Colour blind?

[Killraven]

I got this idea from a comment by Bayne in another thread (cheers matey! )

Much has been said before about the martians' eyes - colour, shape, size etc. etc. - but I don't think anyone's mentioned how/what they actually see...

Does anyone have any ideas on this? Could they see only in black and white, or do they see colours, and if so, any preference in the spectrum? Do they see colours like we do? Assuming that these creatures had evolved far beyond humanity, losing their limbs in the process , surely their eyes would be far more complex than ours?

[Tripod]

Passage from 'What we saw from the Ruined House':
,,The Martians had what appears to have been an auditory organ, a single round drum at the back of the head-body, and eyes with a visual range not very different from ours except that, according to Philips, blue and violet were as black to them.''

That's all I could find out about their sight.

Tripod

[Killraven]

Well done Tripod! I'd missed that line!

[Bayne]

[glow=red,2,300]The inability to see blue isn't that surprising, in nature blue is the rarest of colours, on Mars it might be rarer still. [/glow]

[EvilNerfherder]

In the movie they ignored the book and went for the triple lens thing.. remember the thing they captured and set up with the red, green and blue lenses which merged the picture into a weird fisheye blurry technicolor type of effect.But they reinvented alot of the Martian's technology for the movie, probably to make it easier for the punters to understand or perhaps to make them seem even more alien.

[Killraven]

EvilNerfherder said:

or perhaps to make them seem even more alien.

...well, less American anyway... and more Commie??! ;D

[krys666]

So they see our sky as black to them. So to them it's night time ALL the time except there is a big yellow sun for most of the day?

That must seem wierd.

And also water (which reflects the blue in the sky).

And on the film. There eye/camera has three lens (whatever), red green and blue.
RED: Primary color isn't it?*
BLUE: Secondary Colour*
GREEN: Secondary Colour*

These will act as filters, filters that only let that same colourpass through it. Well these 3 colours, if you go back through them to their primary colours, you would have all 3 wouldn't you? So wouldn't they be able to see ALL colours but just some are differnent to them. Not a black and white effect.

* i may be wrong on the primary/secondary colours so if i am tell me to hurry on to school when it opens again!

[Killraven]

Tell me if I'm wrong someone but I'm sure Red, Blue Green are the three primary colours..

This suggests that the film martians must have had a series of lenses at the back of the eye that 'mixed' these colours into secondary ones according to the way they saw things. Which of course, could be quite different to the way WE see things...?

[krys666]

Yes o.k.!

But... one possibility, the martians are greatly advanced more than we. We have glasses (somethings that change the image so it appears corect to us, it our retinas are short sighted ect, there are 2 types of lenses)... (i may have got some words wrong then...)


So wouldn't the martians be able to make something like glasses? Or contact lenses? Or some sort of laser eye treatment?

I know the film is 1953 and the martians can see perfectly on mars and all the other possibilities that correct me.

[Bayne]

[glow=red,2,300]Regarding colours...

Blue red and yellow are the primary colours, of which all other colours are made. Green being the result of mixing blue and yellow together. TV, though is made up of red blue and green pixels (or at least it was, don't know if it still is) how they get yellow then I don't know...

There are colours in nature that we don't see that other animals do, many flowers that we see as yellow actually are a colour that only bees can see called Bee Purple that is too high in Ultraviolet for our eyes, we can only see part of that so it looks yellow to us. Eagles apparently see a whole new section of colours with hues, tints etc unimaginable to us. Of course many animals don't see many colours, dogs and cats for example see mostly in shades with exceptions for red. Blue being the rarest colour in nature it is not visible to a great many animals.

Interesting thing, it was noted that amongst Australian Native peoples colour blindness is far more common, this condition however improves night vision and distance vision. Recent studies of Indonesian sea gypsies show a host of adaptations for underwater vision, some of which seem to come from repeated use, in that other people who spend enough of their lives underwater will get similar changes, while others are inherited. [/glow]

[Charles]

That's fascinating about the native Australians being prone to color blindness. Is there any pattern to it, ie certain colors?

[Bayne]

[glow=red,2,300]Sorry, thats about the extent of what I can remember of the article, other than the absence of colour meaning that tone was seen better, hence the advantages. [/glow]

[Killraven]

krys666 said:

Yes o.k.!


So wouldn't the martians be able to make something like glasses? Or contact lenses? Or some sort of laser eye treatment?

...that's assuming of course that the martian's knew what they couldn't see. If they didn't have the ability to see blue, then would they know what 'blue' was? If not, then they wouldn't try and correct their vision to see it. If you know what I mean.

[krys666]

o.k. it seems that i'm not going to win this battle...

But.. now i'm just guessing... if like on our plannet there are other creatures, insects, birds ect, and we know and can now with technology, see what other colours they see. Like bees with infa-red (am i right in that?).

So if there are other creatures on mars, mabey the martians have a way of detecting if a creature can see something else?

I'm not saying that the martians can see the insect's vision colour but if they knew somehow that the insect or whatever could see something they couldn't? How did we first get to know about bees and other coulours we can't see withg our naked eye?

[Topaz]

I know this thread has been dead for a bit, but since it's right up my alley, maybe I can toss in a little something. I work in prepress/graphic arts, so we get a grand pile of color theory shoved onto our plates on a daily basis.

Red/Green/Blue (RGB) are the 'additive' primary colors. That is, if you mix red, green, and blue light beams (you 'add' them), you get white. No light equals black. Your eyes have certain types of cells that 'measure' light levels, and there are different types sensitive to each primary color. (There are fewer red-sensitive cells than the others, which is why red light doesn't hurt your night vision as much as other colors.)

The 'subtractive' primaries are Cyan (kinda light blue), Magenta (like a rich, vibrant, pink), and Yellow. Theoretically, you could mix them in equal quantities to get black, since each absorbs (subtracts) it's opposite color of light. That is, Cyan absorbs Red, Magenta absorbs Green, and Yellow absorbs Blue. You paint or color an object with a mix of dyes that absorb varying amounts of each RGB primary. Whatever is left is what's bounced back to your eye and that remaining mix of light is what you see as the 'color' of the object. So a 'red' ink absorbs a lot of green and blue light, for example, while a 'yellow' ink absorbs mostly blue light and reflects in the red and green portions of the spectrum. In the real world, we can't make a really pure cyan ink, so we add black for contrast, resulting in the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black you see in your printer's ink cartridges.

The fact that the George Pal Martian had separate eyes for each primary, rather than merging the sensors on a single retina like our eyes, is kinda cool. It was great that they had the eyes locked together as one unit - you'd want to merge the view from each eye to get a true color image. In fact, since each eye would be all one type of sensor, they'd theoretically have much higher resolution in their vision. HD eyes!

In both the book and the movie, the range of colors the Martian's eyes could see (their 'gamut') would depend upon the frequency response of their retinal cells, so it's quite likely they'd have a different gamut than our eyes, having evolved on another world. In fact, most people have slightly different gamuts from each other. I remember an experiment in a physics lab class I had in college, involving spectroscopy. We figured out that my lab partner could see slightly farther into the violet than I could, but that I could see farther into the red.

If you really want to know more about measuring and comparing the color response of the human eye to 'reality', probably the most comprehensive reference I know about is at: www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/wcolor.html, although, be warned, it can get rather technical!

The human eye is most sensitive in the green-yellow part of the spectrum, because we evolved near lots and lots of green foliage. We see green-yellow colors very sharply and can detect very subtle differences in them, and sense contrasts between them and reddish colors very, very well. Since the light bounced from objects on the surface of Mars is so heavy in the red end of the spectrum, the Martians would have little use for much acuity in the blue/green end. Likely they'd be able to see much farther into the red than we could - in other words, somewhat into our infrared. Makes it easy to understand how they could work and hunt into the evening hours so readily. And since they wouldn't have as many retinal cells in the green/blue range, their omnipresent green light would be much like red to us - it wouldn't hurt the night vision much.

Well, my color theory teachers would be proud.

Hope this is helpful!

[malfunkshun]

interesting stuff there topaz. also, have you noticed that when you lay magenta paint on really think, its red, but if you thin it, it becomes magenta? ;D

anywho, about blue being the rarest color... i'd never heard of this before. is it just relatively rare, or is it really rare? because blue seems pretty common to me (at least on planet earth)...

also newborn star clusters are blue. although in about 50 billion years, when all the stars are either burned out or inflated giants, red will be the predominant color and blue probably won't exist at all, unless you're traveling at relatavistic speeds and notice a blue shift

[kingofthemorlocks]

Killraven said:

...that's assuming of course that the martian's knew what they couldn't see. If they didn't have the ability to see blue, then would they know what 'blue' was?

Sounds a bit like H.G.'s "The Country of the Blind" in which the villagers who'd been blind and nearly eyeless for generations had lost words like "see," "vision," "color," etc., and when a man arrived from outside the valley and could see, they thought he was a lunatic.

[Topaz]

Thanks, Malfunkshun. It's not often I get to put this stuff to use outside the office. ;D

A friend of mine in high school was always fond of saying "There is no blue food!" I'm not quite sure what the point of her signature statement was, other than perverse adolescent individualism, but I guess she was right. After all (and this was another one she liked), "while there are blueberries, there are no blue berries."

And I'm dangerously close to losing my point here! At the risk of sounding 'lecturish' (and thump me if I get there)...

"Red" and "Blue" are just subjective names assigned to relative wavelengths in our visual spectrum. Going back to my physics-lab example, my partner could see colors she would call 'violet' that I would call 'black,' since apparently I'm closer to being a Martian than she was. My definition of 'violet' was pushed towards the 'blue,' from her point of view, but I still would say that I can see 'violet'. So the Martians would say (telepathically, of course) that they saw 'blue,' even if we'd call those wavelengths 'green.'

It would have been more accurate for Wells to have said that the Martians had a visual range from say, 800nm to 470nm, but then he'd sound like Verne and I wouldn't be able to spout color theory over the internet like some overly-tenured professor.

This whole mess is why, whenever you go into a print shop or prepress house, you'll always see a 'light booth' that has standardized lighting of a certain color, and the whole thing is painted a medium grey. It gives everyone a common color reference for viewing the work. If someone says of the art, "I'd like this a little warmer (redder) please," while they're standing under office flourescent tubes, is that because of the lighting or because of the art? You can't tell. Office lights are a ghastly blue-green-white, compared to sunlight, which is why people always look dead in indoor photos taken under that kind of lighting. Take the art outside, and maybe then it's warmer without you lifting a finger. Every printing device and every monitor and every eyeball has a different gamut (range of colors it can print/sense), so unless you put everything under standardized conditions, verbal descriptions of 'color' mean exactly nothing.

It's all so amazingly subjective. This is also why, if you want to watch a prepress person roll their eyes, tell them you want the colors of your printed piece to match how it looked on your monitor. It's like a bad joke in our industry.

[Killraven]

Cheers Topaz, I've learnt a lot from that

With such a "blue blindness", it makes you wonder really what the martians saw as the sky or the oceans

[malfunkshun]

Killraven said:

Cheers Topaz, I've learnt a lot from that

With such a "blue blindness", it makes you wonder really what the martians saw as the sky or the oceans

according to the book, blue and violet appeared as black to them. so, the oceans and the sky probably appeared black or dark shades of grey.