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.
I think you’re vastly underestimating how quickly culture deviates and develops. A planetary mono-culture would require every person to grow up in exactly the same circumstances. No stratification from class or gender or sex or age or ethnicity. No varying seasons or biomes or climates. Exposed to all the same media at exactly the same time, and all with the same intelligence and personality and ability to interpret it.
In short, the only time a mono-culture makes even a tiny bit of sense is when it’s a hivemind. (Or mind-control but that’s pretty much the same thing)
Read what I wrote. I didn’t define a monoculture as literally every individual being the same. I defined a monoculture a a planet that had a similar level of cultural diversity to a small country like Iceland. We would typically call countries like this a monoculture, even though they obviously have variations gender, class, etc. People don’t have to be absolute identical clones for it to be a monoculture.
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.
I think you’re vastly underestimating how quickly culture deviates and develops. A planetary mono-culture would require every person to grow up in exactly the same circumstances. No stratification from class or gender or sex or age or ethnicity. No varying seasons or biomes or climates. Exposed to all the same media at exactly the same time, and all with the same intelligence and personality and ability to interpret it.
In short, the only time a mono-culture makes even a tiny bit of sense is when it’s a hivemind. (Or mind-control but that’s pretty much the same thing)
Read what I wrote. I didn’t define a monoculture as literally every individual being the same. I defined a monoculture a a planet that had a similar level of cultural diversity to a small country like Iceland. We would typically call countries like this a monoculture, even though they obviously have variations gender, class, etc. People don’t have to be absolute identical clones for it to be a monoculture.
On a planetary scale, hundreds of millions if not billions, they absolutely do. There are simply too many variables for people to crystallize around.
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