Alien Sky Discussion - Television Tropes & Idioms

Tanto: I. Hate. This. Trope. It's one of those cliches in fantasy that annoys me far more than it should. There's no way it should work, and the authors never use it to drive the plot. It's just for decoration; asking me to increase the Willing Suspension Of Disbelief for no reason. I'm reading James Clemens's Godslayer series right now, characters mention there's two moons about a third of the way through the first book, never bring it up again. What the hell was the point of that? Why increase the number of improbable elements in your story for no reason like that? If you want Earthlike cultures, you need an Earthlike planet.

Big T: Arguments exist for Earth-like life on planets that are completely unlike Earth, so I don't see the problem. Oh, and...

Earnest: Would it be worthwhile to reorganize this trope into astronomical categories rather than media? Like say: Moons, Suns, Orbits a Gas Giant, Nebula, Sky color (Day/Night), et al.

Doug S. Machina: I think this page would be better served with an image from the end of The Quiet Earth, but I don't know how to put it on. Here's a link

with the picture. It wouldn't be a spoiler: they use it for the covers.

Turns out this comment is a combination of Did Not Do The Research and idleness.

If I remember correctly, the entry on Issac Asimov's Nightfall is wrong: the six suns hadn't just set, they had aligned behind one another. The "moon" was another planet (previously unknown) and was eclipsing them all.

Koveras: God DAMN that f—king vandal. One stupid bastard messes the article up and months of efforts of all tropers are lost.

Doug S. Machina: Nice to see someone took up my suggestion. I think it looks better. What was the vandalism?

Fast Eddie: This is getting chatty ..

Star Trek The Next Generation had an episode ("Hide and Q") where Riker commented a world was "so unlike Earth it has two moons." This troper feels two moons are sorta old hat just from reading science fiction, so how likely is it Riker, who has travelled to various planets and star systems, would be impressed enough to even mention it?
- Having said that, as moon-like moons are kinda rare among Earth-like planets in our solar system (Okay - maybe not rare - two from four), and the currently accepted process of creation doesn't lend itself well to making more than a single moon, it may be that two Earth-like moon *is* a remarkable occurrence. That or he was being ironic.
  - Doesn't Mars have two moons? Deimos and Phobos. And some think Mars might have been able to support life at one point, too.
  - Deimos and Phobos are basically captured asteroids, and are much smaller than Earth's moon. Moons the size of ours are extremely rare-ours was formed when Earth collided with a Mars-sized planet early in the solar system's history. Its hard to imagine that happening twice.

... and this is incomplete

This comic from Dresden Codak. You've probably never seen Saturn that close to Earth's atmosphere.
- What comic? I think you forgot to put a link in there.

Big T: I never thought I'd see the day, but I just removed the following Thread Mode Natter from the main entry. Please remember to change incorrect information, not just chat about it.

(never mind that [two suns] usually would destroy any planet thanks to tidal forces, not to mention the heat).

That depends on how far away the planet is from the two stars.

Darker Than Black has as part of the back story that the normal sky of the Earth disappeared when Hell's Gate opened ten years ago, taking with it all man-made constructs found above the Stratosphere (though strangely enough, the sun still works). Attempts to reclaim space only result in silence from whatever is sent up there. Instead, the stars in the night sky are all artificial and bound to a particular contractor, blinking as the contractor uses its power and falling from the sky when the contractor dies.

Does anything in the series establish that the sun isn't just another artificial star? Also, I though it was just the normal sky of Tokyo that was replaced. —Document N

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