The human eye and brain have a mechanism to adjust to a completely new environment, such as another planet, both in terms of color and intensity.
NASA's Curiosity robot takes a selfie on Mars. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The human brain is very good at adjusting to different lighting conditions. For example, when you wear a pair of tinted sunglasses, the color will initially appear more vivid, but after a while, the colors will start to look “normal” again. This also happens naturally as people age. The lenses of older people’s eyes will gradually become more yellow than when they were younger. However, they will not see the colors that way because the brain adjusts to the difference.
So how would the brain adjust to color in a completely new environment? Experts speculate about what color might look like on other planets.
The same mechanism that adjusts yellow lenses and tinted sunglasses may be at work when astronauts land on another planet, according to research by Michael Webster, a cognitive vision scientist at the University of Nevada. Depending on the dominant colors in the new environment, astronauts’ brains will recalibrate to perceive them as more neutral.
“My prediction is that when people go to Mars, the planet will no longer look red to their eyes over time,” Webster says. Instead, the Martian terrain will start to look more brown or gray, and the Martian ochre sky will appear bluer—not blue like on Earth, but significantly less orange than what humans see today.
Not all alien skies get bluer over time, however. It depends on the dominant color of the light coming through the atmosphere versus the dominant colors of the landscape. The opposite of orange on the color wheel is blue, so cooler tones might become more prominent as an astronaut’s brain moves toward neutrality. But if an astronaut lands on an exoplanet with purple vegetation and a yellow sky, the brain might adjust differently.
Human “filters” are not limited to color, but also to intensity. On a planet with a limited natural color palette, the brain would become attuned to very subtle changes in hue. Over time, astronauts would see duller colors as more vivid, and vice versa.
What if, instead of waiting for astronauts’ eyes and brains to adapt to a new planet, humans invented an autonomous filter for that environment? Derya Akkaynak, an engineer and oceanographer at the University of Haifa, and her lab colleagues are working on a similar problem. But her research is done in marine environments, not space.
In theory, if you know the composition of an exoplanet’s atmosphere and oceans, you can predict how light will interact with it. Experts can then use this information to create algorithmic filters that “correct” the colors of the environment. These filters could be installed in the visor of a spacesuit.
Until humans actually visit another planet, it’s impossible to know exactly how alien color adjustments work. But deep-sea research can provide a rough approximation. Akkaynak once went as deep as 100 feet underwater, deep enough to filter out all red light. “Everything looked yellow instead of blue, probably because I was trying to compensate for the lack of red,” Akkaynak told Live Science on September 27. “But overall, it was crazy.”
Thu Thao (According to Live Science )
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