What If You Discovered A New Color? | Unveiled

What If You Discovered a New Color?

It may feel as though it’s impossible to create something that has literally never been seen before. But what would happen if even the fundamental way we perceive the world around us was changed in a tiny but unprecedented way?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; What if you discovered a new color?

Outside of saying it’s just “something you can see”, actually defining a color is pretty tricky. It’s a feature of visual perception denoted by language, via the names of its various categories – purple, green, orange, and so on. But, we can only really appreciate colors because our eyes are designed to receive and interpret them in a very specific way using specially-designed cells.

Rod cells are the simpler type of photoreceptor generally concerned with light and dark and, while we have over 90 million of them in our retinas, they primarily work in low-level light. Cone cells, however, are most responsible for our perception of color. The visible light spectrum, our “rainbow”, creates different colors because these colors exist on different wavelengths… Cone cells process information from the various wavelengths, and though each eye has only six million of them, they’re why we’re able to appreciate our multi-colored experience. More specifically, there are L-cones, M-cones and S-cones, which see long, medium and short wavelengths respectively (or red, green and blue), meaning we see in trichromatic color vision.

Of course, there are exceptions. Color-blindness affects an estimated 250 million people worldwide and happens when one or more of these cone types are defective, so people struggle to see reds, red-green colors, or blue-yellows. Technically, one way to create a new color for people to perceive is by creating technology to correct color-blindness, which some companies are attempting to do. If successful, this would enable color-blind people to see things that they previously couldn’t even imagine.

But, if you’re not color-blind, the biology of our eyes means it’s essentially impossible to create a new color. You could perhaps concoct a new or rare shade along the existing spectrum of colors, but creating something totally new is a no go - without completely rewriting accepted human biology, that is. So, if you just plain stumbled across a ball of “new color”, you’d also be a wholly unique human being. Or, maybe you’re just a human being of the future, with some kind of cybernetic eyes that could eventually allow us to perceive other types of light from across the electromagnetic spectrum, that are currently invisible as standard.

There are already examples of something like this in the natural world. The mantis shrimp has arguably the most unique eyes on Earth. Where humans have only three types of color-coding cone cells, the mantis shrimp has twelve to sixteen. This means these shrimps can effectively see up to thirteen more colors than we can, and countless more when you consider the shades and blends possible between those extra colors as well.

Their unprecedented visual set-up also allows mantis shrimps to tap in to other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. If, in the future we’re able to splice the genetics of different animals together - a pretty frightening but also pretty feasible possibility - perhaps we’ll see people purposefully enhanced with mantis shrimp eyes...

Such a move would clearly pose a very complex ethical conundrum, and such a change could well prove too much for the human brain to even cope with. Mantis shrimps are also notably aggressive, and though there’s no established link, perhaps their mood is due to their hyper-sensitive vision… If it is, who knows how humans would react to a dramatically enhanced eyeball. That said, we also have butterflies... Some of which boast five different types of cone cell, presenting them with two extra colors compared to a human. Unlike the mantis shrimp, butterflies aren’t at all noted for being aggressive - so our hypothetical super-vision might not be too much to bear.

In truth, the general quest to discover new colors is a very human thing to do. From scientists to designers, we’ve been blending supposedly unique shades for centuries - although, because of our visual limitations, a “new color” is only ever an artificially created hue or tone that we’ve never blended before. For example, in 2009, Oregon State University created a supposedly new color called YInMn Blue; a very bright shade of blue, which was eventually adopted by Crayola and made into a crayon. Similarly, in the 1970s, a pharmaceutical company accidentally created a shade of red called PR254, which was then mass-produced and ultimately became known as the iconic sports car shade; Ferrari Red. But, strip both colors back, and YInMIN Blue is still blue and Ferrari Red is still red.

They’re still not that little ball of all-new color that’s never ever been seen before. It’s a completely alien concept that’s sometimes used in pop culture sci-fi, and if it ever were discovered it’d quite literally change our view of the world, the universe and life in general. In science fiction, new colors are sometimes used to show how different other worlds and species are from us, or as a horror trope to make us doubt the most basic facts of life.

But arguably the scariest situation would to be the one who knows about and can perceive the color which no-one else believes in. You’d find yourself alone in the way you visualise life, unable to describe anything you see to anyone else because it’s just plain un-knowable to them. There wouldn’t even be words in the dictionary to match what was in front of you. You’d probably find yourself as the subject of endless scientific study, or else used for your apparently unnatural abilities - as a human detector for radiation, perhaps, if your souped-up senses allow you to see it.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that humans will simply evolve to have better, more capable eyes in the future, with more and more colors gradually revealed to us. But, until then, if you unearthed a new color tomorrow, you’d be one in seven billion; a unique human specimen, bizarrely cut off from the rest of society by a linguistic barrier that prevents you from expressing the indescribable and beautiful things your inhuman eyes allow you to see. And that’s what would happen if you discovered a new color.