Okay, so…You go out on the roof at night to look at the stars, but the whole sky is
red! Like it’s filled with ketchup – the shooting stars making French fries in the
heavens! This is incredible, but could it happen?...
You’ve been asking yourself that question your whole life. But you wouldn’t know that
now. You just woke up, dazed and confused in some kind of lab. You don't remember who
you are or how you got here.
Well, You feel ok, your eyes are just a little sore. You see a bunch of containers and cages
with cockroaches, snakes, dung beetles, eagles – a tarsier stares at you with its big bulgy
eyes. A cat runs under your feet before you can even react.
Now, you hear voices coming toward the room. Your intuition tells you to get out of this
place as fast as possible. The pursuers run after you. You hear them yelling “Stop!”
and something else you can’t make out.
You find yourself in a long corridor and burst through the fire exit at the end. You're in
the middle of a green clearing. The huge building you ran out of looks like some secret base.
You climb the high fence surrounding the complex and run into the woods.
After a while, you’re convinced you’ve lost your pursuers. Now you can take a break
and try to understand what's happening. You climb a high hill and look around. A gorgeous
red sunset momentarily gives you some inner peace. You spot a town far off in the distance.
The main thing is to get there before dark…
Your running becomes a jog, then a brisk walk, and soon you’re barely moving. You’re
exhausted, and that’s when you see silhouettes of people with flashlights coming up on you.
You don't have the strength to run further, so you decide to hide in a tall tree. They
pass below without noticing you, but that’s when you look up and see something that almost
makes you fall over…
The sun has already gone below the horizon, but the sky is flooded with red. You see the
moon shining bright yellow, thousands of orange, yellow, white, and blue stars speckle the
sky.
What's going on here? This can't be real. Has something happened with the earth's atmosphere?
Or maybe you're on another planet entirely!? The combined beauty and fear of space painted
red brings a tear to your eye.
You climb down and build a fire – it’s late and getting cold. You don't remember
where you got these skills, but you do it without matches and lighters – all sticks
and stones! But…the flame… it’s transparent, almost invisible! It’s because of the orange-red
glow coming from the sky. The green leaves of the trees mix with the red above and look
brown.
You could observe this new world for days, but the sound of twigs and leaves crunching
pulls you out of your thoughts. Fear gives you strength, and you run to the town. Car
horns, alarms – the sounds of civilization grow louder. You're almost there. Finally,
the forest ends, and you find yourself on the road. An ambulance passes you, but you
can hardly see its red warning lights working because they’re masked by the red glow from
space.
Suddenly, bits of memory come back to you. You're a scientist. You’ve studied space
your whole life. And now you know why it’s red!!
It seems a super-powerful star has formed near the Earth – it’s the only reasonable
answer! Space is usually black because stars are too far away from each other and from
our planet. The closest they get is 4 light-years away, and that trip would still take 137,000
years to get from A to B! The light they emit simply can’t illuminate that vast space
in between.
But it can and does when you shorten the gap. You know this because it’s exactly why the
Horsehead Nebula is surrounded by reddish-pink space. The immense light from nearby blue
stars gets absorbed by hydrogen, the most common substance in the Universe. Then, charged
hydrogen atoms collide with electrons, and red light is what we get.
... If a blue star 75,000 times more powerful than our sun has somehow come near Earth,
then our planet – no, our entire solar system! – is in danger! You need to find people
and warn them as soon as possible!
You run along the road, and that’s when you see your pursuers come out of the woods
where you just were. You speed up and find yourself on a busy street. You want to shout
for everyone to hide in their homes, lock up in their basements. But…you notice something.
Everybody’s completely calm. The night sky is red, and all these people aren’t even
bothered in the slightest! It seems to be normal for them. Maybe you really are on another
planet?
You didn’t even notice you’d stopped moving, and that’s when the people from the base
catch up with you. They don't look mean, on the contrary, they're happy to see you!
"Why did you run away? What happened?" one of them asks. "You tell me. Why is space red?"–
you shout back. They look at you with a smile and say that YOU did it. "Did what?" – you’re
confused beyond comprehension. That’s when the rest of your memories come flooding back…
You're a scientist who’s been researching vision, especially in animals whose eyesight
is hundreds of times better than humans – cockroaches, snakes, dung beetles, eagles, tarsiers, cats.
You’ve managed to combine the properties of their unique vision and integrate it into
human eyes. YOUR eyes. Now you can see not just super far and clearly, you also see in
different spectra: gamma, ultraviolet, infrared, energies no other human eye can pick up!
Your vision has been getting better every hour since the experiment. The first color
you see on hyped-up sensitivity is red. Space is black as it always was, but you can see
the glow from the Horsehead Nebula and other super-powerful stars that light up hydrogen
atoms. The only side-effect is that you temporarily lost your memory, so you didn't recognize
your lab partners!
The red spectrum is just the beginning. Your vision will only advance further, allowing
you to see other colors and energies. Powerlines and microwaves will glow! The night sky, for
you, will turn into an incredibly beautiful mix of hues.
So yeah, outer space could be red in one case – if your vision allows you to see it!
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