What are common stereotypes in science fiction/Space opera?

Space traveling works like sailing

You forgot
>SEXY RACE

All hot or all cold makes sense, but even in an "Ice" planet or a "desert" planet you would have geodiversity due to weather patterns and the like. An ice planet would have subterranean oceans and cryovolcanoes above them, huge glaciers in place of rivers, great tundras and continental tagia forests. It wouldn't all just be a planet of greenland, which is how it's usually depicted. And planets like "swamp planet" make negative sense. Swamps require a precise balance of conditions and they're not self sustaining.

>Planets are just as bad. ALL swamp, ice, city, etc. Thank you George Lucas, you fucking hack.
To be fair, every planet that we've seen aside from Earth is that way.

While it's likely that there are exo-planets that have diverse environments, we haven't yet observed them closely enough to know for sure.

Likely most planets with life are going to be slimeballs. The Earth stayed as a slimeball for 3 billion years. That's longer than all the history of complex life put together. Plus, any early starter have been likely exterminated by gamma ray burst, which were more common, and radiation from the once active galactic nucleus. Even then, peer planets are likely going to be separated by millions of years in evolution.

They have space ships

fuck lukas so much. every time i see a game of movie have fighters in space i have to puke

>To be fair, every planet that we've seen aside from Earth is that way.

Trappist-1, knucklehead. You should have heard of that system just this week.

The diversity of exoplanets is far greater than your Star Wars Happy Meal would have you believe.

Here's pluto, true colour, and hoth, as in empire strikes back. Notice how hoth is one general indistinct ball of snow with some small pools of water, while pluto has large clearly defined geologically different zones?

Giant planet killer/planet sized space station/powerful alien relic ALWAYS gets blown up.

That pisses me off, its like authors and writers are just too afraid to give power to the protagonists and know how to write empowered and logical characters with large amounts of military might.

Manual labour is not done by robots.

Literally all we know about those planets is their masses, radii, and orbits. We know literally nothing about their surface conditions, aside from constraints on temperature based on sunlight. It has nothing at all to do with the single-gimmick planet idea.

The point is, most known planets are single-gimmick. Venus is the Hot Acid Cloud planet, Mars is the Cold Red Desert planet, and most of the moons have their own quirks - You've got plenty of Ice Moons, some with undersurface oceans and cryovolcanoes, you've got the Hydrocarbon Marsh Moon, you've got the Half-Black-Half-White Moon, and lots and lots of Cratered Grey Balls.

There are still regional variations - Mars does have 'biomes' of a sort, the Moon has its maria, but you could be very easily forgiven for rounding off most of the solar system to single environment worlds.

That said, none of these have life in them and most of them are geologically dead.

The Earth's variety comes mostly from having 1) active plate tectonics, which leads to really complex geology, 2) oceans, which adds weather, and also makes erosion really complex, and 3) life, which among the obvious local color also is a huge contributor to our planet's geochemical cycles and shapes the regions it lives in in really fundamental ways.

I would expect planets with similar features to also have interesting variety. And they may all be interlinked - there's reason to believe rocky planets need oceans to have plate tectonics, that without plate tectonics to keep recycling various elements there couldn't be life, and that without life to keep the carbon cycle going you'd ultimately end up like Venus.

>That said, none of these have life in them and most of them are geologically dead.

Exactly. What pinheads like overlook is that people walk around on their Ice!, Desert!, Whatever! planets breathing the air and wearing clothes instead of spacesuits.

You cannot be forgiven single biome worlds where humans walk around unprotected in said biome.

As for Trappist-1, we know three of the planets there are roughly Earth-sized, orbit in the star's liquid water zone, and are almost certainly tidally locked. Whether or not humans can stroll unprotected on them, they WILL have geodiversity.

But that's the whole problem. People read "cold desert planet" and just assume the entire planet is the gobi desert. People ignore the great canyons of mars, the rocky areas, the glaciers, the sea and river beds, the mudflows, the volcanoes and so on. It's always just red sand with the occasional mountain.
Now, yes, most do fall under a single earth biome category, but when you extrapolate those biomes to planetary scale, things become very different to earth. Pluto has forests of ice spikes hundreds of meters tall, but you'd never see that on hoth because sci-fi authors have no sense of imagination, and so reality ends up being much stranger than fiction because fiction is afraid of being strange.

>not virtually all labour is handled by robots/low Ais

I was just typing out part 2, it just took me a while because phone keyboard.

I didn't overlook it, it just didn't fit into the post. See for the addendum.

I sent get it. What will become of people if there is not any work and labor anymore?

No one has the autism necessary to map out several biomes in several unique planets, especially in a visual medium.
It's not that they have no sense of imagination, it's that you fail to realize just how BIG planets are. No one has time to care about the geology on several planets when there's no one who truly understands all the different biomes on earth.

Unless the Singularity has come and the machines have utterly supplanted humanity, there will always be *some* work to do. If robots can do all manual labor super cheap, then all the things that require manual labor but would otherwise be too much of an investment for people to do freelance open up.

And just because people would no longer *need* to work in order to ensure there would be goods and services, doesn't mean there'd be nothing to *do*, or nothing that people would want done by humans.

There'd still be work out there that people would do because they enjoy it. Like how Sisko's dad in DS9 running a restaurant.

>What will become of people if there is not any work and labor anymore?

Look at the inner cities in the US, the banlieues in France, the "grass eaters' in Japan, etc.

When provided with what they need to live, most people will end up doing nothing of any real substance and instead will divert themselves in various ways; drugs, religion, fantasy lives, obsessive hobbies, casual violence, etc.

In John Barnes "Million Open Doors" series, most of Earth's population consists of morbidly obese shut-ins spending nearly all their waking hours plugged into VR systems while robots, AIs, and a tiny fraction of people keep the post-scarcity system chugging along.

Things were so boring that many people volunteered for STL generation ship colonization projects planned around specific and mostly make-believe "cultures" like Neu Occitan and it's "3 Musketeer/Dumas/Cyrano/dueling" lifestyle.

They shall become amateur writers.

People may take advantages of cybernetics and genetics in an attempt to catch up machines.

>>Sitting on the internet hating on successful IP's that people like is much more productive than making my own better one.

Spending your life working for the man is of real substance and worth, suuuure.

People with nothing to do are obese because obesity isn't forced on people by shitty lifestyles that don't leave them enough time to cook and eat proper food and exercise.

Nobody ever engaged in amateur sports, arts, music without any realistic hope of monetary reward. This is why marathons don't draw in tens of thousands of people in big cities, and people don't share their creative visions for free online.

For one thing, humans are actually pretty incredible machinery; it will be a long time until there is any hardware that can match a human in *every* application, and there may never be a machine that can perform as well or better than a human at all/most areas at once. Humans are ridiculously versatile.

And designing specialized hardware and software to replace any particular human task is expensive, and so is installing it once developed, even if it is cheaper to run. Doing so only really makes sense for factories or large chains, where you have many employees performing essentially the same task in parallel or performing the same task many times repeatedly. McDonalds might automate, but small local restaurants might never do so.

>Nobody ever engaged in amateur sports, arts, music without any realistic hope of monetary reward. This is why marathons don't draw in tens of thousands of people in big cities, and people don't share their creative visions for free online.

Nice binary thinking, sperglord. You autistically assumed ALL when I deliberately wrote MOST.

Yeah, 10,000+ drawn worldwide run in the NYC marathon. Now, contrast that with how people actually live the NYC metro area. Ditto all the other activities you listed.

Most people are lazy assholes. Not all, most. If given what they need to live, most people will do nothing of consequence with their free time. Not all, most.

There will be outliers and I mentioned their presence in Barne's series, but most people will end up doing little more than turning food and drink into shit and piss.

And right now these same people do the same shit, except they also spend 40-80 hours per week at work, and probably half of it on the road.

They aren't suddenly going to become amazing artists or scientists or musicians. They weren't doing shit before, and they'll continue not doing shit, what's the problem?

Most people are too poor and too busy working to not be poor to invest time and money into anything more involved than TV. It's not laziness, user, it's poverty.

And regardless, a world where people flat out do not have to work would be so radically different than the current one that trying to decide what it would be like based on our present circumstances is impossible.

>ancient aliens left ruins everywhere
>mages, but they get a fancy name like psychics
>spaceships are basically exactly like sea ships, though they may be as impractically big as you please
>most alien races are humans with a funny skin color
>the others are space bugs
>or space furries
>some sort of transcendental singularity scenario ala Evangelion
>space magic in general explains everything
>blending of the most superficial aspects of a genre: your protagonists can travel in a Star Trek-esque spaceship, have a not!Jedi on board, investigate on Cyberpunk planet, then go to low-tech Cowboy planet, before facing the Lovecraftian BBEG

>They aren't suddenly going to become amazing artists or scientists or musicians. They weren't doing shit before, and they'll continue not doing shit, what's the problem?

Exactly.

>>Most people are too poor and too busy working to not be poor to invest time and money into anything more involved than TV.

Complete and utter bullshit.

Most don't have enough time? In 2015, the average person in the US spent FIVE HOURS A DAY watching TV. That's the average meaning half of people watch more than 5 hours.

Most don't have enough money? Watching TV requires a TV plus cable, Netflix, etc. They've enough money to pay monthly subscription fees but not enough for basic running shoes? Paper and pencils? Does THINKING cost money?

Most people are LAZY ASSHOLES, Skippy. Poverty is an excuse, not a reason. When you grow up you'll come to understand that.

Okay, add "lack the energy" to that list. Try working two, three jobs to make ends meet and see if you've still got the drive to run a marathon or write a novel.

>Okay, add "lack the energy" to that list. Try working two, three jobs to make ends meet and see if you've still got the drive to run a marathon or write a novel.

More excuses? I worked at a shipyard on swing shift, went to college during the day, and still found time to hike, play wargames, cook, clean, chase/fuck women, etc.

You have the time you make. When you're lazy, you make nothing including time.

It is human behavior to turn a safety net into a hammock.

>Most people are lazy assholes, therefore they should while away doing meaningless jobs that are probably indirectly killing them, for no reason. Mincome bad!

>hike, play wargames, cook, clean, chase/fuck women

What about any of this has "real substance"? I thought you were talking about people being too lazy to put their time towards creative and intellectual pursuits, but apparently you're just bitching about how some people's non-productiveness is somehow worse than yours.

>>Most people are lazy assholes, therefore they should while away doing meaningless jobs that are probably indirectly killing them, for no reason. Mincome bad!

I'm not saying that, asshole.

What I'm saying that a "mincome" system doesn't automatically create a huge outpouring of creativity coupled with an explosion of personal growth.

Neither of those things are occurring now within the populations which have limited "mincomes" and neither will happen when a majority of people enjoy large "mincomes" associated with fully automated, post scarcity societies.

TV sucks.

>What about any of this has "real substance"? I thought you were talking about people being too lazy to put their time towards creative and intellectual pursuits,

>attend college full time
>work full time to support myself
>enjoy a variety of leisure activities
>I was doing it wrong

Spandex spacesuits and casual wear

Martians will bitch that they can play with their Earhling counterparts due the the 3-20 minute lag.

Rubber forehead aliens.

I'm not saying you're doing it wrong, that sounds like a solid life. I'm saying it's not that different from the people you're calling lazy assholes.

>I'm saying it's not that different from the people you're calling lazy assholes.

Working, instead of collecting a dole.
Earning a degree, instead of dropping out.
Physically active, instead of parked in front of the TV.
Intellectually active, instead of parked in front of a TV.
Working towards my future, instead of doing the same thing day in and day out.

You're right. There's no real difference at all.

why would fighters be so infective?

I know we're comparing real life to fiction here, but Pluto is covered in all kinds of different frozen gases, all of which together might absorb and re-emit the Sun's light at that particularly dirty brown color.
If Hoth has a different surface composition then that could help explain the color difference.

That there aren't any visibly different geological regions on Hoth is a big problem though. All of those big ass moons would stir up some sort of weather to shape Hoth's surface, even if the world is so old that it doesn't have many active geological processes anymore.

>spaceships can travel in space
>technology does stuff
>there are living beings in the setting
>languages are used to communicate
>clothing exists and is used
>there are planets that float around in space

Bear in mind that averages can be a poor measure of center when it comes to social data.
Outliers can drag the mean away from a more realistic value.
If out of 10 people surveyed 9 of them watch TV for 1 hour per day, but 1 of them watches it for 10 hours per day, then the average TV watch time is 1.9 hours per day, even though the majority of those surveyed only watch it for 1 hour.
It works the same way if a lot of people watch a lot of TV but a few of them don't watch it at all, though in this case the average shifts left and appears lower than what the true majority is doing.
That's not to say that averages can't be accurate or that they aren't useful, but the median is a more reliable measure of center in situations that have potential for outliers in the data.

>Bear in mind blah blah blah

While it was 3 decades ago, I took statistics. Passed too.

Five hours is a SHIT TON of time in which people can be doing all the things wanted to believe they have no time for.

Again, we're talking about most and not all. We're talking about the population as a whole, not small groups or individuals.

Are there individuals overworked and under payed to the point where their lives consist of too much work and too little sleep? You fucking bet there are.

Do the majority of people with free time PISS AWAY that time? You fucking bet they do.

If you want to get into planet realism the real crime Hoth commits isn't bland geography. Any planet CAN be bland geographically. What it can't be is as small as Hoth is and retain any kind of breathable atmosphere. Hoth's radius is just a bit bigger than Mercury. It's also pretty unreasonable for large creatures like tautauns to live there with essentially no food to eat. Without abundant autotrophic organisms you can't have heterotrophs living there.

One thing it seems no one is mentioning is how sci fi totally forgets about how big space is, even when you handwave away FTL and the like. Spaceships are always flying within visual range to shoot at each other or worse, you have space marines or what not fighting other military foes. The reason is understandable: realistic wars in space will involve extremely high speeds, extremely long distances, and aside from the lengthy travel times will be so cataclysimic and fast that it wouldn't be fun to watch. It's still a stereotype though.

The colonial era called. They want their populist fallacies back.

Saudi Arabia didn't put a man on the moon.

How common is, "the technologically-advanced machines are hyper-religious?"

You can hear sounds in space, as in space fighters and ships firing *pew pew* lasers and shit.

As far as I know sound doesn't travel in vacuum.

Also there are quasi-magical defensive energy ''shields'' and whatnot

>Mining is done by medical holograms
>by hand, with actual picks and shovels
Voyager

Empires are bad

>You can hear sounds in space, as in space fighters and ships firing *pew pew* lasers and shit.
That's just shows adding in sound effects for the benefit of the audience. For all we know, it's actually dead silent in-universe unless the characters acknowledge the sound.

Does shit explode or does it just break apart in space?

Usually, and on the higher/harder end of the sci-fi scale, they have lots of drawbacks.

>Maintenance and Parts
>Training squishy pilots that need Oxygen
>Needing more people on the ship to run the fighters

When you have interstellar battles where ships fired last week, and fights are breaking out between the Golbian Federocracy and Xi'on Emperacrauts on a galactic level, they don't make too much sense since even point defenses at that level should be able to swat them out of the sky.

Just like in real life.

>Artificial gravity.
>Artificial gravity is the last things to fail.
.

HOWEVER,

At the lower, more personal size, they can do fine. A carrier trying to take a planet can project more force over a wider area, and do precise damage, than a super massive Battleship that fires every other day.

They are also good at the Cowboy Bebop or Firefly sizes, since you can pack a pretty strong and capable prototype fighter in the hold of the Millennium Turkey to surprise would be hijackers during your smuggling runs.

hyperjumps for FTL travel

also, ftl travel in general

Inertial dampers.

>Aliens will never be divided into nation-states and will either be one race-wide democratic republic, hive-mind, or imperial despotism with some nobles added for plot devices.

>Aliens will NEVER be depicted as having separate nation-states if humans are depicted as having a race-wide signle government.

> Posting peb-tier mega-corps

Best mega-corps coming through

Space travel is quick, easy, and routine for people at the main character's social level.

Battlestar Galactica.

The Reaper-aligned Geth in Mass Effect.

Or you could just shoot the planet bound defenses from orbit? You know with all the guns and ammo you could fit instead of an incredibly wasteful flight deck.

Space "fighters" only make sense as the Ferrari bragging rights type of shuttle not as a weapon of war where they would be atomised by computer controlled defenses.

Too common.

Fuck you, Ray Kurzweil. Spiritual machines should be mocked by secular machines.

Yet, we are the secret.

>Ancient precursor aliens with an all powerful galaxy spanning empire that are either mysteriously extinct or are about to die off because "reasons".

Aliens are not uncomfortable in human ships/planets/stations despite having evolved in planets with different:
>temperatures
>climate
>luminosity
>radiation
>gravity
etc

Also eating alien food is surprisingly safe and it will never kill you.

They aren't dead they just got bored living in a galactic utopia and went to take a nap until things get interesting again.

Well, either we are the first or among the first, or everyone's death.

Not to mention that all of those possibilities are horrifying.

Well what would you do with retired holograms, throw them in a landfill?

>Most people are LAZY ASSHOLES
Stahp projecting, moron.
>Poverty is an excuse, not a reason
Nice meme! But when literally the entire economic system is stacked against people with no money, your argument makes no sense. Come back when you graduate kindergarten.

nice head canon - but, seriously: welcome to the age of drones! Glad you could join us! Don't let your big massive compensating-for-something battleship get blowed up by one teensy-weensy drone fighta! Twit.

Dude just learn how to make more money LMAO

>Muh drones!
>Muh fighters!

If they've mastered spaceflight and are conducting space warfare then chances are the computing power is far high then possible today. Point defenses to knock down projectiles would also be able to knock down those drones/fighters you think highly of. With that precision they could also conduct pin-point strikes on the surface of the planet. Why send out expendable fighters when you can just sling a tungsten rod at the hardened bunker or w/e.

imo The Lost Fleet series had some pretty good ideas when it came to space combat.

Can't tell if you're stupid, or just pretending to be stupid. Given the anime, I gotta assume stupid.
This site is for 18+, kiddo.

I'm 23 and I make $95k + full benefits you must have done something wrong

Hey, nice headcanon, but you're not thinking this through: if your big uber ship has a big uber computron doin' all yer calculations for fire control, then, well, you must assume the drones have one too!
Aaaaaand you're forgetting that, in virtually all of the competitive testing of space warfare, the drones win. Always. Masses of expendable drones always defeat big ships and big navies. This has been a truism of space warfare since we began to study it.

Well, if that's true (and, let's face it: it ain't!), then clearly YOU have made some sort of horrendous life error to be shitposting on 4chinz with weeb shit...

What do you do?

Oh? Very nice. And how'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers. By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.

That Calhoun mouse utopia experiment is interesting stuff.