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Posted on 02/24/2026 5:48:41 AM PST by SunkenCiv
...Chlorophyll, the main photosynthetic pigment of plants, absorbs mainly blue and red wavelengths from the Sun and reflects green ones, and it is this reflected light that gives plants their leafy color. This fact puzzles some biologists because the sun transmits most of its energy in the green part of the visible spectrum...
DasSarma thinks it is because chlorophyll appeared after another light-sensitive molecule called retinal was already present on early Earth. Retinal, today found in the plum-colored membrane of a photosynthetic microbe called halobacteria, absorbs green light and reflects back red and violet light, the combination of which appears purple.
Primitive microbes that used retinal to harness the sun's energy might have dominated early Earth...
retinal has a simpler structure than chlorophyll, and would have been easier to produce in the low-oxygen environment of early Earth, DasSarma said.
Also, the process for making retinal is very similar to that of a fatty acid, which many scientists think was one of the key-ingredients for the development of cells.
Lastly, halobacteria, a microbe alive today that uses retinal, is not a bacterium at all. It belongs to a group of organisms called archaea, whose lineage stretches back to a time before Earth had an oxygen atmosphere...
If future research validates the purple Earth hypothesis, it would have implications for scientists searching for life on distant worlds, the researchers say...
For example, one biomarker of special interest in astrobiology is the "red edge" produced by plants on Earth. Terrestrial vegetation absorbs most, but not all, of the red light in the visible spectrum. Many scientists have proposed using the small portion of reflected red light as an indicator of life on other planets.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
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Nothing Gold Can Stay
- Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
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How long before we hear of the Climate Change benefits of purple and the coming Global Purge of all things green chlorophyll?
4.something years!
Was the earliest atmosphere opaque? (Filled with clouds or not transparent to what we now call “visible light”?)
Or does this theory cover that period AFTER the release of the deadly oxygen by the simple cyno bacteria 3.5 to 3 billion years ago, but BEFORE chlorophyll evolved in modern plants?
🍁🍂
Well, that explains all of those blue-toned people running around in sci-fi movies!
Maybe the earth was purple, but there were no people yet, so nothing for purple people eaters to eat. So they left.
:) You must be as old as me.
Eggplant Earth.
Before his time -
I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
I only wanted one time to see you laughing
I only want to see you laughing in the purple rain
Purple rain, purple rain
Purple rain, purple rain
Purple rain, purple rain
I only want to see you bathing in the purple rain
That does check the boxes. 💜
Drinking a McDonald’s shake will turn you into a fat purple blob?
Hush!
My Woman From Tokyo...
That sounds like a strong case for funding a multi-year billion dollar Federal research initiative at liberal universities to better understand the racial implications on current and future societal diversity outcomes for accomodating special needs of purple people in historical chromatically disadvantaged communities of non-color.
/sarc off but would likely get funding at Stanford or Harvard.
Could be older. I remember when the song was a hit in 1958.
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