Space: Desert Planets

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Well, you know, regardless of that, the point of the joke is still valid: A planet has diverse terrain types (as GURPS calls them), and fiction with "desert planets" and "jungle planets" and "swamp planets" is naive. You might as well have aliens come to Earth and call it "the water planet."

I think "water planet" touches on another issue here - water comes with a lot of ecological diversity. For that matter even deserts come in a lot of different types, even here on Earth. Desertworld may have dozens of different kinds of biomes, each dominated by entirely different organisms that can easily tell them apart. Just because it all looks the same to humans with their pathetically inferior moisture senses that can't even distinguish between 2 and 5% relative humidity, and total inability to smell phosphates....