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.
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.
Well, look, the show has a budget. And the game also a gameplay.
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
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.
I mean we have deserts in Canada too.
Yeah but they’re cold and boring. Doesn’t make great tv.
Not a desert but Vancouver is perfect for the screen! https://youtu.be/ojm74VGsZBU (Every Frame A Painting - Vancouver Never Plays Itself)
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?
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.
Well, as the person you replied to, you should pay attention a little closer to what others are saying.
Dr Who: Every planet is a disused quarry.
Hey, sometimes it’s a ramshackle alleyway or the back of someone’s car.
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
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 all planets with a livable zine 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.
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.
Even the desert is Canada. The desert scenes were filmed in Richmond, BC at a sand and gravel quarry (no longer there now).
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.
“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 thr 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 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!
Moss is to be sorted by color not taste!
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.
Laughing in Metroidvania.
“This is all one castle.”
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.
This is my favorite market on the entire 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.
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It might have had biomes in the past, but that’s a different discussion. There’s no evidence of life currently existing on Mars.
A lot of stargates seem suspiciously located in abandoned quarries in the Pacific northwest
Naquda mines?
It’s amazing how Quizxiolia Gemini III looks absolutely nothing like southern California!
California, such diverse film locales
Dam bro. No wonder California is always talking about Cost of Living. They got it all
This just absolutely delighted me.
I’m working on a Starfinder campaign, so explaining all of these and the lore becomes more complex. I’m homebrewing a lot of the lore, because I’d rather make my own than learn a different one (and it lets me make things up on the spot that I don’t know). I know for one planet, its industrial revolution made its inhabitants flee underground, since the surface became too hostile. Magic helps with a lot of explanations too.
Earth is pretty rad if you take humans out of the equation.
