memes

Always one of my favorite parts of that episode.

You can see a decent bit depending on terrain in most places, more if the terrain is higher than surrounding areas, but she pops out of a crack, looks around and sees ice for a few hundred yards, and gives up.

In fairness, without direction, some form of marker, or obvious landmark, wandering around in a blizzard would have been death for both of them... Not that they would have been able to walk to civilization even if they DIDN'T have injuries...

Still though, they've experienced varied terrain in plenty of planets, so assuming the whole planet is ice is something Sam would have corrected someone else on in a heartbeat. (and also made the argument that for all intents and purposes, for them it may as well be a whole planet)

I wonder how much better we could have had it if the location budget were like 4x what they had. Eventually you start to recognize specific rocks in the quarry... My wife likes to call one rock Terry because it has two vaguely eye-shaped holes, and "because it's terrible how often they use that place"

Star Wars even have a city covering an entire planet

Yes, they copied it from Foundation. Trantor has a perfectly fine reason for being the way it is, that would apply to Corusant too.

That is, if physics actually allowed them to be that way. Apparently Asimov didn't run the numbers on that one.

An ecumenopolis makes more sense imo. It's artificially created and a somewhat believable endpoint for population growth in the capital of a galaxy spanning civilization

Hey, sometimes it's a ramshackle alleyway or the back of someone's car.

Yeah but they’re cold and boring. Doesn’t make great tv.

I don't know if we have enough evidence to make such claims tbh. In our solar system, half the planets are rocks with a metal core (riffs playing in the background), the other half are gas giants. Among the gazillion moons though, there are some ice moons (like Titan and Europa), Venus only has no oceans because it is too hot, Mars has a volcanic past and may be warmer had it a thicker athmosphere and has polar ice caps, etc. There is a lot going on on these "barren rocks" and a lot of them being barren rocks could be due to them being located outside the goldilock zone.

If there is somewhere where humans can live, then likely there are also zones nearer and further from the poles.

So e.g. surely almost all planets with a livable zone would have polar ice caps.

Those planets typically don't heave a breathable atmosphere, though. You pretty much need a large biosphere if you want to be able to walk around without a spacesuit. An iceball world or a barren rock probably won't contain a breathable amount of oxygen in an otherwise mostly inert atmosphere. If you want to breathe pure carbon dioxide or get fried by nearly unfiltered UV radiation, though, they'd be great.

Within the TMZ, thirty mile zone, because union rules say you have to pay transportation time for workers above that limit.