To say otherwise would be to admit your story has no need for aliens.
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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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.
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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.
"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
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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