I asked him “what color were the clouds back then?” and he said they were white. I asked him what happens if I take an orange light and light up something that’s white with it. He ignored me. He went on about how everyone in his age group remembers the Sun being orange, and by me questioning him, I’m calling him and all his peers liars and I’m stupid because I’m younger than him and vaccinated.
While the conclusion of it being replaced with an LED is obviously not what happened, I think it’s very possible that the sun was often orange for him when he was growing up, because of air pollution.
30 years ago, depending on where you lived, there were more cars on the road with less efficient fuel consumption, more people using fireplaces, more people burning trash, less regulation of various industries etc. Searching for images with the phrase “smoke pollution sun” will give you a lot of photos of orange suns, and they’re definitely not all altered for effect. I’ve seen red suns in real life too when wildfires are really bad near my area even though that’s thankfully rare.
We know not the sun itself that is orange, but in a polluted environment it certainly looks like it is - and if you don’t get a great education, I can see how you might think that’s the actual color of the sun.
30+ years ago skies used to be silver in cities from smog. Going across the mountains into Los Angeles could be like going to a different planet.
I mean same for photography, tv, film and even artistic renderings. They probably consumed a lot of media and can draw parallels and contrasts just from those.
This makes some sense. Clearly the friend is a bit of a conspiracy theorist, or trolling. There’s a decent chance they are younger too. That being said you’re the only person with a reasonable feasible explanation that might get through to the friend.