• skibidi@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    In fairness, seasons and varied terrain aren’t guaranteed.

    Of all the bodies in the solar system, only Earth has such a wide variety of landscape. Mars is rocky desert or rocky desert with canyons. Pluto is ice ball or rocky ice ball. Etc.

    Also, if humans were colonizing earth from outside, we would probably just build cities on the river deltas and skip the less habitable spots. Stories set here would then just be cityscape or river delta, even though the ice caps/mountains/jungles/deserts still exist. Colonized worlds will have different population distribution that organically settled ones.

    • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Mars is rocky desert or rocky desert with canyons.

      Mars has river deltas. It has flat plains. It has shifting rolling dunes. It has mountains and valley. It has a twisting series of canyons so constricted they’re called the Labyrinth of Night. It has vast ice sheets and polar caps of frozen carbon dioxide and water. It has caves and frozen mud flats and a thousand other varied forms.

      Mars is a world. It is a place. It has biomes as varied and unique as those of Earth.

      Pluto is ice ball or rocky ice ball.

      There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

    • Tiral@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Yeah, plus NMS has come a really really long way since release and they haven’t ever asked for another dime.

    • Skepticpunk@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Honestly, by the numbers, Earth is mostly an ocean/forest planet with some desert. Desert and ice planets are believable, too, given those are more temperature-based, and city planets seem like they’d be inevitable in a sci-fi setting just due to population sizes.

      • halowpeano@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        By the numbers I think it’s an ocean planet with 71% coverage. Of the land, it’s actually pretty evenly split 1/3 forest, 1/3 desert, 1/3 grass or shrubland.

        Given what we know of the Earth’s own history, forest planets, ice planets, and desert planets are all possible and the Earth has been each in different geologic times. Although in every case there will be pockets of other biomes that are very large on a human scale. A single France-sized forest would be massive to a human explorer, even if the rest of the planet is ocean and ice.