“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!”
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!
Lower Decks vibes!
It’s from an old College Humor Troopers sketch
It sounded like it was from something, but I couldn’t find it from a quick search!
They’ve added to Troopers over the years with an animated series and a new live action one, if anyone’s missed it
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.
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.
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.
Well, not exactly biomes. That one it doesn’t have.
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.
if you’re really unlucky
If you somehow evolved there, that’s your favourite space.
If you went to a small, close-to-star planet, that’s probably on you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Monobiomes are probably the rule and Earth-like continental planetoids with diverse topology are probably exceedingly rare in the universe.
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.
A lot of stargates seem suspiciously located in abandoned quarries in the Pacific northwest
California, such diverse film locales
Dam bro. No wonder California is always talking about Cost of Living. They got it all
It’s amazing how Quizxiolia Gemini III looks absolutely nothing like southern California!
Naquda mines?
Don’t forget that if the planet is inhabited, it has only has one civilization that is mono-ethnic and mono-cultural. Star Trek is the most prominent
offenderexample of this. Still a good series though.I mean the Ferengi are mono-ethnic and mono-cultural and they are spread throughout the whole damn universe.
Maybe we are the one that is not like the others?
Imagine how jank that game would have been on release if they tried varied procedurally generated biomes hahaha.
They’re making a new game with that exact premise actually. Only one planet but still
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
But the planets in our solar system, except Earth, have not a lot of different biomes. To me this is one of the proofs leaning toward the simulation theory. Why make different biomes if your players and NPCs are only on one planet?
To get real pedantic, the planets in the solar system besides Earth don’t have any biomes because they don’t have any life as far as we know.
Earth also had periods of being a molten or frozen mass.
My psyche doesn’t like this.
Laughing in Metroidvania.
“This is all one castle.”
Which somehow has an indoor jungle, an ice cave, an underwater section, a fire cave, a cathedral, the entire Library of Alexandria, the inevitable clock tower, an arcade and bowling alley…
Well, look, the show has a budget. And the game also a gameplay.
Earth is not your average planet. We’ve been looking for YEARS for goldilocks planets.
If anything, all those single-biome planets aren’t extreme enough.
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.
Bits of California, Nevada and Utah all squished together.
The Pacific Northwest? Aka Stargate…wherever planet looks like the hills around Vancouver…
that’s the nice thing about california.
