Single-Biome Planet: Difference between revisions
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Earth is a wonderfully varied place with an amazingly diverse biosphere. On this single planet, you can find jungles, mountains, forests, deserts, prairies... we must be the most varied planet in the universe. Or you'd think so after seeing so many alien worlds trapped in solitary, homogeneous landscapes.
Planets in outer space will often be defined by a single setting. It doesn't matter if the events of the story only take place in on a small portion of the
A creature well-suited to the local environment may be [[Horse of a Different Color|upgraded to horse status]], if it's big enough.
It should perhaps be noted that we usually only get very small views of these planets. Many times there are lines to the effect that it is a fairly standard planet. Almost never are we shown or told that a planet is ''entirely'' a
Earth itself could fairly be considered a Water Planet. In its history, it has been an Ice planet more than once, though, as well as periods when most of the landmass was Desert (early Mesozoic) and of nearly uniform lush growth (mid-Mesozoic). By similar standards, Mercury could be a Desert Planet, Venus a Cloud/Volcano Planet, and Mars another Desert Planet (a cold desert this time). If you allow the moons of the gas giants, you also have Io (a Volcano Planetoid - it has been said that the entire surface of the moon is repaved in just 3 years by volcanic activity) and numerous Ice Planetoids (such as Europa & Enceladus). Most of the outer solar system dwarf-planets are also Ice Planetoids.
Note that a
'''Notable classifications:'''
* [[City Planet|City Planets (Ecumenopolis)]]
* Cloud
* Dark
* [[Death World
* Desert
* Farm
* [[Landfill Beyond the Stars|Garbage Planets]]
* Ice
* Jungle
* Ocean
* Swamp
* [[Lethal Lava Land|Volcano Planets]]
Contrast [[Patchwork Map]]. Near the polar opposite of [[All Planets Are Earthlike]]. May overlap with [[One Product Planet]]. See also [[Planetville]].
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== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Galaxy Express 999]]'' visited a Dark Planet, subverted in that it's actually a rather pleasant place with lush forests, pretty flowers, low crime rates, and genial people and it's lovely to visit apart from the difficulty of finding your way around. At least it ''was''...until a native [[Mad Scientist]], having decided that her people's way of life was [[Anvilicious|archaic and hopelessly out of step with the rest of the galaxy]], shut off the planet's natural light-dampening field and shot an artificial light source into orbit. Everyone and everything on the planet (herself included) promptly [[Downer Ending|dropped dead from photosensitivity]].
* Justified on ''[[Outlaw Star]]'' with the explanation that since the planet in question is a ''resort'' planet, they [[
** Heck, it's not even a
* ''[[The Five Star Stories]]'' has only two of these, out of the half-dozen or so habitable planets that orbit the titular stars. There's Juno, which is a relatively young planet currently in a jungle-covered mid-mesozoic phase & Pestako, a tiny, clapped out mining planet that has no natural atmosphere & is slowly being terraformed into a city planet, complete with roads so big you can see them from space. The rest are Earthlike, with some minor variations in their average temperature & terrain.
* Terraformed planets and moons in ''[[Cowboy Bebop]]'' (e.g. Ganymede seems to be a water moon, Europa a kind of Western Prarie Moon, Titan a Desert Moon...)
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* Although [[Jerry Pournelle]] famously parodied this trope with the phrase "It was raining on Mongo that morning", the original planet Mongo in the old ''[[Flash Gordon (comic strip)|Flash Gordon]]'' comics is actually an aversion. It's specifically Earth-like, in that humans and near-humans can live comfortably there indefinitely without life support systems, which means it should be expected to have the full variety of potential environments as Earth...and it ''does''. Jungles, forests, deserts, glaciers, etc. It's not a bad example of a relatively realistic habitable world, in ''some'' ways.
* The 1980's British science fiction comic ''Starblazer'' had a variety of such planets.
** [[City Planet
** Cloud Planets: Pelion (issue 167). The factories of Cybeset industries are suspended above the poisonous acidic atmosphere.
** Dark Planets: Largos (issue 56). It lost its sun long ago and is in an almost permanent state of darkness.
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**** There are geothermal vents and underground (underice?) cavern systems that have liquid water and support lichens and other hardy plants, which the herbivores feed on, which feed the omnivorous tauntauns and carnivorous wampas. The tauntauns and some smaller animals regularly trek out across the surface to find new territory, mates and food. The wampas find the thermal areas too hot and are the only creatures to spend all their time in the ice and snow, only going into the warmer places to quickly grab a meal if they can't ambush one out on the ice.
** Subverted in the second [[Knights of the Old Republic]] game. You travel to the desolated Telos. Most of the planet has been bombed, and it's in the process of being terraformed. At first you land in a temperate forest, only to find out later that what you're really looking for is in the polar ice caps.
** This trope is lampshaded in the second [[Star Wars]] parody episode of [[Robot Chicken]]. One sketch features a krayt dragon and his wife as sea serpents in a body of water on Tatooine; when the husband expresses his desire to explore the world beyond, his wife insists that, as far as they know, there's nothing but desert on this planet. The husband then retorts that a
** Another exception is Kashyyyk, the Wookiee homeworld. Famous for its forests that greatly resemble Endor's, but in Episode Three, there's a battle on a beach. It is still often regarded as a jungle planet though.
*** The [[Legacy of the Force]] novels have gone and shown that the wroshyr forests range from very short, to half a kilometer tall, to many kilometers tall.
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* Played straight for dramatic purposes in ''[[Animorphs]]''. One Yeerk in book 6 mutters about the insane number of species Earth has, while the Yeerk character in book 19 is even more impressed with Earth...
** Another ''Animorphs''-example that both does and doesn't fit the planet archetypes is Ket, homeworld of The Ellimist. At first glance it looked just like a standard volcanic planet. But it was in fact a low-gravity world with a very dense atmosphere, which allowed for giant crystals to float freely in the atmosphere. The planet's civilisation of winged aliens lived entirely on (and off) those crystals. One character calls it "the rarest of all environments".
*** Saturn's moon Titan has 150% of Earth's atmospheric pressure and one-seventh the gravity; a human could strap on wings and fly there. Pity it's all at -180
** The Hork-Bajir homeworld is a valley planet (sort of. It's [[Justified Trope|justified]] by a catastrophic impact in the past which left a ring of steep valley around the equator as the only habitable part of the planet. Come to think of it, between the valleys, the Outside, and the Deep, it's got quite a bit of diversity over quite a small habitable area). It's also stated that the Yeerks artificially make the planets they conquer
*** The Hork-Bajir world apparently was once closer to Earth's atmosphere, just with less oxygen and more nitrogen. After the impact the 'real' race of the planet realized that the small equator, while liveable, was highly unstable. Unable to terraform but masters of genetics they created the Hork-Bajir (who feed on bark) and gave them a diet that would make THEM take care of the trees and the environment. The Deep, an area with numerous monsters, was created by the original race to keep the Hork-Bajir from bothering them (they live on the other side)
* Parodied in ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/The Restaurant At The End of The Universe|The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy]]'' (the second ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy|Hitchhiker's Guide]]'' book), where the planet Ursa Minor Beta has not only a homogeneous geography (subtropical coast) but a perpetual Saturday afternoon.
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** ''Night of Masks'' takes place mostly on a world whose star radiates only in the infra-red.
* Justified in the ''To The Stars'' trilogy by [[Harry Harrison]]. An imperialistic Earth has terraformed a number of planets (with a [[Planet of Hats|custom-made culture]] as well), each one dedicated to farming, production or mining of one particular resource. The idea being that none of them have the diverse resources [[The War of Earthly Aggression|needed to launch a revolt]].
* Dan Simmons' ''[[Hyperion]]'' novels include several of these : The ecumenopolises of Tau Ceti Center and Renaissance Vector, the ocean planet of Maui-Covenant, the forest planet of God's Grove, etc. Because all the planets are connected together in a single WorldWeb this doesn't appear to be a problem, though the ecological absurdity of this becomes a plot point when {{spoiler|the network of [[Portal Network|Farcasters
* Deeply averted in [[Dan Abnett]]'s ''[[Ravenor]]'' novels, where the villains speak with Ravenor after he comes through [[Cool Gate|a gate]]. He has to go back the same way, but he can identify the location: not just the planet, but the actual location, down to a small sector, by the plants he sees.
* The Puppeteer homeworld in [[Larry Niven]]'s ''[[Known Space]]'' [[The Verse|'verse]] was a city world. To deal with the heat dissipation problem, they moved the planet increasingly far away from its star, with other farm worlds growing food. Then they discovered that the center of the galaxy was exploding, so they organised their five planets into a "Fleet of Worlds" and fled.
** ''[[Known Space]]'' is also home to the sunflower plant, a genetically engineered lifeform that is capable of focusing solar rays to ''[[Frickin' Laser Beams]]'' in order to burn all other life to ashes, thus creating worlds solely populated by sunflowers.
** There's also Planet Beanstalk, seen in one ''Man-Kzin Wars'' story set in the same universe, which is actually maintained as a pole-to-pole "gardened" forest planet by the ancient immortal Bandersnatchi because they just like it that way.
* Inverted for several worlds in the ''[[Known Space]]'' setting: they were settled after being found by ramrobots (computer-controlled interstellar ramjets) with a slight bug: they were programmed to look for a "habitable spot" only. So Plateau gets settled: a Venus-type hellhole with just one large
* [[Alan Dean Foster]] is ''addicted'' to this trope.
** Many [[Humanx Commonwealth]] novels were set on his own versions of [[Death World]] (Prism in ''Sentenced to Prism''), Desert Planet (Jast in ''Sliding Scales'', Pyrassis in ''Reunion''), Ice Planet (Tran-Ky-Ky in ''Icerigger'', Treetrunk on ''Dirge''), Ocean Planet (''Cachelot''), [[Up to Eleven|Jungle Planet]] (''Midworld''), Jungle In A Swamp Planet (Fluva in ''Drowning World''), Even Soggier Than Vancouver Pine Forest Planet (Moth in ''For Love Of Mother-Not''), etc. He's even got Cave Planet (Longtunnel) and Vacation Paradise Planet (New Riviera) thrown into the mix.
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* In almost every drawing or painting of Earth created prior to the famous [[wikipedia:The Blue Marble|Blue Marble]] photos, the Earth was apparently a single-weather-system planet, with not a cloud to be seen anywhere.
* Beachworld, a short story by [[Stephen King]], is a very creepy deconstruction of an all-desert planet.
* Trantor isn't the only
* [[Larry Niven]]'s short story "The Soft Weapon". One of the planets in the Beta Lyrae star system is a "icy little blob of a world", AKA an Ice World.
== Live Action TV ==
* ''[[Star Trek]]'' has a tendency to either have totally Earth-like planets (class M) or
** Ferenginar, the Ferengi homeworld, is a class M planet that's home to virtually constant, planet-wide torrential downpours, due to weather control technology and the Ferengi's preference for rainy days.
** Andoria, home of the Andorians, is an Ice Moon.
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* [[Deconstruction|Deconstructed]] in ''[[Power Rangers RPM]]'', which takes place on a Desert Planet. The thing is, three years before the series takes place, it was earthlike - and the series takes place in a [[Please Insert New City Name]] version of ''Boston'', most certainly not in a desert region, showing just how much of the planet is sandy wasteland. The cause of the mass desertification is subtly implied to be ''nuclear carpet-bombing''. The background radiation is so high that long-distance communication is all but impossible, and orphans with cancer are prevalent.
* Lampshaded on the episode of ''[[The Muppet Show]]'' where the cast of Star Wars are the guest stars. "Seems we've landed on some sort of comedy variety show planet!"
* Usually in ''[[Doctor Who]]'', we are only shown a small part of any given world so it is not possible to generalise about the entire planet. However, there are a few cases were a world is explicitly stated as being a
* At the end of the ''[[Firefly]]'' episode "The Message", it snows at Tracy's funeral, which is on an Ice Planet.
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** It's noted that City Planets, if cut off by a Warp storm are essentially screwed since it prevents food from being transported in, unless they are lucky enough to have an agricultural world in-system - hive worlds (see below) may well have a problem even if they do.
** The homeworld of the Vespid is an interesting one - an entire world of stone islands floating in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant.
** It also has a
* Classic ''[[Traveller]]'' had desert planets (hydrographic % = 0), ocean planets (hydrographic % = 100, called "water worlds" long before the Kevin Costner movie), and ice planets (such as Mithril in Double Adventure 2 Mission on Mithril).
* ''[[Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game)]]'' supplement ''Curse of the Chthonians'', adventure "The City Without A Name". If the investigators are very unlucky they can go through a Gate to the home planet of the Chthonians, which is a "monstrous violent world of volcanic upheavals and earthquakes", i.e. a Volcano Planet.
* ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]''
** [[Planescape]] setting solved this by splitting planes into layers and realms, each of which is easy to describe, because the areas that stand out would rather form a separate layer. E.g. [http://images.yuku.com/image/pjpeg/45536ba641a897edcc85536f05a293fe97906a7c.jpg The Nine Hells of Baator] - the whole place is [[Death World]], and most layers are quite uniform, but the whole gets more diverse the further "down" you go - the only constant being that it gets considerably more horrible with each level. The surface Avernus is along the lines of a volcanic wasteland under dark red skies, the second layer is the iron city of Dis where petitioners are slaves raising and tearing down structures with bare hands, and it's scalding hot there; the third is Minauros - a foul bog with ridges of volcanic glass scoured with razor-sharp hail and corrosive rain; then there's fiery Phlegetos, frozen sea of Stygia, endless pile of rocks Malbolge, Maladomini - land of ruins, mine pits and so on, glacier mountains of Cania, and finally Nessus - the place of extremes: a plain shattered with botomless rifts, with fires and ice and everything.
** The [[Spelljammer]] setting featured a number of
* Mongoose Publishing
** ''[[Starship Troopers]] RPG''
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** Farm: Agria's name suggests it is one of these, and the terrain does indeed have numerous farms.
** Garbage: Deadma's port.
* ''[[Super Mario Bros.|Super Mario Galaxy]]'' has plenty of
* ''[[Thunder Force]] series'' often has each stage a separate single biome planet. Sole exception is ''V'' where it take place on Earth.
* Poor ''[[Star Fox (series)|Star Fox]]'' can't seem to get anything remotely spacey right, though being [[Funny Animal]] and all, science isn't really a priority. But wait, in is this an aversion in the planet of Fortuna? In [[Star Fox (series)|Star Fox]] 64, it was icy, but in Assault, it's a jungle level? Maybe they got this different biomes thing right ... oh, wait, turns out Fortuna is all jungle, and the ice planet Fichina was the one that we were supposed to see in 64, they just got the names confused in the American version.
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*** Before biomes were added to the game, however, the trope was in full effect.
* Both played straight and spectacularly averted in [[Myst]] IV: Revelation. Spire is revealed to be a literal Cloud World, a series of floating towers apparently orbiting a cometlike body; while Haven has seacoast, jungle, savanna, and swamp within a few minutes' walk of each other.
* [[Knights of the Old Republic]] goes along with the [[Star Wars]] mentions
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== Western Animation ==
* ''[[Futurama]]'' frequently makes fun of this, and the [[Planet of Hats]], as every world the crew visits seems to have a single defining characteristic; Dr. Zoidberg's home planet of Decapod 10 is all beaches (referred to as "the Mud Planet" by its ambassador), Kif's is all swamp, etc. A notable example is the Nude Beach Planet, the entire planet apparently a coastline.
* Nearly every planet in ''[[War Planets]]'' was a
** The adaptation took it a lot further. Bone provides food, Rock provides minerals, and Fire provides energy. They even have world engines inside.
* ''[[Invader Zim]]'' has Zim banished to the planet of Foodcourtia, an entire planet of fast-food outlets. Similarly, Zim avails himself of the services offered by the planet Callnowia, which is devoted to the taking of catalogue orders and the shipping of products. Other Irken-dominated planets include Conventia, the convention center planet, recently-dominated Blorch, now a parking structure planet, and Dirt, the garbage dump.
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* [[wikipedia:CoRoT-7 b|Look at Corot-7b]], which is even being called "the lava planet".
* [http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2009/pr200924.html GJ 1214b] appears to be a prime candidate for an ocean planet. It's estimated that the ocean on its surface would be roughly three to four ''thousand'' miles deep. Yes, the ocean depth is a large percentage of the total radius of the planet. Additionally, because the planet is definitely hotter than boiling point, the ocean doesn't have a defined surface. Instead the atmosphere just gets thicker and thicker as you go down until it becomes as dense as water, which can't compress anymore, meaning the ocean and atmosphere just blend together.
* Today, Earth is the ''only'' aversion in the solar system. In the very early stages of formation, Earth was a lava planet, and if the [[wikipedia:Giant impact hypothesis|Giant Impact Hypothesis]] of the Moon's origin is correct, the Earth and the Moon were balls of magma for a while after the impact. It was probably a kind of ice planet at various points in the [[wikipedia:Cryogenian|Cryogenian]] era (850-625 million years ago), particularly during the Marinoan Glaciation. This hypothesis is called ([[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|fittingly]]) "[[wikipedia:Snowball Earth|Snowball Earth]]". During Earth's Pangaea period, it was largely one huge desert surrounded with one gigantic ocean. Later, There was a period when the entire planet was a warm, moist planet covered with jungles - ''even Antarctica''. This is how most of our coal reserves were created, by the way. Possibly the closest fit to the above archetypes would be an Ocean World, as the surface is over 70% water
As for the other planets...
** Venus has an extremely dense atmosphere that distributes heat very efficiently around the planet, so its [[Death World|surface of volcanoes and sulfuric acid]] is hot enough to melt lead from equator to pole and through the 60-Earth-day ''night''.
** Mars is basically a desert world. A very cold desert world. It does have polar glaciers
** Jupiter through Neptune are pretty much all Cloud Planets.
** Everything else (Mercury, most moons, asteroids, etc.) are pretty much airless rocks or ice balls.
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