What Color Is My Planet?

[kent_allard_jr]

I stopped playing paper & pencil RPGs in the late 80s and early 90s. What brought me back, oddly enough, was graduate school: As I learned more about government and social science I thought about updating world-generation tables in games like Traveller. (I eventually wrote them up and published them in The Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society.)

Comments

[peacewood]

Wired had an article about this a year or so back -- the consensus was that the color of the flora depended on the color of the star the planet is orbiting. Young, blue stars give off lots of radiation and the plants on that planet would appear blue to reflect the excess blue energy. Likewise, plants on planets around a dying red dwarf would need all the light that they could get and would possibly even appear black, in order to soak up as much light as possible.

I'd love to know how planets around a binary star system would work. :p

[kent_allard_jr]

I will look for that article, thanks!

From what little I know about planetology, blue stars may not last long enough to develop multicellular life. The consensus used to be that binary stars were less likely to have planets -- the second star grabs up most material in the accretion disk -- but recently discovered extrasolar planets may have changed things.

[barking_iguana]

Of course, any color-seeing sentience evolving on a planet will be more sensitive to subtle variations in their won palette than in ours.

[kent_allard_jr]

True. I guess I'm interested in what things would look like to a human visitor, rather than a native one. This could be an issue, though, when talking about animal colorations, as entities would only get an evolutionary advantage from bright colors if they attract or scare off creatures who can see them.