Tuesday, March 10, 2015

No Blue


At the heart of much speculative fiction (and fiction in general) is a question. What if? On Tuesdays I like to throw one out there and see what you make of it. Do with it as you please. If a for-instance is not specified, feel free to interpret that instance as you wish. And if you find this becomes a novel-length answer, I'd appreciate a thank you in the acknowledgements ;)

What is blue? How do we see color? That article was posted to Facebook by Theresa Milstein, and it got me thinking...

What if blue didn't exist in ancient times? What if another color appeared in the future, a color we do not see nor do we have a concept of?

13 comments:

  1. Interesting question. If we didn't have the color blue then what name would we use for the color of the sky? ;)

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    1. That was one of the things they talked about in the article. They didn't have a color for the sky.

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  2. Another interesting one. Then it makes you wonder what people's favorite color was back then since blue seems to be a favorite color these days :)

    betty

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  3. I would be so blue if blue did not exist. According to my mom, when i was 3, I asked for blue pain because I wanted to paint the dog blue. Blue was actually a rare colour and it comes from lapis Lazuli. In the times of the great painters, the colour blue was more expensive than gold because it was so rare to find it. I have no idea about what a colour would look like if we could not visualize it since all colours come from the basics

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  4. What about the sea? What color would it be?

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  5. I remember reading once that the daughters of color blind men actually have more receptors for colors than other people, so they actually do see more colors. But how would they know if the world just looks the same?

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  6. It's interesting, in light of that photo that went viral. It makes you wonder if everyone is perceiving things as you do and just how much of what we perceive is accurate.

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  7. I read just today that blue was the last colour humans were able to see. How they'd know that is beyond me. My Dad is colour blind and so is my eldest son and apparently the gene is passed on by the mother.

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    1. Yeah, that was the article I linked to. Fascinating.

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  8. I've always wondered if people (even those that are not color blind) perceive colors the same. I'm pretty sure that people don't percive colors the same. But what would happen to purple and green if there wasn't any blue? Or does that just matter for mixing paint?

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  9. I would miss blue; it's one of my favorite colors, especially cornflower blue. What a heavenly shade.

    I also know people don't all perceive colors exactly the same way, which is interesting. I wonder why.

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  10. That rather blows the mind when you think about it. No more blue sky or blue oceans...

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I appreciate your comments.

I respond to comments* via email, unless your profile email is not enabled. Then, I'll reply in the comment thread. Eventually. Probably.

*Exception: I do not respond to "what if?" comments, but I do read them all. Those questions are open to your interpretation, and I don't wish to limit your imagination by what I thought the question was supposed to be.