares were not at regular intervals wouldn’t they?
@@MisterSketch4 chemical reaction , as in they would be detecting the change... how could you not feel a solar flare
@@applesauce3873 My point is that by the time the plant felt the solar flare it might be too late. I think they might need some advanced warning, to avoid being destroyed frequently.
They might have folds that one side is black and one side is white to block the flares.
THIS IS THE MOST AMBITIOUS CROSSOVER EVENT IN HISTORY!!!!!
10:25
I know that this is REALLY late, but I just had a cool thought about how plants could adapt to a flare star. What if they had a sensor that could detect a change in their environment, like you said, and when those sensors are triggered, the plant tells its chlorophyll equivalent to change to white or die too be replaced by/swap out with another chlorophyll equivalent? Essentially, the plants would go through a sudden change from black to white. Once the flash is over, they return to their normal black color. Kinda like a much quicker version of how some animals' fur colors change depending on the season, but extremely faster.
This change could also be an alert system for creatures that can see, telling them to seek shelter. Intelligent creatures that can have a culture would then associate white with fear, danger, and death. White may be used to signify a dangerous area, it could be used on flags to ward off other civilizations, and if could be used in funeral services as a color of mourning, or maybe it's adorned by powerful people like dictators and monarchs. If a disease causes paleness, people may fear it like the black death in our world. If albinos exist, their birth may become an omen of bad luck in the family's future. It could also be a sign of beauty, the same way some people romanticize our own symbols of death. The simple act of the plants changing from black to white could shape an entire culture.
This feels like a lecture given by an instructor at the Guild of Writers in the city of D'ni.
Just south of BC we're also getting skies tinted by wildfires. I don't think we ever had violet skies as far south as the Seattle area, but between wildfires in BC and California we spent the last two summers with pink skies and a deep red sun and moon.
Predictions were saying it could become a yearly occurrence similar to Ewa's monsoon skies example.
the story from at the end is great. The speech to text made it even better XD
alan pompom I’m pretty sure that’s her voice. Ewa isn’t a native English speaker...
Marvel: Infinty War is the most ambitious crossover event in history.
Artifexian and WorldbuildingNotes:
damn, i got some inspiration for my dnd custom setting. thanks buddy :)
Yay. World Building Notes! I started following her a few months ago and she has some very intriguing world building tales.
PS: Can you do a video on how an "Earth like" planet's moons can have different colors? Other than bright gray I mean.
Yeah, Ewa’s work is super interesting.
On the moon note, I assume the moons for earth-like planets are too small to have an atmosphere, so no colored gases, but does that eliminate oxidation? Mars is famous for its red iron oxide, and it doesn’t have an oxygen rich atmosphere. Is there any reason why a moon couldn’t be formed of the same stuff? Minerals rich in metal oxides can have different colors: copper oxide alone giving us vibrant blues, greens, purples, reds, and browns.
Perhaps it has to do wish planetary formation from the accretion disk: maybe the gravity of the planet hogs all the heavy metals leaving only dusty grey silicates to form moons? This is totally a perfect question for Artifexian
This is why I love worldbuilding, I learn so much in the research
I wish you'd gone more into detail about violet! Would love to hear a realistic perspective on the atmosphere of eve :3
That was my favourite cross over ever
Like ... in every video you just throw in some example planets that are just based on the _one_ concept you're trying to bring across. And every single one of them is so f*cking creative and interesting to explore that you could write a Dune-style novel series set on this planet. That just blows my mind.
Was Earth's sky ever a different colour within the timeframe of multi-cellular life existing?
Almost definitely not. Not at all substantially anyway.
Took me a while to find this video again since I didn't save it the first time like a dummy dum. I'm using this as a reference for an alien world to figure out the color scheme, even though it's more fantasy oriented.
This is a great video by the way!
I'm so glad you guys did a video together. You should do more!
My only complaint here is that you didn't account for ambient scattering in your examples, which would throw off the colors that you actually see in the image.
This video is just a series of prog-rock song titles.
I do have a dissenting opinion regarding the effect of scattering in thicker atmospheres:
Scattering is the main reason the sky has colour at all. If you look directly at the Sun (not recommended) it appears yellowish because some of the blue wavelengths have been scattered out of the direct line from the Sun and into other directions, away from the viewer. Meanwhile, the rest of the sky is blue because that represents light that's been scattered from OTHER ray paths towards the viewer.
The sky turns red near the sun during twilight because at that point you're seeing light that's only been scattered a little, meaning the redder wavelengths, while bluer wavelengths have the opportunity to be scattered multiple times in the thicker atmosphere. However, the twilight sky is still blue (albeit blue fading towards black) and sometimes even noticeably violet-tinged away from the sun, because at those angles, you're looking at photons that would have simply passed through the upper atmosphere and sailed off back into space if they hadn't been scattered towards the viewer.
As a result, I don't think a thicker atmosphere would result in the sky in general turning to a warmer colour, but to something more spectacular: a permanent twilight-like effect. The sun would be reddish even at high noon, with a halo of sunset colour around it, but further away from the sun this would transition through an orange-yellow-white sequence into a bright blue (as the only light coming from parts of the sky away from the sun would be light that's been heavily scattered - ie, bluer wavelengths). This twilight effect would be further enhanced during actual twilight, possibly including a patch of purple on the sky opposite the sun.
Chris Weekes excellent observation. I don’t think artefexian actually took the time to directly claim contrary, but he did kinda leave that scenario unfinished. I saw someone else ask “what would sunset look like on that planet?” Aardvark I didn’t know whether it’d be even more dramatic because of the further increased tangent distance or less dramatic because of a flattened ratio of tangent to radial distances. You cleared that up for me.
Now I have to re-examine my decision to go with the latter to let my planet Rayleigh get torched by farUV except for a couple hours as the sun rises or sets...
I love it how her part is 2 minutes of it
I love that city idea at the end.