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{{trope}}
[[File:Gateway Galaxy Planet 2310.png|link=Super Mario Galaxy|rightframe]]
 
{{quote|''"When you live on a planet the size of a town''
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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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A side effect of this is that the characters never realize that things can happen in parts of planets. You will never see aliens trying to capture a planet's equator, or its polar caps—it's the whole planet or bust.
 
'''Planetville''' instantly explains these [[Speculative Fiction Tropes]]:
 
* [[Ditto Aliens]]: To outsiders, most any human ethnic group looks alike.
* [[It's a Small World After All]]: '''Planetville''' is as small as a town, so finding things is the same.
* [[One World Order]]: A country has one government except in civil wars. '''Planetville''' has only one except in civil wars.
* [[Planet of Hats]]: It's just like the wacky [[Adventure Towns]] of Earth.
* [[Scary Dogmatic Aliens]]: Nazis... [[Recycled in Space|In Spaaaaaace]]!
* [[Single Biome Planet]]: Do Earth towns have both a frozen and a jungle region? '''Planetville''' doesn't have them either.
 
This trope is sometimes extended further still, with each star system apparently only having a single planet in it... every body in the system aside from Planetville itself is merely decoration if it is considered at all.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/2034117"
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