Has anyone noticed how much variation there is over the solar system? We have large worlds. We have little worlds. We have volcanic worlds. We have dead worlds. We have worlds spewing nitrogen. Worlds spewing sulphur. Worlds that are spherical. Worlds that are irregular. Worlds with water. Worlds with ammonia. Worlds with colour. Worlds of black and white. Worlds with rings. Worlds with magnetic fields. Worlds with atmospheres. Smooth worlds. Cratered worlds. Dynamic worlds. Worlds with cliffs. Worlds with geysers. Worlds that might sustain all sorts of life.

Yet has anyone noticed how little variation there is over an entire galaxy as depicted on most SF shows? It makes you wonder why Enterprise would want to embark on its historic mission when apparently most of the interesting things are back home.

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Budget constraints - the eternal problem of filmed science fiction.

Well actually not every solar system in the galaxy is like our little spot...

From what I've read astronomers found that most stars either cannot support Earth like systems or that they have planets like Jupiter in close orbits, basically killing the smaller, more "interesting" planets...

Eitherway, extreme environments can support the kind of plots happening in most sci-fi shows anyway. Except for the Starwars galaxy, which apparently have so many earth like planets that they built a giant space station just to blow them up.

As an anthropologist, I'm always amused at how sci-fi worlds always have a homogeneous global culture.

That, plus aliens always seem to have had a sort of parallel biological/cultural/technological evolution with humans (or we're where they "used to be" and we just need to "catch up" with them).

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Well, if you've ever read the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter Hamilton (excellent series, it a tad oversexed in the first book, The Reality Dysfunction), he makes the point that humanity learned the lession that our differing cultures and religions could all live together in relative harmony as long as they didn't have to share a planet together.

So as humanity expanded, the planets tended to become populated mainly by a domiant culture and/or religion. European Christans might live on this planet, Islamics on another, etc.

Now I'm sure even in that scenario, there would still be regional differences, but compared to our current situation, it would appear to be a single culture.

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I'm still not buying it. Look at the diversity among, say, European Christians and then imagine an entire planet populated that way. It would magnify the differences, not sublimate them.

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You are absolutely correct, Xbalanque; the culture of tomorrow's new worlds will be as diverse as that of the Earth, or more so;

except perhaps those which have direct neural contact between the minds of the inhabitants, if such a thing is possible.

even then the linked minds might strive to be different from each other, with the benefit of a more accurate appreciation of the differences.

It is also important to remember that any alien races will be similarly diverse, although it might be difficult to differentiate between divergent alien cultures if they are extremely different from our own.

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Well, you also gotta allow the fact that (somehow), all the different Christian/Catholic religions were reunited into a single one as well and that English is the dominat language. Those two items alone, given 500 years, would remove a major source of cultural differences.

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The British have been colonizing the earth for almost that long, and I wouldn't say that there are no cultural differences between English-speaking countries. Just look at the linguistic differences between/within England, the United States, and Australia. You can increase the time frame all you want, but you will never get rid of diversity, and I see no reason why we should expect alien worlds to be the same way.

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If the world is ever united into a single culture it is unlikely to be either english speaking or christian.

As for European christians, Ulster and the Balkans tend to suggest as much discord as concensus.

BTW Britain and England are not synonyms; the UK consists of Great Britain and Nortern Ireland, Great Britain consists of Scotland, England and Wales. Just don't get me started on the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands.

And maybe that's why the alien ambassador in one episode of Enterprize was wearing stiletto heels.

Must persuade Mrs Bawheid that that is the sign of an advanced society.

I agree. This a shortcoming of much science fiction. Sometimes - especially on film - the reason for that is a plain lack of vision from the writers. Other times, the writers use each alien culture as a metaphor for a different human culture or character trait. And other times the writers seem to assume that as civilization progresses it tends to become more homogenous, so that the culture of "advanced" aliens, or future humans, will be less varied than human cultures have been up to the 20th century.
But what boring worlds those would be, no?

I think you've hit it right on the nose there. I've long debated with myself as to whether or not this is a sign of poor writing, in and of itself. It may just be a technique. Less realistic, perhaps, but then, it's fiction -- it's not neccesarily required to be an accurate depiction of things as they are or as they could be. Stories shouldn't be written because we want to accurately depict real life. They should be written because we want to tell a story. If that means inventing aliens to suit a series of metaphors, so be it. It may be unrealistic, but if the story works, it really doesn't matter.

That said, I think writers need to exercise great caution when deviating from reality. It's too easy to simply expect the reader/viewer to simply write off the improbabilities as fiction, and that kind of laziness can make the story not work at all. I think it was Isaac Asimov who said that you can only expect the audience to swallow one major leap of faith, and everything else has to either come from the real world or have a reasonable, logical connection to the major leap of faith and/or the real world. I don't think there's really a magic number, but I do think one has to be very careful about what they are asking the audience to accept in a story.

One of the Star Trek books was discussing something along these lines. There were apparently westerns made in that period that tried to portray feelings and reactions authentic to the period--they weren't very popular. The audience was much more comfortable with 1960's attiutudes in 1880's costumes.

Up until around 1980, if not later, that assumption was by no means unique to SF writers. Anthropologists and sociologists also believed that "history is directional", i.e. all societies go through same or similar stages and convert on the same ideal. Even if adherents of different ideologies disagreed vehemently on what this ideal is.

No one in 1970's could imagine Taliban or Bosnia - "history going backwards".

Even if all societies go through same or similar stages, sociologically, I don't see how that means that everyone must dress the same way, speak the same language, follow the same religion, eat the same food, have the same personality, etc.

The mistake made by SF writers is to show that all members of a culture are alike. The Ferengi are all profiteers except for a few disturbed souls. The Klingons are all warriors. No no. But the culture as a whole could become integrated. It's called the mongrel culture. Many say that Britain is a mongrel culture. Where would we be without our chicken tikkas?

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Yeah, but did you ever notice how many planets in the Star Trek universe have 24-hour days?

That's not due to budget contstraints. That's due to unimaginitive scriptwriting.

Xbalanque wrote:
I agree that SF worlds do seem ridiculously homogeneous. However, I would a mention that our earth would probably seem much more homogeneous if seen from the perspective of an outsider. A species seeing us for the first time wouldn't necessarily notice our differences the way we do.

A fair, but even smaller scale, analogy would be the way westerners merge their images of those from Asia. Especially southeast Asia-- Koreans, Vietnamese, Japanese, etc. -- I hear so many people refer to them all as "chinamen", or something equally appalling.

I find this lack of discernment rather nauseating, but all too frequent among the intelligent species of our planet. How much more so would be the case with a lifeform setting it's sensory organs upon us for the first time? We'd all be some translation of "weak, wet, blue-marble-men"...