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Planetville (view source)

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By extension, if a planet represents a country, an alien race represents an ethnic group, and an empire that spans Earth becomes a multi-planet empire.
 
Unfortunately, because [[Sci -Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]], stories about [[Planetville]] make no sense. Nobody seems to realize how BIG a planet is -- everything in [[Planetville]] takes the same amount of time as stories set in towns or countries. In the updated [[Wild West]] story, the outlaws are "exiled from the planet" just like they'd be exiled from Dodgeville, and the outlaws have to leave... instead of challenging the authorities to find them when they have an entire planet in which to hide. When the space Nazis invade, they seem to need the same number of soldiers as the Earth Nazis needed to invade Europe. And when the crew of the [[Cool Starship]] finds the cure for the alien plague, the issue of distributing it to an entire planet rarely gets mentioned at all. These considerations are [[Hand Wave|minimized]] [[Easy Logistics|or left out entirely]] in many stories.
 
This might work if technology was really advanced -- if transport were so fast that crossing a planet took as much time as crossing a town or Earth country does today. But that almost never happens. Besides, even if Planetville were a global village in terms of travel time, a planet still has thousands of times as many people, thousands of times as many hiding-places, thousands of times as many strategic locations, thousands of times as many and as much of everything as a city on Earth today has.
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== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* ''[[Star Trek]]'' is a constant offender here, where everybody on a planet is the same and nothing happens on a smaller scale, ever. When a low-tech planet isn't united, Starfleet considers it in civil war. Earth in 2000 BC was presumably in civil war, and (except for some arguable periods of peace) continued to be at least into the nineteenth century. Possibly the only exception is the depiction of Bajor in ''[[Star Trek Deep Space Nine]]'' as its proximity to the show's main setting meant that the writers were able to focus on the planet in greater depth than any other planet depicted in Star Trek's history before or since.
** Particularly conspicuous in ''The Next Generation'' episode "Reunification", in which the Romulans planned to seize control of the entire planet Vulcan with [[Sci -Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale|just a few thousand ground troops]].
** At least two separate stories have featured autonomous colonies with populations given as being in the ''hundreds'', acting (and recognised) as planetary governments. Several others come close.
* Both ''[[Stargate SG 1]]'' and ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'' are very consistent with this. Nothing of interest happens more than a few kilometres from a Stargate, most planets seem to possess a few thousand people at most, and conquering/purging/eating an entire planet is apparently a very simple affair. The characters even seem to be aware of this, as one episode featured Carter and O'Neill trapped in a frozen cave and ''immediately'' thinking they were on an [[Single Biome Planet|ice planet]] -- but it turned out that they were really {{spoiler|on Earth, in the Antarctic}}. On the few occasions that a planet has more than one state, such as Jonas Quinn's homeworld, they are always at war with each other.
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[[Category:Index of the Week]]
[[Category:Planetville]]
[[Category:Trope]]
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