Our perception colors and forms our culture
Do you know what color our star actually is? Isn’t the Sun yellow? Of course it’s yellow, right? Because even little toddlers with crayons will instinctively reach for the yellow ones to draw crude, happy circles in the sky with.
Hold on. Gonna nerd out here, y’all. Our star, Sol, or simply the Sun, is a middle-aged star birthed from the remnants of older stars and their long-destroyed solar systems. Imagine for a moment, a gazillion eons ago on a once-existing planet around an elder sun before it self-destructed to generate the nursery for more stars…imagine members of an intelligent multicellular species, technological animals, making love in a lovely forest of giant, multicolored psychedelic mushrooms…and it’s their long-transformed souls we access as the shamanic entities inhabiting the astral realms of DMT… OK, a few clouds too far, a rainbow too high? Never mind then, but our Sun did emerge from such solarian nurseries around 4.5 billion years ago. Who knows what civilizations may have risen and fallen across such long ago solar systems before everything became ruin for future nutrients so far back in time those futures are now our remote past.
The star we call Sol, our Sun, isn’t yellow at all. The Sun is a white star, completely white, but our atmosphere filters it yellow. Our biological senses evolved and developed for us to perceive the Sun as yellow, the label from language our minds attach to the object without even thinking. Indeed, Sol is a yellow dwarf star. But it’s really a white dwarf. Why? Because it’s white and not yellow. And, but, again, the Sun is not a true white dwarf. Why? Because true white dwarfs are remnants of larger stars, red giants, bloated enough to shed their outer layers but not massive enough to collapse into a neutron star or black hole. Yellow dwarf is an inaccurate term for what astronomers term a G-typed main-sequence star. Called G-stars for short, such stars are mostly white with some being a slight yellow in color. Therefore we somewhat inaccurately refer to the Sun as a yellow dwarf star.
Yellow is one of my favorite colors. altho not on me as clothes. Yellow is a happy color. Our misperception of the Sun as a yellow star affects the psychology of us as individuals and as a species. Even little kids draw Sol as yellow. Imagine, however, how different it would be if the gases of our atmosphere allowed us to see the Sun as it truly is, a banal white orb, hot white, chalky as death. Considers the appearance of the Moon at night as it reflects the white light of the Sun.
Think how our perception of colors as a species affects our culture the world over. Supposed we grew up instead with a harsh, white sun beating down on us without mercy. Or a red sun? Science fiction is resplendent with numerous examples of life, including a technologically advanced civilization, evolving on planets orbiting stars of a different color than what we perceive in our time. The color of the sky would be different, and so would the water. Art would be different. And music. And writing. Language would be different. Paintings. Photography. Ceramics. Molecular bonds and chemical reactions. Religion, spirituality, and psychology would be different. Remember how important the Sun and the Moon and the manner in which we see their light was to early religions and still is today. Just watch modern, secular, scientific humans feel superstitious during a total solar eclipse. Indeed, what we see the Sun as affects our biology and informs our evolutionary development. Perhaps the light we live within out of darkness affects our consciousness.
We take it for granted, don’t we, life beneath our Sun. We often don’t think how we are as shaped by our perception of light and color as we are by gravity, Earth’s magnetosphere, and the tides of the Moon. It shall be immensely different as we journey forth to explore and perhaps live upon other worlds similar yet so distinct from our Mother Planet.
William Dudley Bass
Monday 23 December 2024
Tuesday 31 December 2024
Shoreline/Seattle, WA
USA
Earth
Sol
Copyright © 2024 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.