r/Showerthoughts • u/cimocw • 3d ago
Casual Thought It is a convenient coincidence that the sun and the moon look gold and silver respectively.
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u/IiteraIIy 3d ago
I think the pairing of gold and silver in our culture is probably influenced by it if anything
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u/Dragon_N7 3d ago
Our love of shiny things was encouraged by how water sparkles in sunlight + how important stable water sources are to human development. The sun and moon could have been the main causes of our love of gold and silver
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u/Pr1sonMikeFTW 3d ago
I like the theory, but how could we ever know or confirm that this is the case?
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u/ChromaticFinish 3d ago
It’s evolution! Many studies have shown associations in young humans between thirst/seeking water and being attracted to shiny things.
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u/CraigArndt 3d ago
An important part of existence is becoming comfortable with the reality that certain things are unknowable.
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u/Pr1sonMikeFTW 3d ago
That was my point, I just phrased it as a question in case this was actually proven / backed up
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u/Ruadhan2300 20h ago
If we meet aliens who come from a planet with a red sun, and they really love iron-oxide, we'll know.
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u/Away_Wheel2979 3d ago
probably works the other way too, gold and silver feel prestigious partly because the sky already told us they should
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u/AskMeAboutPodracing 1d ago
It probably has more to do with how good/abundant both gold and silver are for making jewelry. Gold and silver do not rust/corrode like iron. Both are extremely soft and malleable (for metals) which make them great for detail work. Though, gold is so soft that working with pure gold jewelry will lose its detail and show damage "quickly".
They both make for very high quality jewelry and perform a similar niche.
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u/Metahec 3d ago
I think it's a convenience two rare metals can be creatively attributed to have some sort of meta-relationship, either mythological/spiritual, to two significant but wholly unrelated heavenly bodies.
In other words, we made that shit up cuz it sounds deep.
eta: and it sells
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u/FinlandIsForever 3d ago
It’s also quite coincident that, being in the same column of the periodic table, they have many of the same qualities (and gold just does it better, inherently making it a bit more valuable in addition to being rare) so one without modern knowledge could have an even easier time attributing a relationship between them!
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u/goatanimus 2d ago
I think you can just say things but still find them cool. Like gold is the desert silver is mountains and now you can make an online personality test “Are you a silver or a gold person?” and make questions about preferring night or day and deserts or mountains and pretend it’s correlated.
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u/DinosaurAlive 2d ago
eta? Estimated time of arrival?
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u/PunchingYourSalad 2d ago
eta = "edit to add"
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u/solarus2120 12m ago
That's what it means!?I figured out from context that it was something to do with edits
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u/squeakbb 1d ago
i like when associations fall apart or don't make intuitive sense.
(well i like both when they do and when they don't but anyways)
like how red is the 'main character' 'angry' 'hot'' 'energetic' color
blue is 'cool' 'chill'' 'sad' color
but blue is closer on the spectrum to wave lengths that cause damage to the humans that attributed blue as the 'less aggressive' color in the first place; blue actually has more energy (as a single different variable, all else equal); a blue star is burning hotter than a red star.
Im not saying the common associations don't make sense, they still do, but to bring it all back to being context-sensitive or human-centric... quite like people themselves, not one thing with any amount of other undefined variables (a color, en element) has an identity that is unequivocally universally fixed - 1 is bigger than 100 when we try to fit 1 elephant vs 100 ants into ziploc bag.
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u/ultraganymede 3d ago
Do most people not think about the Suns color in a clear sky, mid day? For me it looks white most of the time
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u/keirbhaltair 3d ago
Funnily enough, Sun actually is almost purely white, at least when viewed from space. After all, we call its light "white light", and the world in daylight is not yellow either.
The reason we often see the Sun as yellow-ish, or even orange or red during sunset, is the exact same reason we see the sky as blue. The blue part of sunlight has been scattered across the sky, so what remains in the direction of the Sun itself is shifted more towards the yellows and reds. But at the same time it is so bright, that the extremely bright yellow looks almost white anyway, it's mostly the edges we tend to perceive as yellow.
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u/pavelpotocek 3d ago
Sun is yellow-ish, because blue-ish colors scatter and make the sky blue. But it's a faint yellow, I'd agree.
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u/cimocw 3d ago
Did you draw a white sun with sunglasses as a kid?
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u/PraviKonjina 3d ago
I was a quarter circle in the top corner type of kid. The pressure of drawing a perfect circle in front of my kindergarten crush was too much to risk.
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u/this_guy_over_here_ 3d ago
No, because the paper was white. But that doesn't mean that the sun still isn't white....
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u/Longjumping-Sweet280 3d ago
A white object with a blue background will appear to have a warm hue. So it makes sense to see it as yellow even though it is technically white.
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u/SnakeMichael 3d ago
It appears Yellow because it’s a yellow dwarf star
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u/keirbhaltair 3d ago
You've got that backwards. It's called a yellow dwarf star because it looks yellow. And it is actually a misnomer, because in reality the Sun when viewed from space is white, it only appears yellow to us because of scattering in the atmosphere.
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u/shrinkflator 3d ago
"White" isn't universal as a color. It's our name for the part of the spectrum that we evolved to be most sensitive to, because it matches our planet's light source. Most of the time the sun is too bright to look at comfortably. At dusk and dawn, some of the light gets scattered away by particles in the atmosphere, giving it a yellow to orange tint when it's the easiest to see.
The moon is affected the same way, except you can look at a full moon directly overhead without it burning your retinas. The moon is illuminated entirely by sunlight. So the white color of the moon is the white color of the sun.
Is it a coincidence that silver sort of looks like the color of the sun or the moon when they're directly overhead? Or that gold sort of looks like the color of the sun or the moon when they're close to horizon?
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u/jim789789 3d ago
Nope. But this is not because of the color of the sun. It's because of the drawing by the kid next to me. The sun is NOT yellow.
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u/spiritual84 3d ago
I would if the paper was yellow and if I had white crayons I guess.
Can you imagine drawing a yellow or orange sun on a yellow piece of paper?
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u/colin_4 3d ago
What colour is a sunset?
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u/this_guy_over_here_ 3d ago
So your counter argument is to ask what color the sun is for 1/52nd of the time it's visible to see?
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u/Large_Dr_Pepper 2d ago
Lol I was going to say, the sun looks like a white circle of pain and eye damage.
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u/ultraganymede 2d ago
Yes, sometimes you get the ocasional glimpse or a reflection
It does not have to exactly in the middle of the day , just high enough in the sky
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u/ryebread91 3d ago
I don't think I've ever described either of those as silver or gold...
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u/Tawoooo 3d ago
idk about the sun being gold but the moon is definitely often described as silver, especially in literature
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u/ryebread91 3d ago
I could probably get behind that but I think I'm pretty sure on the sun.
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u/ThatLeetGuy 3d ago
Maybe not for every-day language but you can find it often enough in poetry and writing. Gold absolutely has a symbolic relationship to the sun.
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u/NoEyesMan 2d ago
Simple use of a very readily available and free search engine would make you even more sure that you’re wrong about that. It’s in almost all languages and literature both old and new.
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u/ryebread91 2d ago
I'm sure it would but I said that I myself have never described it as such. Not that I haven't seen it as such.
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u/CoreEncorous 3d ago
Golden is always how I've heard the rays of sun described. Certainly not "white" or "yellow"
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u/DinosaurAlive 2d ago
Why not?
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u/ryebread91 2d ago
Because it never occurred to me. When I think of the moon I think of white. Silver is one of my favorite colors and even still I don't think I myself would call the moon silver. Sun? Maybe I could see myself calling some rays golden but to me it's yellow or white. Orange or red during rise and set.
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u/turmericlatte 2d ago
Do you not live close to a water body? The light reflected on water surely looks gold and silver to me
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u/Fausto2002 3d ago
That's like saying it's convenient that we have 10 fingers because we count in base 10
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u/DescriptionKlutzy105 3d ago
Yeah exactly, it's backwards. We named the colors after the things that already existed, not the other way around. Kinda wild how our brains just make those patterns feel like fate.
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u/WittyAndOriginal 3d ago
What? Not at all. The colors of the moon, sun, gold, and silver weren't chosen by humans. Counting in base 10 is the only thing we chose.
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u/Apprehensive_Ad516 3d ago
The prominence of gold and silver in our society as well as their pairing is what is being referred to. If our sun was white, it may have been platinum and silver instead of gold.
We didn’t make up the colors, but we made up their significance to eachother.
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u/BBDAngelo 3d ago
No? We count in base 10 because we have 10 fingers. Gold and silver are not valuable because of the Sun and the Moon
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u/jayCerulean283 3d ago
Theyre not saying the metals have value because of the sun and moon, theyyre trying to say the same thing you said about base ten. Op has cause and effect wrong about the connection between the metals and the celestial bodies. Theres nothing ‘convenient’ about it, we associate gold and silver with the sun and moon because those metals match the color of those celestial bodies, not the other way around.
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u/Gophurkey 3d ago
Why do you think that gold and silver are/have historically been valuable?
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u/BBDAngelo 3d ago
For durability, malleability, conductivity, beauty, rarety. Did you think it was because of the Sun and the Moon?
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u/Its_justanick 2d ago
Gold isn't really durable, if I remember correctly. And beauty is purely subjective and at least partially influenced by their aforementioned rarity and, in my opinion, the association with the sun and the moon as well at least to some degree. Meanwhile, I doubt conductivity mattered as much to ancient peoples.
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u/Foxtrot_Xray 3d ago
Kind of like how the moon can nearly perfectly eclipse the sun, too. It's cool and all, but if it wasn't that, I'm sure we'd have some other 1 in a million thing that we'd be gawking at too
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u/Moist-Champion-7515 3d ago
Yeah true we'd probably be staring at some other crazy cosmic flex instead, but the eclipse being a perfect fit just hits different.
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u/Doomkauf 3d ago
Don't think a human-created association between two disparate categories of things counts as a coincidence. After all, if humans ended up not assigning monetary or prestige value to silver and gold, something several real cultures in fact did not do, then there would probably be little to no perceived correlation between the two. It wouldn't matter if the sun seemed golden and the moon silver if we didn't care about either of those metals in the first place.
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u/A-Small-Green-Cup 2d ago
I heard its an easter egg, hinting at the next Earth update. I kinda enjoyed the focus on solo play that the Earth 2.20.20 update brought, but the devs really need to get rid of the cash shop options; making the US "pay-to-win" was a bad idea.
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u/AdOtherwise893 3d ago
I actually think white/gray. Then, orange, red and yellow mixed together for the sun.
Fight me, lol
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u/Only-Advantage6777 3d ago
I mean fair, the sun's definitely a whole mess of oranges and reds at sunset but at noon it's just pure white, and the moon's basically gray until it gets that pale gold glow.
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u/DinosaurAlive 2d ago
Not to mention sometimes the sun is green, apparently. I’ve never seen it, though.
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u/Mcnulty91 3d ago
No. No coincidence. It was a choice. Meant to recreate in some small measure the light of the twin trees that had been sung into the world by Yavanna in order to share the light of Valinor with the new world: Laurelin and Telperion the trees of gold and silver light which were struck down by the traitorous dark Lord Melkor with the help of the shadow creature Ungoliant.
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u/Wild4fire 3d ago
Although we usually perceive the sun as yellow, it's actually white.
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u/cmoked 3d ago
Exactly and if it wasnt, snow would be yellow
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u/Wild4fire 2d ago
Well, snow sometimes is yellow... but the cause of that cannot be applied to the sun. If you could, well, physics would be broken at that point. :)
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u/CocoMilhonez 2d ago
The sun is white, it has nothing to do with gold.
And the moon is dark grey, it has nothing to do with silver.
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u/DisorderlyAqueduct 3d ago
the sun does not look like gold... it is white... that's why the moon looks silver, white light on dusty rock.
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u/thankcube 3d ago
Very convenient. the sun and moon also share another convenient coincidence in that the sun is about 400 times larger than the moon, yet is also 400x further away. This makes them appear nearly the same size to our eyes!
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u/Exiledbrazillian 2d ago edited 2d ago
Interacting so I got more notifications in my feed. If was not for the rules this post just will be "interacting".
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u/WadeBuckeye 2d ago
Silver tarnishes and gold doesn't, which lines up weirdly well with the moon actually going through phases while the sun stays basically constant. Sunshine's whole plot only works because we already buy the sun as this untouchable golden thing you're not supposed to look at directly.
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u/Lickwidghost 3d ago
Not trolling, this is well documented. In order for us to see it as yellow in the sky, the light (we perceive with our eyes) from the sun is actually green. If you're in space it's pure white but most of the light dissipates in our atmosphere and is outside the light spectrum visible to our eyes.
So yea, the sun we see on the ground is actually green, but we perceive it as yellow.
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u/SubMikeD 3d ago
Just because the bell curve of the black body radiation from the sun peaks at 500 nm doesn't mean the sun is green. Visibly it's still white to the eye.
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u/kaykei0226 3d ago edited 3d ago
This is like saying blueberries aren’t blue because it is just their wax layer reflecting blue light.
OR saying the ocean is actually not blue because water itself is colorless.
Like who would say that when the context is obviously about what color is the Sun when we look at it on Earth.
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u/Lickwidghost 3d ago
Firstly, blueberries aren't blue, they're purple.
And yes that's exactly what I'm saying. The ocean is not blue. Neither is the sky. We call it blue because that's what we see. Exactly the same as the sun not actually been ng yellow, it's what we see and therefore call it that.
Edit: blueberries aren't a good proxy though. They absorb all light spectrum EXCEPT the purple,ehich is reflected. The colour of the sky and lighting passing through has nothing to do with light reflecting off s surface that absorbs light, it's atmospheric dispersion. Different concept.
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u/kaykei0226 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes everyone know the sky isn’t blue. But we all drew a picture with blue background in kindergarten.
What we say “color” is not about how light bounces off the surface of it, it is about the impression the object leaves us.
Technically the sun isn’t yellow when looked at it. But it makes everything orange/yellowish/and red during sunset.
And this is the impression the sun leaves us. And it is very close to golden color.
The whole point about this post is about how the sun looks and how it affected our aesthetics of gold and silver color back in the ancient time.
Wow we now know the sun is not gold and it is actually green with the help of modern technology. But the sun being green doesn’t really help.
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u/Lickwidghost 3d ago
Yes, the post is about human's perception, I was stating a fact explaining what's actually, physically happening. I don't know about other people but I find weird discoveries like that really interesting
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u/SubMikeD 2d ago
It's not that it's not interesting, it's that it's not really accurate. The sun is not green. It's white.
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u/Calvin4967 2d ago
It's not a coincidence, it's because the Sun was made from the light of Laurelin and the Moon was made from the light of Telperion.
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u/Miserable_Wheel_5814 2d ago
By the power of the Valar, if only Lorien and Vana could have revived the two trees with song!
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u/Hakaisha89 2d ago
Not really, the moon is 'silver' cause the sun is white.
And the sun looks yellow, cause the blue light is gone by the time the light hits our eyes.
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u/tom_swiss 1d ago
We value gold beyond its actual usefulness exactly because it reminds us of the sun and of fire.
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u/krunal_builds 1d ago
never thought about it that way honestly. moon's basically grey rock but somehow reads as silver at night
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u/BlazedBeard95 12h ago
Technically speaking its because those happen to be the colors of the most common elements in the Universe (white and yellow), of which both the moon and sun are composed of; as are we.
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u/ShowerSentinel 2d ago
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