So they're like black plants

That paper talks only about it producing red leaves, or "vermilion" as it calls them.

there are plenty of purple plants, im guessing certain plants evolved to do this, and most remain green(there also other complicated mechanism like cam, c2,,,etc. plants can get sunburned if exposed to too much light.

they are more dark green if they a understory plant, or a shaded plant. there of course plants that have no chlorophyll whatsoever. 2 types, one is mostly albino plants where they lose all thier chlorophyll, the other is mycoheterotrophic plants(either partial or fully). ever seen a albino redwood, apparently it lives off being attached to the roots of the parent plant where it came from or from nearby trees.

Albino plants are a thing, but they usually are attached to the main plant where they came from. albino redwoods is an example. fully parasitic plants usually dont have leaves or have a small nonfunctional ones. some parasitic plants is exist as filaments inside a host(no stem no, leaves whatsoever)(rafflesia, pilostyles). the most famous is miseltoe, which is hemiparasitics, as it can sitll fully photosynthesize.

partial and fully mycoheterotrophic orchids are fascinating. at least 1 kind is native to North america with many species(corallhiza, trifida being the most common since its a partial mycoheterotroph), gastrodia seems to be the most species rich MH.

they keep finding new thismia species(1 supposedly existed in america a century ago, but became extinct. the rest lives in South east asia, china, india, and australia area. they refind at least 2 thismia that went extinct but was found again in another area(T.kobensis, and T. neptunis). i find thismia the most fascinating one.

and South america has thier own thismia(its alleged that this is a different genus related to thismia), recently they seperated the African variety into its own family status.

So, what color were plants during the Hadean æon?

So, is the blue from the water in the plant or the air?

"Why" and "biology" famously do not get along. The best you can usually do is say it's evolutionarily advantageous because the true answer is usually a neural network the size of life itself. There are plenty of decent reasons that play parts that we can quibble over, though.

Purple Humans who don't need to eat.

In respect to green leaves I have read that it is most likely a peak. They can't get to a better colour that doesn't send away lots of energy because they would have to lose the ability to make energy from sunlight to get to a better way of doing it

Plants manage to use about 2% of the sunlight that hits them (the best get up to 6%) . Our rooftop solar does 22% (with the best managing 25%)

Same.

Color exists physically as different wavelengths of light. The thing "in your mind" is about non-natural colors which trigger multiple light cones in your eye and your brain interprets them a certain way different than the natural colors. In that sense you do interpret the wavelengths one way or another in your head, but the actual light wavelengths so exist.

The air is blue buddy so it come from thsi

Yeah wavelengths exist. But ALL color only exists in your mind as perception. Natural and non natural.

If color existed outside of light touching your eye, you would be able to deduce it without light.

Fun to think about.

Most physical objects I encounter are the same color up close that they are far away...

Edit: ITT, people who completely misunderstand my point downvoting me and being pedantic

Wouldn't it be a "lemmy" guess? I'll go ahead and see myself out.

Explain this then

Air is light blue because it filters out red, which is why chlorophyl has optimized for the mix of the remaining wavelengths yellow and blue, which is green. Color theory of additive blending.

(Our sun is slightly yellow, which is why the sky isn't cyan and why alot of tropical plants are darker green close to brown/red)

We have diverse geography, and genetic diversity. Obviously this plant worked out a way to use the high energy of the wide green ranhe, without overcooking itself. But if you compare all plamt leaves and grasses of plant life green is the most common.

And why does the green spectrum have a lot of energy?

Sky isn't yellow over a cornfield

I'd have to go back and find the science article, but it was something about sunrise, sunset which would often provide end of spectrum red or blue, while full daylight provided a lot of green light spectrum. Plants having to balalnce processes in full spectrum would overload/oveheat so they evolved to reflect or transmit through 80% of that spectrum.

They mostly use red and blue for photosynthesis because those seem more steady during daylight hours in various seasons and hours of the day. Cloudy day still gets infrared end through etc.

The green overlaps into red and blue zones. Its not so much that it is higher energy than blue, but a wider amount of spectrum total energy the plant wants to avoid.

Why are plants purple?

with a slight bias towards green

And it's my understanding THATS why plants are green

They’re not anymore

Would you also say a mirror is green? Or a glass of water is blue? Windows are a greenish hue? Shaving foam is blue?

What color was the sky?

I came upon a silly scene,
As they opined 'bout blue,
"The lemming's comment rhymes!", I screamed
An experience quite new!

And here's the correct answer, boys and girls.

It was also a great pun for the topic being discussed.

If a leaf was broken up into microscopic bits and flung into the air you wouldn't be able to determine what color it was either. So at best the thing thats missing is that there's a lot less air.

I don't disagree. It's just that we don't frequently encounter throwing microscopic bits of things into the air in our lives, especially early lives. It's pretty normal to be curious about the color of the sky as a child, and it is not obvious that distance of air is what makes enough of a difference. I think you've entirely missed the point of my original comment.

To understand why the sky is blue and why butterfly wings are all sorts of colors even though the material itself is not that color is not something that is intuitive or easy to understand without a great deal of experience and prior knowledge.

Better question: "Why is the sky usually blue but sometimes red?"

Talking specifically about sunsets, not apocalyptic wildfire smoke

Actually, leaves look green because they don't absorb green light (that's why grow bulbs are red & blue)

It's the opposite, no? Red and green light have shorter wavelengths, so they get scattered before they reach our eyes, but the blue wavelengths are long enough that we actually see them

What is the color of a carbon atom?

No, it's well known Raleigh scattering. Red and green have longer wavelengths than blue. Just past red, in the "wavelengths too long to be seen" direction is infrared which we feel as heat, and which just makes things warm. If you go the other direction into "wavelengths too short to be seen" direction, past violet, you get into Ultra Violet or UV, which is ionizing radiation, and that's why UV is a skin cancer danger. The short wavelength blue light gets scattered, the longer wavelengths don't, so the sky appears blue, and the sun appears yellow.

Sorry, I gave an incomplete answer. It is my understanding that chloroplasts use the blue and red (high and low frequencies of visible light) and the remaining spectrum looks green because of the aforementioned bias with less "noise" to obfuscate the bias, otherwise chloroplasts would appear more yellow.

But truthfully I'm neither a physist nor a biologist and I was kinda hoping to employ Cunningham's law. So if I'm wrong please do correct me. Especially if it has to do with rods and cones since those never really made sense to me

Are you saying that chlorophyll naturally evolved to take in specific wavelengths of light given the availability of light in specific frequencies in response to how the sun's light moves through our amosphere? I would get it, but that would be so frustrating of a response to, "why air blue matter".

I mean, yeah. I'm reaching for the, "why", though. Specifically for chlorophyll, which reflects light with a specificity. As does carotene in dying trees in the fall.

Blue waves fast
Red waves slow

Easy as

Oh, damn. Reductionist.

I hate that one misclick can delete my comment.

Would that be a natural, logical discernment for someone trying to figure out why chlorophyll is green? I say that this is an unhinged take and everyone siding with it should feel like... an amount of bad. It's pretty misleading by virtue.

This comment here had a much more grounded explanation

Science is making mistakes towards to the truth

Incidentally it's the same reason between a sunset and smoke - more scattering.

Because evolution isn't actually guided and is really just a process of mutation, reassembly (for sexual species), then checking to see if it works well enough to pass genes on. Apparently red leaves work for that plant

Same color as animals were

Steve Mould has a great video digging into why things look white: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gug67f1_8jM

Probably not strictly translatable to all other colors, but a helpful illustration of how color is a result of the way objects interact with light, not inherent properties of the object itself.