This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Kendra Kirai: The thing with this trope is that unless it's a special case, the most times the characters only go to the main settlement, or one of the important ones. Carter's belief that she and O'Niell were on an ice planet was valid for two reasons..one, a planet usually has only one gate, and two, the gate is usually placed in a temperate, or important part of the planet, such as near a place of worship. Most colonies will, naturally, try to build first in the most habitable areas..thus the Vancouver Pine Forest planets, and Tropical planets.
Also, as I mentioned in the article itself, a Single-Biome Planet is actually logical and even likely. If the earth didn't have as much of a tilt as it does, and an orbit like it does, we ourselves would have a Temperate world..probably very much like a Vancouver Pine Forest planet. We would basically have no seasons. If we were in a closer orbit, or didn't have so much water, we'd have a desert planet. If we had MORE water, we'd have an Ocean Planet. If we were a little closer and had more water, we'd have a Swamp, or Jungle Planet. Further orbit, an Ice Planet. Planets with as varied a climate as Earth are, in all likelyhood, probably extremely rare, even among the mathematically uncommon habitable planets.
RobertThat is, at best debatable. Models of global climate can be contentious, but it seems clear that inhabitable worlds can't be all tropic, all ice, or all desert.
If its tropical at the poles, at the equator it will be hotter, hot enough to start a run-away greenhouse affect, with the planet ending up like Venus.
If the equator is sub-zero, all the water will rapidly be locked up as ice, reflecting away the sunlight, and the temperature will plummet further, until at the poles it begins to rain liquid air.
Without all the plants that make our Earth green a desert world will have very little oxygen. People would need a spacesuit to step outside.
You can have a water-world - no land except a few scattered islands - but otherwise a single biome world staying inhabitable for more than a few millennia seems implausible, unless it is being maintained that way by an elder race.
BT The P: When I wrote the initial entry, I was thinking of Star Wars and Star Trek, both big-time offenders on this one. I suppose it's difficult for anyone to imagine what life would be like on a planet with less diversity than ours, how the gloabl ecosphere would function in the absense of such diversity. And, I suppose, Stargate is a bit better about it than most series, the Vancouver Pine Forest line was a Call-Back to California Doubling.
Remember, the descriptions are how the planet is now, many stories set on a planet with a hostile environment describe the cataclysm that made it so. Most planets-of-the-week don't have the luxury of Back Story. Also, I think the examples of planet types should be separate from the series examples.
Robert Ultimately, this is mostly a special case of Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale. Even a single planet is much bigger than people can easily imagine. Instead they tend to be treated as if they were only 50 miles across. Thus Dr Who had a thousand year war between two cities within walking distance of each other. Planet of Hats is another example of small worlds.
The average planet may well have less diversity than the earth currently has - the earth itself did for much of its history - but it won't be completely uniform.
Whitewings In the case of War Planets (Shadow Raiders up here) the complaint isn't really valid; the four worlds of the Cluster were artificial, not natural. They were designed to be interdependent.
Paul A: If you say so, I believe you. I gave up on the series before they got around to explaining that.
Egak: I merged the two Dune examples.
Scrounge: I refuse to believe the biomes we have listed are all the important ones... No cloud planets?
Honore DB: I've said this elsewhere, but I still think this is realistic, from a human perspective. Any planet is either going to be "Earthlike" or be dramatically different from Earth in some way: temperature, atmosphere, plant life, something, and then that difference will define how humans perceive it.
Tamfang: in Dune, "the planet's polar regions are mentioned (though never shown)" — doesn't the book's map show that the most hospitable region is polar?
Nipok Nek: I'm taking out the Doctor Who reference. Not only doesn't a planet-sized library qualify for this trope, the planet is mentioned to have different weather patterns in different sections, but they specifically mention that the planet's trees were used to print all the books thus making the tropers assertion that the planet was built specifically as a library obviously wrong. I just don't see any way to fix the reference and still have it come out meaningful. I mention this here so it doesn't become an edit war.
The Last Conformist: It's rather silly to apply the label "single biome planet" to uninhabited worlds - they don't have any biomes!
Can'tRememberMyName: Endor actually did have other biomes, but they were only seen in the two Ewok Adventure movies: Caravan of Courage and Battle for Endor. There are apparently deserts, mountains, and grassy hills.
Washington213 I don't know if that was a joke, but there actually are cloud planets, we call them gas giants.
