As very interesting described in the blog entry of Ginny the colorblind italian astronomer Schriparalli influenced the history of Mars very much. The interesting part of this story is that he was suffering from a red-green color blindness. According to the mentioned article this was the reason, that he couldn’t distinguish some light shadings and missinterpret this. He was describing Mars in terms of ‘land’ and ‘sea’ and this missleading sights made him describe the view of ‘canali’ on the surface of the planet Mars. ‘Canali’ was translated to ‘canal’ and therefore something human made. This kicked off the missbelieves and dreams of intelligent living on Mars. The correct translation would have been ‘channels’ or ‘grooves’ which is something completely natural.

So a colorblind man inspired the world to dream of intelligent beings outside the earth and I think this is still in our minds and keeps going on. This story tells me that even if people are suffering from color blindness this is for a good reason. A reason we maybe don’t realize in our daily living and which usually only gives us trouble. But I know now that there is a reason for it and we only have to find this reason and make it public to other people so they can share those insights with us.