I’d like to note that queries like “history” and “ancient” result in images with much more yellow and orange in them (pyramids, pottery, old paper, etc.). I checked by blurring screenshots a lot in an image editor, and the average color for “history” seems to be a shade of orange, while that of “futuristic” is a shade of blue. Blue and yellow/orange are complementary color combinations, so I wonder if that plays any role in reinforcing the blue-future and yellow-past associations.
Maybe one angle is clean vs. dirty? Ancient imagery brings to mind dust, rust, yellowing of paper and bleaching by the sun. If one looks at the future as the opposite of the past, we’d imagine it clean and bright.
Other future-as-inversion-of-past ideas:
The past was brutal and violent; the future is peaceful and harmonized (well, ignoring extraterrestrial space war)
The past was concerned with frivolity, the future is concerned with important things like science, technology, fairness, etc.
This is a bit of a stretch, but maybe the past was information-poor: lossy, poorly preserved, easily lost documents in ambiguous old language vs. modern, lossless, high-fidelity recordings of knowledge en masse
I’d like to note that queries like “history” and “ancient” result in images with much more yellow and orange in them (pyramids, pottery, old paper, etc.). I checked by blurring screenshots a lot in an image editor, and the average color for “history” seems to be a shade of orange, while that of “futuristic” is a shade of blue. Blue and yellow/orange are complementary color combinations, so I wonder if that plays any role in reinforcing the blue-future and yellow-past associations.
Maybe one angle is clean vs. dirty? Ancient imagery brings to mind dust, rust, yellowing of paper and bleaching by the sun. If one looks at the future as the opposite of the past, we’d imagine it clean and bright.
Other future-as-inversion-of-past ideas:
The past was brutal and violent; the future is peaceful and harmonized (well, ignoring extraterrestrial space war)
The past was concerned with frivolity, the future is concerned with important things like science, technology, fairness, etc.
This is a bit of a stretch, but maybe the past was information-poor: lossy, poorly preserved, easily lost documents in ambiguous old language vs. modern, lossless, high-fidelity recordings of knowledge en masse
Old photographs yellow.