Lies to Children: The Sky Is Blue
Part Two of the Series on Hard Truths and Soft Landings
This is part two of Lies to Children, a series where I walk the edge between wonder and complexity. Inspired by Terry Pratchett’s notion of “lies to children”—those simplified half-truths that help young minds build scaffolding for bigger realities—I’m exploring how the world is often more strange, tangled, and beautiful than we tell it. The lies aren’t meant to trick. They’re meant to teach. Eventually. With luck.
Last time, we started with prosthetics—what happens when the body breaks and builds anew. This time, we look up.
“Why is the sky blue?”
Because light is playing dress-up.
That’s the lie.
It’s a gentle one, and a functional one. You can build a science fair poster around it. You can color it with crayons. The sky is blue because reasons. Something something sunlight. Something something molecules.
And technically, if you say “it’s because of Rayleigh scattering,” you’re not lying. You’re just compressing a doctoral thesis into a single polite cough.
But the real truth?
The sky isn’t blue.
There is no sky
Start here: there is no “sky” the way we picture it. No solid dome. No ceiling. Just gradients of gas thinned into space, and the illusion of color created by light bouncing off particles of atmosphere.
The sunlight that hits Earth is white. Not pure-white, but spectrum-white—a blend of all visible colors. As this light enters the atmosphere, the shorter, smaller wavelengths (blue and violet) scatter more easily in all directions.
Your eye, like most human biology, is biased. You perceive more blue than violet, so the scattered blue light dominates your view. Hence: “the sky is blue.”
But that’s only from the ground.
If you leave the atmosphere, the sky goes black.
If you change the angle, it shifts to red and gold.
If you’re a different creature, with different eyes, the sky isn’t blue at all.
And if you’re inside a simulation? Well. That’s another lie entirely.
Color is a hallucination
Here’s the truth that’s hardest to carry, even for adults:
Color doesn’t exist out there. It exists in here.
Light has properties. Wavelengths. Frequencies. But “blue” isn’t a frequency. “Blue” is a story your brain tells when it encounters a particular kind of signal. Color is a neurological hallucination that overlaps with consensus reality just enough that we can name it.
The sky is blue because you agree to see it that way.
Take that sentence, and let it haunt you.
Lies to children are lenses
When we say “the sky is blue,” we’re really saying:
You are embedded in a system.
That system is dynamic, interactive, and sensory.
You are part of the illusion, and also the one interpreting it.
But that’s too much for a toddler.
So we start with crayons.
And when they’re ready, we teach scattering, and light waves, and perceptual variance, and spectral distribution. And eventually, we get to the deeper lesson:
Reality is filtered. And that filter is called you.
Next time: The Mind Reaches Further Than We Know
Lies to Children, Part Three: Parapsychology. Telepathy, intuition, strange knowing, and what we don’t yet have the tools to explain.
"Reality is filtered. And that filter is called you."
This should be tattooed on the inside of every newborn's skull 😂
Fusion. Quantum. Absorbed.