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”
No, Carter had a point. Antarctica is a terrible place to put a Stargate. The Ancients usually put them in places where people can live. She didn’t know they put Atlantis in Antarctica.
Assuming that people lived near this Stargate thousands of years ago, and it’s now in an arctic climate, an ice age is the logical conclusion.
Don’t quote me on this, because I can’t remember the specific episode, comic, or book, but I vaguely remember the ancients settled places thy were most like their original homeworld of Alterra, and gave them the best comfort overall. That just happened to be what the Pacific Northwest region of North America looks like, so most of the planets are still pretty close to that. Some obviously have continued morphing over the millennia, but it makes a nice explanation for why everywhere looks like the same 30 mile area around their BC studio lol.
At the time they didn’t really know much about the ancients, definitely didn’t know that Atlantis took off from Antarctica 5 million years ago…
That’s fair, however it always felt a little weird for the scientist of all people to make such a broad generalization.
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.
wasn’t it a metaphor
Maybe. I just remember re-reading the book in preparation for the TV Show’s release, and being somewhat set back by how low tech even the more advanced set pieces were in the book compared to the show. It makes more sense when you recognize these books were written in the 1940s, practically before rocketry was a thing. But it’s still a bit of a trip to see what Asimov considered the future would look like.
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
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.
Dr Who: Every planet is a disused quarry.
Hey, sometimes it’s a ramshackle alleyway or the back of someone’s car.
Even the desert is Canada. The desert scenes were filmed in Richmond, BC at a sand and gravel quarry (no longer there now).
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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
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
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.
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.
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.And only a few specific exports of a single variety. Apparently Romulans found one fermentation technique and never experimented again.
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?
Laughing in Metroidvania.
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
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.
Well, look, the show has a budget. And the game also a gameplay.
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.
that’s the nice thing about california.
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.
I would love it if something like star trek would address this. Even a handwavey “this region is the only area with humanoid life” would be good enough for me
