So I was watching a video on color television and it prompted a few thoughts. Now as many of you know monitor color comes from the additive properties of Red, Blue, and Green. Mix Red and Green and you get yellow, Red and Blue creates purple and mixed in the correct ratios every color can be generated from just Red, Blue, and Green. This works because in your eye you have ‘cones’ that are sensitive to those three colors but with a bit of an overlap, so that for example yellow light activates both the red and green cones in your eye, thus you see the yellow.

However the process is a little different the colors created by the RGB method. That monitors is not actually creating yellow light, but rather is emitting Red and Green light in a specific ration activating the red and green cones in your eye to the same degree that actual yellow light would have and your brain detects that level of activation and interprets it as yellow light, even though there is no yellow light present.

So if there is an alien that has a different method of color perception, a different mix of cones, or their vision system reads wavelengths directly, a human monitor would never appear to them in full color, but always in a mix mash of Red, Blue, Green.

This is something I will need to keep in mind as I craft stories with aliens.