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Comment by polishdude20 | Hacker News Reader

You mentioned red is identified as danger in nature and that made me think... I'm assuming red is danger because blood is red? If so, I bet if we were to visit an alien civilization on another planet who has a different biological process, they may have different colored blood and their warning buttons may instead be blue or green even. Interesting to think about!

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There is an interesting example of this in Robert J. Sawyer's The Neanderthal Parallax, which has an alternate world where the Neanderthals became the dominant human species.

In the Neanderthal world, red means "good" or "go" and green means "danger" or "stop".

This is because red is the color of good meat and green is the color of bad meat.

In a remarkable HN coincidence, I was trying to remember the name of this series when I ran across kleer001's comment on "At Home with Our Ancient Cousins, the Neanderthals", also on the HN home page right now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26381829

That is an excellent book BTW, thanks for mentioning it.

I am Canadian, and being able to read Canadian locales referenced in his books as places that I have been and are aware-of is a rare treat in Sci-Fi.

I highly encourage any SciFi fan to read his works.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/264946.Hominids

You don't even need to leave this planet to find and example of this. In East Asia, red symbolizes prosperity, and the stock market tickers use red to indicate gains.

I've always wondered about this.

We have a site dealing with finance for a East Asia audience. It's original audience was Europe with a blue theme (signifies trust etc) and it got extended to Asia (english speaking still). So we just themed it by changing the branding colors to the East Asia organizations color. Which is... red signifying prosperity. As in 10 shades of red.

The site has the typical warning/alert/error message feedback in forms/charts etc... in different reds/oranges/etc. I spent a bit of time trying to find a Asia focused UX guide on color for alerts/errors without luck. Does anyone have suggestions? I've asked a few different culturally native Asians from various countries and just get resigned shrugs.

Note: The messages have icons/text to go with them so it's not a total disaster but it is hard to figure out

I will confess I didn't believe you, which makes me ashamed since I work in finance. But then I went to the Shanghai stock exchange and their English language website uses red for losses and green for gains, but if you switch to the Mandarin website, it's the complete opposite. I appreciate that insight.

[1] http://english.sse.com.cn/

[2] http://www.sse.com.cn/

My guess would be that it's because of fire. While fire is an incredibly useful tool, a wildfire can be devastating for the whole ecosystem.

RED = FIRE => RUN AWAY WHILE YOU STILL CAN

Red means "cancel" or "stop", which are safe actions, not dangerous ones. Red is the color of health and safety.

Blue is the color of danger because it means "confirm changes". Blue is the color of the abyss, and aliens would agree on this.

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