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

[ffutures]

This may help with current knowledge, I thin 2007 is a little out of date

[ffutures]

I forgot to say, take a look at Bujold's "Vorkosigan" novels for some examples of the problems - the main planet, Barrayar, has native plants which people can't even touch without violent allergic reactions. No question of eating them, they're terraforming the place by slash and burn methods to wipe out the native plants and replace them with Earth plants.

[full_metal_ox]

Comes to that, are alien life forms under any obligation to be classifiable as plants, animals, fungi, and so forth, or will evolution have taken directions that render anything resembling Earth taxonomies meaningless?

[sailorhathor]

Thank you, there are some things here I can research and possibly use to my advantage.

[sailorhathor]

>> there's no reason that some couldn't be nutritious and good-tasting while others could be spectacularly toxic

This is pretty much what I want. I want there to be interesting conflict but some plants that can go either way (we can eat some of their food, they can eat some of ours, discovery of each other's cultures through food, research to figure out how to possibly make the unedible stuff edible, etc).

[mindways]

If the two planets (Earth and this alien one) were seeded with the building blocks for life from the same source, would that help at all with the suspension of disbelief? If some alien plants could be consumed by humans after a detoxifying process, would that help at all as well?

"Yes" on both counts.

[sailorhathor]

\o/ hee

[essayofthoughts]

Have you had any pokes at other sci-fi books? John Scalzi's Old Man's War series does talk somewhat about similarity of alien ecosystems to Earth and what that means both for nutrients and for disease, as well as offering some pretty wonderfully bizarre ideas for aliens. You may want to avoid other sci-fi lest it corrupt your ideas for your own, which is fine, but if you want some of the basics I got from reading books (not nearly as good as the knowledge of anyone with a firm grounding in bio or microbio or exobio) I can relay the approximate science of what I read without big spoilery/idea-y parts.

[sailorhathor]

Yes please, relay the approximate science you have been able to gather from reading other books. It helps me understand these things better and gets my creative thinky parts going.

[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

[sailorhathor]

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