Black plants and whether or not they're edible

[sailorhathor]

Hi, I'm working on a book that features aliens from a planet that orbits a red dwarf star. One of the theories I've read through research is that the plants on this planet would be black and dark purple. One of the sites that I read explained it this way:

As indicated in NASA studies announced in 2007, plants evolved under dim red dwarf suns or in

Comments

[essayofthoughts]

Well in the Old Man's War series the science isn't always wonderful (has alien DNA being "translated" to human DNA for splicing purposes), but when it comes to planetary stuff its pretty good imo. It points out that the more similar an alien ecosystem is to Earth's the more likely it is that diseases present on the planet would be able to make the hop skip and a jump of evolution necessary for them to be able to infect humans and other creatures from Earth ecosystems. Another thing it points out is that habitable planets would be rare, and likely fought over by any species to which they would be habitable, if there were other alien species out there, though only half of it would be an actual battle - the other half would be seeing if your kind could actually survive there. Just because it has an ecosystem and pseudo-plantae doesn't mean the soils would be any good for Earth plants, so you might have to fix the soil with fertilizers or (if tech is suitably advanced) nanobots able to break down the alien molecules into something Earth plants could use.

There would also be the risk of human infection of a planet - bringing in diseases and bugs which could damage the ecosystem if they were similar enough, bringing in invasive plants and animals the ecosystem isn't able to deal with, especially if the plant/animal has been genetically modified to be hardier than it would be back on Earth, while still providing a high yield of harvestable material/milk/meat/wool etc.. There is also the possibility of species which might consider humans nothing more than tasty-tasty snacks, regardless of if human-flesh is good for them or bad for them, or anything else - to an alien species we might taste like delicious delicious chocolate, but have something in our system as dangerous to them as arsenic is to us.

That's all I can recall right off the top of my head, but I might be able to recall more with time. If I can't, well I hope this is enough to give you some ideas to bounce around :)

[sailorhathor]

Thank you! That does give me a few things to kick around.