Dying Mars variant

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Seriously guys, are we bright red?

If you are "white" very likely yes, at least for some areas of skin.

Note that all transition metals are capable of displaying quite a wide range of colors depending on their surrounding environment - interaction with the surrounding ligands splits the degeneracy of the (unfilled) d-orbitals, and the magnitude of the split is in the range that exciting an electron from the lower to higher band usually absorbs in the visible somewhere. The splitting can be quite different for different ligands. For instance Fe2+ is usually green and Fe3+ yellow-brown in aqueous solutions, but hemoglobin is bluish or blood red depending on oxygenation.