To say otherwise would be to admit your story has no need for aliens.
Oh man, in general, people be raving about aliens, but never give two looks to the ants in their garden. Or you know, the entirety of Australia. Or the deep sea. We have so much life that’s alien buzzing around us. Hell, we even have the Scottish – humanoids that speak an entirely cryptic language. It’s so much more compelling story-telling, too, if they don’t arrive here in a spaceship, but rather have been living among us all this time.
Oh man, in general, people be raving about aliens, but never give two looks to the ants in their garden.
Idk about that. “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids” did numbers.
I mean, not really? There’s lots of reasons to use aliens in a story and I’m struggling to think of one that only works if you assume low-diversity planets
Well, look, the show has a budget. And the game also a gameplay.
In fairness, seasons and varied terrain aren’t guaranteed.
Of all the bodies in the solar system, only Earth has such a wide variety of landscape. Mars is rocky desert or rocky desert with canyons. Pluto is ice ball or rocky ice ball. Etc.
Also, if humans were colonizing earth from outside, we would probably just build cities on the river deltas and skip the less habitable spots. Stories set here would then just be cityscape or river delta, even though the ice caps/mountains/jungles/deserts still exist. Colonized worlds will have different population distribution that organically settled ones.
Some Sci-Fi planet types are reasonable.
The Kepler program found a lot of exoplanets and has categorized them generally as Hot Jupiters, Cold Gas Giants, Ocean Worlds & Ice Giants, Rocky Planets and Lava Worlds.
If you ignore the gas giants because there’s no surface to land on, rocky planets (and maybe desert planets) would be extremely common. Water or ice planets would also be incredibly common. And, if you’re really unlucky, you might end up on a lava planet – one that’s small and very close to its sun.
What wouldn’t be common are things like an entire planet that’s a swamp, or an entire planet that’s a forest of Earth-style trees. I’m sure it’s entirely possible that on some planet there’s a life-form that becomes the dominant form and that looks vaguely like Earth-style trees, but not the kind you see on a typical SciFi show filmed near Vancouver.
If you ignore the gas giants because there’s no surface to land on
Hey now. You can land on the surface of Jupiter if you’re dense enough.
Metallic hydrogen sounds so cool.
Mars is rocky desert or rocky desert with canyons.
Mars has river deltas. It has flat plains. It has shifting rolling dunes. It has mountains and valley. It has a twisting series of canyons so constricted they’re called the Labyrinth of Night. It has vast ice sheets and polar caps of frozen carbon dioxide and water. It has caves and frozen mud flats and a thousand other varied forms.
Mars is a world. It is a place. It has biomes as varied and unique as those of Earth.
Pluto is ice ball or rocky ice ball.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Well, not exactly biomes. That one it doesn’t have.
Mars may have “river deltas”, but without the river.
Mars is a world. It is a place. It has biomes as varied and unique as those of Earth.
Suuure. A biome is a geographical region with a specific climate, flora and fauna. Mars doesn’t have much climate because it has very little atmosphere, and it has no flora or fauna. There’s no way in hell that it has biomes as varied as earth.
They are more subtle, but they are there. And it does have an atmosphere. It’s substantial enough that communication to the surface can be lost for months due to planet-spanning dust storms. Yes, it’s only 1% the pressure of Earth’s at the surface, but that’s enough, especially when you allow forces to act over geological time scales.
And yes, they can be as varied as those on Earth. Life doesn’t actually increase the biome variety as much as you think it does. The kind of life you get in any given biome on Earth is a direct function of the geology and climate in the area. Input a given altitude, rainfall, temperature, and soil conditions, and you’ll get a similar biome anywhere on Earth. Yes, there are different individual species in the rain forests of South America vs the rain forests of Africa, but they’re both rain forests. They work as biomes in similar ways. Wherever the local climate and geology support rain forests, rain forests sprout up. The only exception is isolated islands that can’t be reached by certain species.
This is why Mars can have the same biome diversity as Earth. The living components of Earth’s biomes are a direct mapping to the nonliving components. Earth’s living biomes are no more diverse than the underlying geology and climate.
And this is before we even consider Martian life forms, which almost certainly exist. We know of bacteria that exist deep in the Earth’s crust that, if you transported them to deep under the Martian surface, would be able to survive and thrive just fine with zero modification. We know Mars used to have vast oceans and all the ingredients necessary to get life started. And we’ve seen numerous bits of circumstantial evidence of bacterial life present in some capacity on Mars today. While scientists are loathe to affirmatively proclaim life on Mars. The extant existence of bacterial life on Mars today really isn’t that an unusual claim. If life could get started on Earth, there’s no reason to believe it couldn’t have started on Mars. And that’s before you consider pansperia. If nothing else, we know life can comfortably exist deep in the planet’s crust. And who knows how such life might affect conditions on the surface.
Mars has no biomes because Mars has no known life. You can’t skip the “bio” part of the word.
Honestly, by the numbers, Earth is mostly an ocean/forest planet with some desert. Desert and ice planets are believable, too, given those are more temperature-based, and city planets seem like they’d be inevitable in a sci-fi setting just due to population sizes.
By the numbers I think it’s an ocean planet with 71% coverage. Of the land, it’s actually pretty evenly split 1/3 forest, 1/3 desert, 1/3 grass or shrubland.
Given what we know of the Earth’s own history, forest planets, ice planets, and desert planets are all possible and the Earth has been each in different geologic times. Although in every case there will be pockets of other biomes that are very large on a human scale. A single France-sized forest would be massive to a human explorer, even if the rest of the planet is ocean and ice.
Yeah, plus NMS has come a really really long way since release and they haven’t ever asked for another dime.
Which is why I’ve purchased it twice. Love that game and want to support great devs.
This guy biomes.
This was, in some ways, the life lesson from FFXIV: Endwalker.
Tap for spoiler
You’re looking to the stars for answers to life’s big questions? You haven’t even fully explored the planet you’re on. Maybe someday those stars will look to your answers. So keep living life to its fullest, rather than hoping for some external salvation.
“Wait wait, you’re from Doloron? Oh my god, I work with someone from the Swamp Planet!”
“Why does everyone call it that. It’s a planet with one or two famous swamps.”
“What was it like growing up in a mud hut?”
“We have other ecosystems! You know, mountains, fields, outlet malls…”
“How did you get to school? Bark canoes? On the back of a swamp snail?”
“No, like everyone else… In hover cars.”
“Is it true you all have eggs sacs? Take off your pants.”
“No I’m not taking off my pants!”
“Aha! We got a swamp monster here!”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! (sigh) 50 years ago, Dread Trooper scouts landed in a swamp on our planet, and for some reason didn’t bother exploring anywhere else. If they had gone one mile to the left, they would have found some beautiful beachfront condos. But they didn’t. And now… we’re the (air quotes) swamp planet. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“I uh…”
“Don’t say anything. Let’s just eat our lunch in silence.”
“… Is that moss!?”
“It’s a delicacy!”
Lower Decks vibes!
It’s from an old College Humor Troopers sketch
They’ve added to Troopers over the years with an animated series and a new live action one, if anyone’s missed it
It sounded like it was from something, but I couldn’t find it from a quick search!
Hmm. Still no resolution on the egg sac question, though.
Swamp monsters from the Swamp Planet find questions about their horrifying egg sacks to be very personal.
Moss is to be sorted by color not taste!
My favorite is how there is only ever one city and like 10,000 people on any planet.
Oh he went to this planet? Well, lets just go to the market, he’s bound to turn up at some point.
My favorite is how there is only ever one city and like 10,000 people on any planet.
I would spot you that some of this makes sense if the world is largely inhospitable and the one city with the singular mono-culture is the corner that’s human habitable.
Mos Eisley Cantina makes sense if you consider it a tiny space port on a largely inhospitable planet where you literally have to farm moister to survive.
And how there’s usually a single culture on each planet.
Depending on the setting, that could make a lot of sense. Imagine a planet settled entirely by the descendants of a single expedition. That planet wouldn’t be a complete cultural monolith; not everyone would be identical. But an entire planet with the cultural diversity of a small place like Iceland really isn’t unreasonable. If it’s a species’ home world, that makes less sense.
Or, a really dark bit of head canon? Every time you find an alien species that lives on its home world and has a single culture? Inevitably this means a cultural evolutionary bottleneck existed in the planet’s past. If it’s not a colony planet, then something else must have caused that bottleneck.
My head canon? Any planet like that is one where an alien Hitler won. When you encounter a planet like that, it means that some time in the last thousand years or so of that planet, a Hitler-like figure came to power and achieved global hegemony. They decided that there was one and only one right way to live. Everyone was either forcibly converted to that lifestyle or done away with.
This is my favorite market on the entire planet.
You’re not thinking dystopian enough. Planets are just the billionaire and the people privileged enough to be their slave.
Everyone else is stuck outside the walled garden on Earth.
I didn’t read the title at first and NMS is exactly what came to mind. I adore that game but they need more diversity.
Stargate: every planet is either desert or Canada.
It’s an ice planet!
Carter, after exiting the second gate on Earth
Always one of my favorite parts of that episode.
You can see a decent bit depending on terrain in most places, more if the terrain is higher than surrounding areas, but she pops out of a crack, looks around and sees ice for a few hundred yards, and gives up.
In fairness, without direction, some form of marker, or obvious landmark, wandering around in a blizzard would have been death for both of them… Not that they would have been able to walk to civilization even if they DIDN’T have injuries…
Still though, they’ve experienced varied terrain in plenty of planets, so assuming the whole planet is ice is something Sam would have corrected someone else on in a heartbeat. (and also made the argument that for all intents and purposes, for them it may as well be a whole planet)
I wonder how much better we could have had it if the location budget were like 4x what they had. Eventually you start to recognize specific rocks in the quarry… My wife likes to call one rock Terry because it has two vaguely eye-shaped holes, and “because it’s terrible how often they use that place”
Can you share which one is Terry? I’d like to watch out for him when I inevitably rewatch the show.
It’s a large boulder (the size of a small boulder) about 4ft wide, never seen more than waist height, a little closer to one of the “walls” of the quarry.
I’ll have to find an episode with it. It’s mostly visible after season 1 and before season 8 or 9. Idk what happened to uncover/bury/move it, but it does move like twice during the show, even though I’m positive it’s an actual rock and not a prop.
I want to say the first time I noticed it was during the episodes where they’re trying to rescue Bra’tac and Ry’ac from the mine? After tretonin was developed. (Ry’ac says “it is hard to ration that which you do not have” when Bra’tac pretends to be taking his tretonin)
When I see it again, I will definitely post to Chevron 7.
Thanks, this will be a fun one
Or a really cheap single set piece that vaguely fits the theme of an ancient earth culture that has managed to not change at all in millenia, and then there is a single high tech alien device in the middle of it.
BTW, I say that with love. Stargate is the best.
Also Star Wars… Star Wars even have a city covering an entire planet.
From Irregular Webcomic!, #87 via https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SingleBiomePlanet
Imperial Officer: Lord Vader, the rebels have fled the ice planet of Hoth. After going to the swamp planet of Dagobah, Skywalker has rejoined his friends on the desert world of Tatooine. And now the rebel fleet is massing for an attack on the forest moon of Endor.
Darth Vader: I sense a great disturbance in the Force.
Imperial Officer: My lord?
Darth Vader: How else can so many worlds be totally covered with only one terrain type without regard to latitudinal variations?Star Wars even have a city covering an entire planet
Yes, they copied it from Foundation. Trantor has a perfectly fine reason for being the way it is, that would apply to Corusant too.
That is, if physics actually allowed them to be that way. Apparently Asimov didn’t run the numbers on that one.
In Foundation, Asimov suggests that spaceships start running on coal power, after civilization collapses so far that people forget how to build nuclear engines. He was always more of a Big Ideas Guy than a Fine Details Guy.
Wait, wasn’t it a metaphor for “some nuclear reactor so rudimentary that they could as well use steam engines”? I really don’t remember it well.
Anyway, he’s famous for running the numbers for some things. But yeah, he absolutely didn’t do it for all things.
Trantor is Rome and the galaxy is the empire.
An ecumenopolis makes more sense imo. It’s artificially created and a somewhat believable endpoint for population growth in the capital of a galaxy spanning civilization
Even the desert is Canada. The desert scenes were filmed in Richmond, BC at a sand and gravel quarry (no longer there now).
Dr Who: Every planet is a disused quarry.
Hey, sometimes it’s a ramshackle alleyway or the back of someone’s car.
That’s probably more realistic. Most planets are just barren rocks that are too hot or too cold, aren’t they?
I don’t know if we have enough evidence to make such claims tbh. In our solar system, half the planets are rocks with a metal core (riffs playing in the background), the other half are gas giants. Among the gazillion moons though, there are some ice moons (like Titan and Europa), Venus only has no oceans because it is too hot, Mars has a volcanic past and may be warmer had it a thicker athmosphere and has polar ice caps, etc. There is a lot going on on these “barren rocks” and a lot of them being barren rocks could be due to them being located outside the goldilock zone.
If there is somewhere where humans can live, then likely there are also zones nearer and further from the poles.
So e.g. surely almost all planets with a livable zone would have polar ice caps.
Those planets typically don’t heave a breathable atmosphere, though. You pretty much need a large biosphere if you want to be able to walk around without a spacesuit. An iceball world or a barren rock probably won’t contain a breathable amount of oxygen in an otherwise mostly inert atmosphere. If you want to breathe pure carbon dioxide or get fried by nearly unfiltered UV radiation, though, they’d be great.
I mean we have deserts in Canada too.
Yeah but they’re cold and boring. Doesn’t make great tv.
Prairie deserts, they exist in every climate.
They didn’t film Stargate there
What’s that got to do with you saying the only deserts Canada has are cold and boring?
There’s even tropical deserts fyi.
See what I originally replied to?
Well, as the person you replied to, you should pay attention a little closer to what others are saying.
Yes they said desert or Canada, so the person said Canada also has deserts, to which you said, “only cold and boring”. Which I nicely corrected you on.
Not a desert but Vancouver is perfect for the screen! https://youtu.be/ojm74VGsZBU (Every Frame A Painting - Vancouver Never Plays Itself)
I watched a film years ago that actually had Toronto as the location and they actually got to showcase local stuff.
It’d be nice if Van or Vic ever got to do the same thing.
Star Trek: Every planet is either a set or within driving distance of Los Angeles
Within the TMZ, thirty mile zone, because union rules say you have to pay transportation time for workers above that limit.
This is a great factoid! No idea why I’m getting downvoted.
I imagine No Man’s Sky is doing this specifically to reference the trope as was originally commonly portrayed in e.g. Flash Gordon serials and various golden age comics. Similar to Starbound, this also has an intentional gameplay implication in that it forces you to leave the planet and find another one with the biome appropriate for whatever resource it is you need. Otherwise you could park your butt on one planet and never have any compelling reason to go anywhere else which really rather defeats the intent of the game.
As far as other works of fiction go, though, yes. It’s just lazy.
It can be relatively justified for NMS too, considering that its setting seems to explicitly be some sort of simulation in-universe, the rules it operates on don’t have to match physical reality
No man’s sky also did it because of lazy. People may have forgotten, but that game released as pure hot garbage and only got better after tons of updates.
Nonsense, those of us who weren’t plugged into gaming journos 24/7 enjoyed it on release. I couldn’t have cared less that it didn’t have multiplayer or whatever. I wasn’t even aware of any controversy at the time.
There aren’t that many first person space exploration games outside of nms and elite and nms is much easier to get into. It was fun, and still is
And I don’t count starfield because starfield is just a loading screen simulator
Being a hot mess and being enjoyable are not mutually exclusive. 1.0 was a buggy mess with worlds that had the depth of a puddle populated by Mr potato head animals, the same half dozen outposts, and a suit screaming LIFE SUPPORT FALLING the moment you stepped out of the ship.
Doesn’t mean it wasn’t enjoyed by some.
Well yeah, procedurally generated worlds were basically what I expected. The game was pretty explicit about that. And it was still fun. Elite’s no different in that regard when it comes to exploration and I also have fun with that
That’s not true of it now? I love No Man’s Sky, and have since launch, but still, it only takes about 10 minutes to see everything there is on one planet
It’s still pretty trash. Every update adds new boring activities but the core gameplay loops still get old quickly and the game is an endlessly scaling grind to nowhere. It’s “redemption story” is drastically overrated.
It has millions of players who enjoy it.
And millions of people enjoy trash mobile games that throw microtransactions at you every couple of minutes. Popularity is not an indicator of quality.
Lol “my opinion is actually objective fact, gentlesir”
Literally not at all what I said. Put that shit back in your ass where it belongs.
One way this could work is having biomes so far apart that it’s more resource efficient to hyperdrive to another planet than traveling all the way.
Outside of that, it probably wouldn’t change No Man’s Sky much if a planet’s poles were colder and had mildly different features
They do. You have to go to different planet types to find materials from the different star types in order to have better warp drives.
Laughing in Metroidvania.
“This is all one castle.”
Whereas Horizon Forbidden West packs all of these into a patch of North America a few miles across (except that the cities are abandoned). The DLC adds a volcanic section.
Edit: the end-credits is a fly-through of much of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVjufECOeHk
Is it the Pacific Northwest? Everything in OP’s pic is within driving distance.
The Pacific Northwest? Aka Stargate…wherever planet looks like the hills around Vancouver…
Bits of California, Nevada and Utah all squished together.
that’s the nice thing about california.
Honestly i think it’s quite possible that earth actually is rare on that regard. Most planets are majorly more uniform than earth. Conditions have to be juuuuuust right for a single planet to have water that exists in all 3 forms at the same time on different areas of the planet. That fact alone creates 4 of the 6 boxes.
My guess is that a rocky planet that is 5% - 95% covered with ocean is probably pretty rare. You probably mostly either get water / ice planets or rock planets.
Another thing that makes Earth unique is the liquid iron core. Without that you don’t get a magnetic field. Without a magnetic field, it’s hard to keep the atmosphere intact. That means that water vapour gets blown off over time, which eventually results on a dry planet like Mars.
As for all 3 states of water, as long as you’re in the range to have a wet surface, you’ll probably get all 3 states of water. The poles will get a lot less solar radiation than the equator, so if the equator is wet it’s pretty likely that you’ll get at least a bit of ice at the poles. If there’s a lot of water then it’s easy to get water vapour. Even Europa which has an average surface temperature of -171C (102K) has a liquid water ocean under the icy surface, and although its atmosphere is extremely thin, part of it is water vapour.
Also there have been eras in earths history where it was basically like one of two environments. Like before the continents emerged from the oceans properly, or the several snowball earths, or the multiple times a super continent formed and created swamp land and desert land because of the fucken Appalachian mountains.
Yeah, the holocene is a weirdly varied time period for climates. Grasslands and similar ecosystems are pretty new geologically.
Probably helps that grasses evolved since the dinosaurs got Cained by the universe. Honestly the variation seen in the Holocene is probably the direct result of the Yucatan impact and the Great Dieing before it.
Water doesn’t have to be the thing that brings variation. Titan has a methane “hydrology” with clouds, rivers, valleys, and beaches whose sand is made of ice. On Triton, ammonia cryovulcanism powered by tidal forces from Neptune create plains with ammonnia snowfall, ice mountain ranges, and underground lakes. On Miranda, the planet is ice, but there are massive terrain differences from 10 km cliffs to flatlands. Io has a massive variety of volcanic planes with color differences visible from space because of their entirely different chemical compositions. The turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter is streaks of water vapor clouds, upwellings from deep beneath the surface, cyclones and massive pressure drops that dent the atmosphere inward by kilometers, with ionosphere above and gas as dense as water below. Even an atmosphere-less grey rock like Mercury has basalt plains, craters, ridges, highlands and dust plains.
In No Man’s Sky, many planets have life, which requires complex chemistry being possible at the temperatures the planet has using the chemicals that are available on that planet. This then naturally creates temperatures that are “too cold” for that life and “too warm” for that life, and complex adaptations made by that life to take resources from places that get “too cold” or “too warm” with less risk of predation or competition. Similar adaptation is possible to other extremes/variations, such as “submerged”, “on land”, “flying”, “too dry”, “too few nutrients”, “too acidic”, “too basic”, “too steep”, “cave”, etc. And thus we get complex biospheres that vary across the planet.
Miranda
Miranda…
Monobiomes are probably the rule and Earth-like continental planetoids with diverse topology are probably exceedingly rare in the universe.
Personally, I think you’re half-right in that (with a sample size of our solar system) the Earth is the only one with an actually diverse range of biomes - really only possible because the availability of water in multiple forms…
But the Earth-like planets in NMS should rightfully have the same biome diversity if they were being scientifically accurate…
Though we all know the real reason for the lack of diversity is to force movement between planets. If every resource was on one planet, there’s be no reason for the player to explore.
This just absolutely delighted me.
Nature is just so insanely beautifull that its hard to come up with something even nicer without seeing it. I actually think that if theres life on other planets then earth is among the more beautiful ones because it is subjectively beautiful to us. Yes mountains and rainforests are beautiful, siberia and the chinese planes, but so is the sahara and especially the places we come from. Im from hungary, one of the more boring parts of europe based on nature if you actually look at it objectively but every time i go back i feel a connection to it. Think this is one of the reasons scifi doesnt work for me. The real cultures and nature and everything else we have on this beautiful planet is more than enough for me and nothing pains my heart more than when these places and peoples are distroyed and restricted. When i watch scifi, its kind of an escapism for me to see those very motifs that make us special but in a better light. But yeah i think we struggle to create something more beautiful than what we are basically coded to find as the most beautiful.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And in case of a whole alien species, by pure probability, they would likely be used to a red sky and black plants (red dwarfs (more infrared) being the most numerous among the suitable stars). Or even find a free sky horrendous and feel similar about rolling green hills like we feel about Nausicaa’s fungal forests.
But Avatar (the Pandora one) did a good job at imagining a different but similiar kind of nature.