Science fiction is full of planets with only one biome. Why is a habitable ocean planet feasible but a desert planet isn’t? Think about planetary ecologies you've run across in fiction, as informed by the biomes on the planet we know...
Every summer for the past 25 years, I’ve taught a class to gifted and talented young people called ALIEN WORLDS. (You may be seeing something a bit more methodical in a future series here!) As a retired science teacher (from elementary through high school, I have taught every (school) science from Astronomy to Zoology!), I teach my alien worlds class STRICTLY from the point of view of SCIENCE. For example, when the students create their “alien intelligence”, they have to not only be part of the ecology of the world they make, but ALSO, they have to have descended from a primitive form of life which still exists on the planet.
As I DO teach fourth graders through high school sophomores, I can, in one week, only touch on the rudimentary rules of evolution. BUT, most of the kids get it.
As well, prior to allowing the evolution of life on their alien worlds, they have to HAVE an alien world! A Power Point slide I leave up and come back to several times during the all-day, week-long class is this: “NO FOREST MOONS OF ENDOR, DESERT PLANETS OF JAKKU, JUNGLE PLANETS OF DAGOBA, OR ICE PLANETS OF HOTH!!!!!” I don’t even allow the World City of Trantor…um…I mean CORRUSCANT…
I spend time teaching that no single world will have (in fact, I use that rarely-used word, “impossible”) a single biome and that George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg have led them wrong (ever since seeing the original STAR WARS (when it was the ONLY Star Wars!) during its opening week, in the theater, in 1977…and I was a newly-turned 20 years old and had just finished two years at a Lutheran junior college – where the two biology professors taught evolution...I've been fascinated by world building -- mostly because when you begin to create the aliens that LIVE on a world, the conditions there ARE the driver of what kinds of intelligences might develop.)
The likely phenomenon that all planets will have multiple biomes is apparently what this session a session at one of the World Science Fiction Conventions was all about.
BUT, it was the rider that intrigued me: Why is a habitable ocean planet feasible but a desert planet isn’t?
My off-the-cuff answer is that an ocean world can’t NOT have variable biomes. As well, water and air have totally different properties. Perhaps the most important is that when air is heated, the heat dissipates fairly quickly – living in Minnesota, we see this obviously after an excessively hot day (Minnesota’s highest recorded temperature was 115 deg. F on July 29, 1917 in a town named Beardsley (one of the western-most points of the state (in the “bump”) cools off dramatically. Once the sun is down, as long as the humidity isn’t excessive, the temperature drops fairly quickly. We even experienced this wild shift of temperature last week, when over a period of four days, the temperature tumbled from Wednesday's dry 87 F (30.5 C) to Sunday's HIGH of 33 F (0 C).
But bodies of water are heat sinks, and we live within a three hour drive of one of the largest freshwater heat sinks on Earth - Lake Gichigami. In addition to being on the edge of the Great Plains with wild temperature swings (record: 72 degrees F, 1970). Gichigami contains 10% of Earth’s surface fresh water; that mass of water (along with the other Great Lakes) “…acts like a heat sink that moderates the temperatures of the surrounding land, cooling the summers and warming the winters. The lakes also act like giant humidifiers, increasing the moisture content of the air. In the winter, this moisture contributes to heavy snowfall known as “lake effect” snow.”
Even strictly speaking, Humans and all other land life are confined to only 25% of the surface of the planet – practically speaking, Earth already IS a water planet. If you want to get REALLY picky about, all life starts in water of varying viscosity – I had an amniotic sack around me until just before my mom “broke water”. I scramble a good half dozen water sacks for birds every week…
At any rate, the response to why you can’t have a world that’s entirely desert – is that CHEMISTRY NEEDS WATER TO HAPPEN.
And if you raise the flag of Arrakis at me, I’ll just drop a rock on it – Arrakis is no more a “desert world” than Sahara is a dry desert – the sand may be dry, but try as you might, you can’t eliminate the fact that Sahara exists on a planet that is 71% WATER…and while we all pretend that there’s no water on Dune – there IS water on Dune. It’s how the Fremen survive – and water has to come from the HUMAN component of Dune in order for the still suits to work…
Minimal water on Dune – absolutely. But except for some very rare cases, I doubt life could have evolved there. The fact that Shai Hulud is made of flesh and not rock is proof that Dune has water and while water isn’t ABUNDANT, it is there – strongly suggesting that you can’t have a totally dry planet.
All planets are water planets. H2O is essential for the activity of cells as we know them. ANDROMEDA STRAIN aside, life as we know it has water in it in some amount.
THAT’S why you can have all-water worlds, and a true, totally dry desert world would be impossible.
Oh, a quibble that bothers me every time I watch it? In Episode VI: The Empire Strikes Back? Hoth CAN’T BE AN ICE MOON/PLANET/WHATEVER: Seventy-one percent of the oxygen we breathe comes from algae IN THE OCEAN. Twenty percent more comes from Prochlorococcus, a cyanobacterium, or a blue green bacteria – so there’s 91% of the oxygen comes from…plants in water. The rest? Soil and rocks, plus atmospheric free oxygen created through radiation and occasionally lightning.
SO: you CAN have a life-bearing oceanic world (you live on one); but you CAN’T have a life-bearing desert one…and while Hoth is technically an "ice planet", just as Earth was essentially an ice planet and our dear Mommy Earth was also one for a time -- https://www.livescience.com/64692-snowball-earth.html, though apparently the water cycle started up again eventually!
The rest of those alien worlds would have to be somewhere in between – dryer or wetter than Earth; and maybe with LOTS of deserts (and there you’d have to define your TYPE of desert – some are cold, some hot, some are Antarctic, and some are Sahara. And you have the driest place on this planet: “The Atacama (west of the Andes on the coast of Bolivia) is the driest place on earth, other than the poles. It receives less than 1 mm of precipitation each year, and some areas haven’t seen a drop of rain in more than 500 years.”
Every summer for the past 25 years, I’ve taught a class to gifted and talented young people called ALIEN WORLDS. (You may be seeing something a bit more methodical in a future series here!) As a retired science teacher (from elementary through high school, I have taught every (school) science from Astronomy to Zoology!), I teach my alien worlds class STRICTLY from the point of view of SCIENCE. For example, when the students create their “alien intelligence”, they have to not only be part of the ecology of the world they make, but ALSO, they have to have descended from a primitive form of life which still exists on the planet.
As I DO teach fourth graders through high school sophomores, I can, in one week, only touch on the rudimentary rules of evolution. BUT, most of the kids get it.
As well, prior to allowing the evolution of life on their alien worlds, they have to HAVE an alien world! A Power Point slide I leave up and come back to several times during the all-day, week-long class is this: “NO FOREST MOONS OF ENDOR, DESERT PLANETS OF JAKKU, JUNGLE PLANETS OF DAGOBA, OR ICE PLANETS OF HOTH!!!!!” I don’t even allow the World City of Trantor…um…I mean CORRUSCANT…
I spend time teaching that no single world will have (in fact, I use that rarely-used word, “impossible”) a single biome and that George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg have led them wrong (ever since seeing the original STAR WARS (when it was the ONLY Star Wars!) during its opening week, in the theater, in 1977…and I was a newly-turned 20 years old and had just finished two years at a Lutheran junior college – where the two biology professors taught evolution...I've been fascinated by world building -- mostly because when you begin to create the aliens that LIVE on a world, the conditions there ARE the driver of what kinds of intelligences might develop.)
The likely phenomenon that all planets will have multiple biomes is apparently what this session a session at one of the World Science Fiction Conventions was all about.
BUT, it was the rider that intrigued me: Why is a habitable ocean planet feasible but a desert planet isn’t?
My off-the-cuff answer is that an ocean world can’t NOT have variable biomes. As well, water and air have totally different properties. Perhaps the most important is that when air is heated, the heat dissipates fairly quickly – living in Minnesota, we see this obviously after an excessively hot day (Minnesota’s highest recorded temperature was 115 deg. F on July 29, 1917 in a town named Beardsley (one of the western-most points of the state (in the “bump”) cools off dramatically. Once the sun is down, as long as the humidity isn’t excessive, the temperature drops fairly quickly. We even experienced this wild shift of temperature last week, when over a period of four days, the temperature tumbled from Wednesday's dry 87 F (30.5 C) to Sunday's HIGH of 33 F (0 C).
But bodies of water are heat sinks, and we live within a three hour drive of one of the largest freshwater heat sinks on Earth - Lake Gichigami. In addition to being on the edge of the Great Plains with wild temperature swings (record: 72 degrees F, 1970). Gichigami contains 10% of Earth’s surface fresh water; that mass of water (along with the other Great Lakes) “…acts like a heat sink that moderates the temperatures of the surrounding land, cooling the summers and warming the winters. The lakes also act like giant humidifiers, increasing the moisture content of the air. In the winter, this moisture contributes to heavy snowfall known as “lake effect” snow.”
Even strictly speaking, Humans and all other land life are confined to only 25% of the surface of the planet – practically speaking, Earth already IS a water planet. If you want to get REALLY picky about, all life starts in water of varying viscosity – I had an amniotic sack around me until just before my mom “broke water”. I scramble a good half dozen water sacks for birds every week…
At any rate, the response to why you can’t have a world that’s entirely desert – is that CHEMISTRY NEEDS WATER TO HAPPEN.
And if you raise the flag of Arrakis at me, I’ll just drop a rock on it – Arrakis is no more a “desert world” than Sahara is a dry desert – the sand may be dry, but try as you might, you can’t eliminate the fact that Sahara exists on a planet that is 71% WATER…and while we all pretend that there’s no water on Dune – there IS water on Dune. It’s how the Fremen survive – and water has to come from the HUMAN component of Dune in order for the still suits to work…
Minimal water on Dune – absolutely. But except for some very rare cases, I doubt life could have evolved there. The fact that Shai Hulud is made of flesh and not rock is proof that Dune has water and while water isn’t ABUNDANT, it is there – strongly suggesting that you can’t have a totally dry planet.
All planets are water planets. H2O is essential for the activity of cells as we know them. ANDROMEDA STRAIN aside, life as we know it has water in it in some amount.
THAT’S why you can have all-water worlds, and a true, totally dry desert world would be impossible.
Oh, a quibble that bothers me every time I watch it? In Episode VI: The Empire Strikes Back? Hoth CAN’T BE AN ICE MOON/PLANET/WHATEVER: Seventy-one percent of the oxygen we breathe comes from algae IN THE OCEAN. Twenty percent more comes from Prochlorococcus, a cyanobacterium, or a blue green bacteria – so there’s 91% of the oxygen comes from…plants in water. The rest? Soil and rocks, plus atmospheric free oxygen created through radiation and occasionally lightning.
SO: you CAN have a life-bearing oceanic world (you live on one); but you CAN’T have a life-bearing desert one…and while Hoth is technically an "ice planet", just as Earth was essentially an ice planet and our dear Mommy Earth was also one for a time -- https://www.livescience.com/64692-snowball-earth.html, though apparently the water cycle started up again eventually!
The rest of those alien worlds would have to be somewhere in between – dryer or wetter than Earth; and maybe with LOTS of deserts (and there you’d have to define your TYPE of desert – some are cold, some hot, some are Antarctic, and some are Sahara. And you have the driest place on this planet: “The Atacama (west of the Andes on the coast of Bolivia) is the driest place on earth, other than the poles. It receives less than 1 mm of precipitation each year, and some areas haven’t seen a drop of rain in more than 500 years.”
So, THAT'S why a true "Desert Planet of Dune" or the "Desert World of Tatooine" would, however disappointingly, unlikely in the extreme. And even if they WEREN'T, life as we know it would be VERY different from their depictions in DUNE and STAR WARS!
Then again, it's an infinite universe, so SOMEWHERE, there may be a TRUE desert planet. What would the life there be like, and WHERE THE HECK WOULD IT HAVE COME FROM?
Then again, it's an infinite universe, so SOMEWHERE, there may be a TRUE desert planet. What would the life there be like, and WHERE THE HECK WOULD IT HAVE COME FROM?
You know, I don’t think I’m done with this whole planet thing...Later!
For more of my essays, visit POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS at https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/
For more of my essays, visit POSSIBLY IRRITATING ESSAYS at https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/
I think this prevalence of single-biome worlds mostly indicates a failure of imagination on the part of SF/F writers — especially the "Golden Age" writers and editors who for the most part lived in New York City and didn't get out much, and thus had no trouble envisioning planets that were all just one big city.
ReplyDeleteAnd not just that, but one city that where the regional climate, architecture, and social norms were the same everywhere their characters went? Seriously, compare and contrast Reykjavik to Rio de Janeiro. You mean to tell me it wasn't cold at Trantor's poles and hot at its equator?
Oh, that's right, "weather control" was usually part and parcel of that generation's output of fiction. As if absolute control of planetary weather for the convenience and comfort of humans wouldn't be an ecological catastrophe in its own right.
Seriously, those "Golden Age" writers and editors really needed to get out of New York more often.
On another more embarrassing level, I think a lot of these single-biome worlds owe their origins to the Flash Gordon comic strip of the 1930s, which stunted the imaginations of the writers and readers of the 1930s through the 1950s as badly as Star Trek has stunted the imaginations of writers and fans ever since the 1960s. Just look at Mongo: it's one single-biome world after another, which exist for the sole purpose of giving Flash and Dale places to have new adventures. Tropica, Arboria, Coralia, Frigidairia, The Great Mongo Desert: there are your prototypes for Dagobah, Endor, Naboo, Hoth, and Arrakis.
ReplyDeleteFinally, a water world would not be a single biome. There are enormous differences between the local underwater landscape, flora, and fauna in say, the deep waters off the coast of Greenland as compared to the shallow waters surrounding a Pacific coral atoll. The problem for SF/F writers is, well, it's all under water. Out of sight, out of mind. Oceans are at least as complex and turbulent as atmospheres, we just live on the top side of the boundary layer, so we don't think about it.
ReplyDeleteThat was the main thing this thought exercise revealed to me...Earth is wildly varied in and of itself, with incredibly, wildly diverse life...if there are habitable worlds Out There, the wildness and diversity will be LIGHT YEARS beyond different from what we find here..
ReplyDeleteThis may be an insoluble problem, because it's so deeply embedded in the ancient pulp roots of the genre. Is a story character/plot-driven or situation-driven?
ReplyDeleteCharacter/plot-driven is easy. We all know how to do that. Intrepid Space Captain Bat Durston and his crew land on planet Quoxnarg IV, where they come into conflict with other people -- they may have four arms, funny-shaped heads, and be called Klingomulans, but for all practical purposes of motivation and action, they're people -- and proceeds to dance through the moves of the traditional three-act structure. In that kind of story there isn't time to explore the surrounding environment (unless there's a secret hidden in it that will lead Capt. Durston and his crew to a clever victory over the Klingomulans), so we resort to Earth-analogue simplified biomes in the same way stage shows use flats and backdrops.
But in a story where the situation is the major driver of the conflict -- well, in recent years, there's been The Martian, and that's about it. Perhaps there is a natural limit on how often the readers will tolerate yet another retelling of Robinson Crusoe on Mars.
> so we resort to Earth-analogue simplified biomes in the same way stage shows use flats and backdrops.
ReplyDeleteTo save time and get on with moving the plot forward.
But it occurs to me: how come there's never something clever to be discovered about the local environment that works in the Klingomulans favor? Why does our genre depend so heavily on our hero's adversaries being so thick?
I think it's because if we take the time to create something REALLY ALIEN (at least as far as we can imagine...) it involves LOTS of hard work. Frank Herbert TRIED with DUNE after spending five years studying a small desert. But he applied what he learned THERE to AN ENTIRE PLANETARY ECOLOGY and lost the weirdness by patiently applying standard fantasy (castles, court intrigue, guilds, and royalty) "paint" on a standard science fiction "canvas" ("alien worlds", Worms, profound genetic manipulation, and an unusual method of instantaneous, drug mediated, interstellar travel.)
ReplyDeleteStory gets lost in the creation of a "universe". It's happened to me many times. And I KNOW very few people want to know about how I got to the universe. My current post at my own website made me flex my imagination more than usual -- I had to try and "see alien", through the eyes of a siphonophore. The WEIRD part was that the Human/Siphonophore interaction prevented me from coming up with a story-driving conflict...To have conflict, there has to be a certain amount of empathy. If there's NOT (I discovered) then there's no INTENTIONAL conflict (all the miscommunication is entirely accidental because neither side can possibly understand the other -- there's no malicious intent that the character can...CONTEND against. Hmmm...
Thesis: the root of conflict is competition. If the alien and the human are not competing for the same resource, there can be no conflict; if there is no conflict, there is no drama; and if there is no drama, there is no story. At least, no interesting story that readers will pay a few bucks to read.
ReplyDeleteDoes that seem to track?
The question to answer then is this: ARE you contending for the same resource?
ReplyDeleteLet's say I meet vampire. They want a Human. So do I.
The vampire wants the Human to feed on.
The Human wants to punish them for murdering my...(whomever).
Are we really competing against each other? Assume I have NO IDEA what the vampire trope is; the vampire has never actually spoken to a living Human except shortly before feeding on them. They are strangers not only to each other, but to the IDEA of each other.
The vampire reasons, "The Human I drink from is still alive; so I've committed no murder. They still recognize the (loved one/perpetrator)...
There IS a conflict...sort of. The Human can feel vindicated that the perpetrator of crime against them will make them a vampire forever. Do they go home, satisfied? The vampire may well assume so.
What if...so...
You track! My thinking is muddled as I puzzle this out. Which is, ultimately GOOD!