Is planetary culture a brain bug?

[Cycloneman]

So, I was mulling this over, and finally decided to post it. Is the science fiction idea of a single planet having a single culture a plausible one? You know, the sort of weird thing some SF settings have where there is a cultural homogeny across the entirety of planet earth. Starship Troopers has this on earth, and lots of sci-fi settings do it with the various settled planets (planets comprised of scottish people, planets comprised of libertarian militarists, et cetera).

I mean, take the US, a large nation which nonetheless takes up only a small portion of the size of earth. Different states have different identities. A person who grew up in Texas was raised with a different accent with pretty different values than a person who grew up in New York, and they were both raised on the same continent.

On the other hand, is it plausible that globalization would help the push towards a unified culture?

[Uraniun235]

I think that most of the examples to be found are not so much a "brain bug" as they are "writer laziness". It's a lot easier to just make a planet under one culture than it is to try and flesh out an entire planet's worth of cultures, languages, religions, governments, alliances, ethnicities, etc.

[loomer]

It is to some extent, though with the likely ease of travel around a world that can colonize other planets, there'd probably be a lot more migration to other nations. sure, you'd maintain individual regional cultures, but you'd wind up with them being more along the lines of 'X continent = Oriental' and 'Y continent = African' in general, as national traditions and even borders blur together. You might even end up with 'Z continent = AfricanAsian culture mixture, with some Central European influence'.

Same deal with planets. While a water world might not stretch it too far, nor a desert or ice world (All just heat/water variables, there, and not too out of the question looking at the planets we know of, like Mars, or further out with, say, pluto.), pure jungle/whatever worlds are both lazy writing and a brain bug, when in reality you'd probably get, again, as a broad generalization (Continents DO have differences in reality, afterall, within their own borders) 'X continent = Conifer like forests, cold mountains', 'Y continent = Dense, small trees, bushes' and 'Z continent = Temperate forest bordering on grasslands'.

...damn it, now I have to write a story about the warriors of Continent X waging war on Communist Continent Z who are being fuelled by capitalist Continent Y.

[Axiomatic]

Well, I suppose you could say there's also the practical side of one planetary culture per planet - it means that a single entity is exploiting all the resources of the planet, which might make it more believable that they are a space nation of any relevance. I mean, if you have a planet that's separated into 200 different nations, then you have to explain where all the individual nations get the resources to be a space power.

[loomer]

Their own space colonies, probably, or mining operations out in asteroid belts. Just because a homeworld is divided into political entities, doesn't mean a colony would be. The first Mars Colony might be built by Germany, but be full of Japanese people as well as Germans. Would that mean that the Japanese get a claim to the resources? No.

[Darth Hoth]

So, I was mulling this over, and finally decided to post it. Is the science fiction idea of a single planet having a single culture a plausible one? You know, the sort of weird thing some SF settings have where there is a cultural homogeny across the entirety of planet earth. Starship Troopers has this on earth, and lots of sci-fi settings do it with the various settled planets (planets comprised of scottish people, planets comprised of libertarian militarists, et cetera).

I mean, take the US, a large nation which nonetheless takes up only a small portion of the size of earth. Different states have different identities. A person who grew up in Texas was raised with a different accent with pretty different values than a person who grew up in New York, and they were both raised on the same continent.

On the other hand, is it plausible that globalization would help the push towards a unified culture?

Firstly, Starship Troopers is not monocultural (unless perhaps if you go by the stupid film). In the book there are very clear references to individual ethnicities and languages, even if there is a federal world state.

As to the actual question, a culturally homogenous Earth might perhaps be possible in a dystopic far future, but not in a reasonably democratic setting. There are simply too many individual cultures here for them to be forced together by any but the most brutal assimilation/ethnic cleansing methods; otherwise, they might grow closer, but not meld.

For a colony world settled later, there is a much larger possibility that it might be monocultural. This because the initial settlers might themselves be a fairly homogenous group, and might then restrict immigration in favour of other like-minded individuals (of related ethnicity, if that is an issue). Come to think of it, they might not even have to do that, since their society likely will not attract people of opposing views, especially if inhabitable worlds are as common as they are in many SF settings.

[Darth Raptor]

Realistic monoethnic or monocultural worlds tend to reference some kind of unification war at some point in their (usually distant) past, and global utopias tend to be built on a violent event of positively dystopic brutality. Still others may only look like a monolithic nation-state when it comes to interstellar imperialism, defense and foreign relations while the metropole remains carved up between rival factions. These planets that have unified peacefully have no business having a monolithic culture or ethnicity though. That's bad writing.

As mentioned, colony worlds that didn't actually genesis the species in question get off easier.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Same deal with planets. While a water world might not stretch it too far, nor a desert or ice world (All just heat/water variables, there, and not too out of the question looking at the planets we know of, like Mars, or further out with, say, pluto.), pure jungle/whatever worlds are both lazy writing and a brain bug, when in reality you'd probably get, again, as a broad generalization (Continents DO have differences in reality, afterall, within their own borders) 'X continent = Conifer like forests, cold mountains', 'Y continent = Dense, small trees, bushes' and 'Z continent = Temperate forest bordering on grasslands'.

Actually, I recall reading some years ago that our present degree of variability is not an inevitability. As I recall, the argument is that without the Rockies and Himalayas or similar large, tall mountain ranges to disrupt weather patterns, you'd have a much more unified climate. And in fact, in the past on Earth that situation may have prevailed. Of course, you'd still have north/south differences.

As for water worlds and desert worlds, they may well be the norm, not the exception. There's no reason so assume that the amount of water our world ended up with was inevitable, and even a relatively small variation on the scale we are talking about could make for a much dryier or water covered world. Especially water worlds, given how prevalent hydrogen is. If Callisto or Europa were closer to the Sun, they'd BE water worlds, or at least moons.

[Warsie]

So, I was mulling this over, and finally decided to post it. Is the science fiction idea of a single planet having a single culture a plausible one?

yes, given the quick movement of people to planets, planets settled by single group of people, etc.

=and lots of sci-fi settings do it with the various settled planets (planets comprised of scottish people, planets comprised of libertarian militarists, et cetera).

A single group colonizes a planet, they band together for a utopia, and they colonized as a group for ease, etc.

On the other hand, is it plausible that globalization would help the push towards a unified culture?

yes it can.

[Nyrath]

SF author Jerry Pournelle summed up the problem this way: "It was raining on Mongo that morning."

It is a failure of scope on the part of the authors. Most of them treat planets as if they were as small as a typical county.
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/200 ... nets.shtml

[Davey]

It all depends on how advanced that planet is. If they've got very sophisticated travel that more or less allows them to zip to, say, different continents instantly, then I'd say it's quite possible they could have done away with localized cultures and adopted a single planetary culture or even a cultural mosaic.

But if that isn't an option, then yes, I'd say it could be a brain bug, and a pretty big 'un at that.

[Axiomatic]

Country? I've always felt Science Fiction planets were vaguely city-sized. And not particularly large cities, either. Like, you told someone that Dassel Vrook is on Altair IV, and they'd nod like you'd just given them an accurate position.

[Darth Hoth]

It all depends on how advanced that planet is. If they've got very sophisticated travel that more or less allows them to zip to, say, different continents instantly, then I'd say it's quite possible they could have done away with localized cultures and adopted a single planetary culture or even a cultural mosaic.

But if that isn't an option, then yes, I'd say it could be a brain bug, and a pretty big 'un at that.

I don't know... we have plenty of intercultural contact in the present day without seeing these developments. On the contrary, it could be argued that while culture within a particular ethnicity grows more streamlined, its differences as compared to others also become more apparent. As long as people retain different languages, religions, etc, that is a much larger barrier to massive integration than transportation factors.

[RedImperator]

Not only do I not buy planetary monocultures on homeworlds that haven't been (recently) unified via violent ethnic cleansing, I don't buy it on colony worlds of any reasonable size or age. The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were all settled by the same mother country in the last 400 years, and not only are their cultures and accents not interchangeable amongst each other, they're not monocultural either. For that matter, their present cultures don't very much resemble the culture of their founders, even amongst those ethnic groups which are directly descended from them. The problem only gets worse the longer time goes on.

As for the idea that a colony could be founded by a single isolationist ethnic group and then bar all immigration from different cultures, that doesn't strike me as particularly likely either. Even a migration of millions of people couldn't come close to filling up a planet, and I really don't see any practical way for a small population of settlers to prevent other populations of settlers from carving out their own claims elsewhere. You could argue that they possess enough military force to shoot down other colony ships, but in that situation, where there's no central authority to prevent such behavior, I really don't see why they wouldn't be hideously vulnerable to being crushed by someone stronger than them. At any rate, even if they could prevent all immigration, there's no way to stop the process of cultural drift as their own population expands and spreads out.

[Darth Hoth]

As for the idea that a colony could be founded by a single isolationist ethnic group and then bar all immigration from different cultures, that doesn't strike me as particularly likely either. Even a migration of millions of people couldn't come close to filling up a planet, and I really don't see any practical way for a small population of settlers to prevent other populations of settlers from carving out their own claims elsewhere. You could argue that they possess enough military force to shoot down other colony ships, but in that situation, where there's no central authority to prevent such behavior, I really don't see why they wouldn't be hideously vulnerable to being crushed by someone stronger than them.

This all assumes that someone would be out to crush/conquer them, of course. If you have a small, well-armed militarist band of dissidents settling on a harsh, poor world, why would anyone necessarily want to live there with them in a galaxy/universe/whatever where inhabitable planets are common (as they are in most SF)? It would be much more likely that people would simply leave that nutbuster colony alone and settle someone else.

At any rate, even if they could prevent all immigration, there's no way to stop the process of cultural drift as their own population expands and spreads out.

Change might be very slowly coming if isolation is coupled with single-mindedness. Granted, people in different cities might have different accents or clothes, but they would still share language, religion, ethnicity and, on the whole, culture. For a dictatorship that actively enforces this uniformity, it would be even stricter.

[Junghalli]

On a planet that has had cheap air travel for centuries or millenia I see a high degree of cultural homogenization being quite plausible. You're starting to see it already on Earth, come back here in a few hundred years and assuming our civilization hasn't collapsed I wouldn't find developments like a planetary lingua franca that everybody speaks unlikely. Cultural differences are likely to persist for a long time, especially if you still have independent nation-states instead of some kind of planetary government, but the longer this state of affairs continues the less different parts of the planet are likely to become.

Actually, I recall reading some years ago that our present degree of variability is not an inevitability. As I recall, the argument is that without the Rockies and Himalayas or similar large, tall mountain ranges to disrupt weather patterns, you'd have a much more unified climate.

High mountain ranges and large continents create lots of different climate zones. For a planet with small continents a "jungle planet" isn't that implausible at all, as long as it's a warmer planet than Earth (or all the continents are close to the equator).

As for water worlds and desert worlds, they may well be the norm, not the exception. There's no reason so assume that the amount of water our world ended up with was inevitable, and even a relatively small variation on the scale we are talking about could make for a much dryier or water covered world. Especially water worlds, given how prevalent hydrogen is. If Callisto or Europa were closer to the Sun, they'd BE water worlds, or at least moons.

I've given a lot of thought to these issues for my own relatively hard space opera uni, and I think water worlds are likely to be very common, because they're quite easy to create. If you have a system with no gas giants, or small gas giants, a lot of the icy debris that Jupiter probably ejected from our solar system rains onto the inner planets instead and they get a lot of extra water. It's probably if anything easier to form a system with no Jupiter than one that has one. If you have a planet a bit bigger than Earth it'll probably be all water unless its water-depleted because you've got more water over proportionately less surface area. Likewise desert worlds aren't that hard: you lower the oceans a kilometer or three and the continents become probably quite dry high plateaus. Switch Jupiter and Saturn around and Earth would probably look like that, because a lot of our water probably came from the asteroid belt.

[Nyrath]

Country? I've always felt Science Fiction planets were vaguely city-sized.

Well, if you look you'll see I originally said "County", not "Country". But I get your point.

[Zixinus]

While a water world might not stretch it too far, nor a desert or ice world (All just heat/water variables, there, and not too out of the question looking at the planets we know of, like Mars, or further out with, say, pluto.), pure jungle/whatever worlds are both lazy writing and a brain bug, when in reality you'd probably get, again, as a broad generalization (Continents DO have differences in reality, afterall, within their own borders) 'X continent = Conifer like forests, cold mountains', 'Y continent = Dense, small trees, bushes' and 'Z continent = Temperate forest bordering on grasslands'.

In lazy author's defence, there is the "work is half dedication and half lazyiness" rule. Don't bother to overly detail things that are insignificant. Most cases like these are most likely just "here is a planet with jungle where the heroes go and do stuff" and don't pay too much attention to the idea of the planet otherwise.

While I agree that more thought should be given to creating planets, sometimes there is simply no point. Why bother detail the continent on which only a few square kilometres are of interest of the story, and even that only for a short while? And if you do that, you might as well use the planet's properties as a plot device. Which is a waste of time if you already have the story planned out in detail.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

So, I was mulling this over, and finally decided to post it. Is the science fiction idea of a single planet having a single culture a plausible one?

yes, given the quick movement of people to planets, planets settled by single group of people, etc.

No. Say you had a planet with a colony established by a band of people who are devoted followers of the Church of Oprah, Post-Reformation. They'd only have a single culture as long as A) They were the only ones there, and B) The colony encompasses only a few small, tightly clustered towns. If the colony spreads out its people across the planet, cultural drift will start to occur, even if they had the benefit of a network of satellites beaming a single planetary government news and Church of Oprah worship station to all colonial settlements scattered on the planet. And cultural drift will certainly occur once there's enough people.

=and lots of sci-fi settings do it with the various settled planets (planets comprised of scottish people, planets comprised of libertarian militarists, et cetera).

A single group colonizes a planet, they band together for a utopia, and they colonized as a group for ease, etc.

Get enough people together for long enough, and eventually you start seeing deviations and schisms. Take my example from above. Over the next century, our Oprah-worshipping utopia grows in size and scope. But, somewhere, on some remote island, some of the people decide that prominent rock face bears a striking resemblance to Oprah, and decide that she carved her likeness on the planet, and it was predestined that the Church of Oprah, post-Reformation would settle there. Assuming the new Calvinist Cult of Oprah isn't too concentrated (inviting pinpoint kinetic strike on their island, wiping them all out) you could well wind up with a schism. Or, perhaps, some of the doctrines of the Church of Oprah run contrary to the ability of a person to survive in the more arid regions of the planet, or something similar. These people will be less-willing to adhere to the tenents of the utopia and will either die out, or add in an additional destabilizing influence to the global monoculture.

On the other hand, is it plausible that globalization would help the push towards a unified culture?

yes it can.

No, not really. Take our world as a quick and dirty example. The United States has one real export these days., and that's culture, and it exports it in enormous quantities. There are artifacts of American culture all over the planet. But how a Chinese person interprets American cultural values will be much different than how a person from Poland would interpret them. And both of these would be rather shocked at a South Pacific cargo cult. For that matter, how a person in urban California sees American culture, and how a Wyoming cattle rancher sees them differ greatly, and they're ostensibly part of the same "American culture."

[Darth Ruinus]

It all depends on how advanced that planet is. If they've got very sophisticated travel that more or less allows them to zip to, say, different continents instantly, then I'd say it's quite possible they could have done away with localized cultures and adopted a single planetary culture or even a cultural mosaic.

But if that isn't an option, then yes, I'd say it could be a brain bug, and a pretty big 'un at that.

Or, people use that nice fast travel method to visit their hometown/holy sites/whatever more regularly, thus keeping their own culture alive, while meeting others.

[SylasGaunt]

Realistic monoethnic or monocultural worlds tend to reference some kind of unification war at some point in their (usually distant) past, and global utopias tend to be built on a violent event of positively dystopic brutality. Still others may only look like a monolithic nation-state when it comes to interstellar imperialism, defense and foreign relations while the metropole remains carved up between rival factions. These planets that have unified peacefully have no business having a monolithic culture or ethnicity though. That's bad writing.

I always liked how the Orions got away with that in the Starfire books.. yeah they were monocultural but it was because in the distant past they blew the ever loving shit out of themselves and the winning clan or whatever was what remained (at least if I'm remembering right, I do know how it's explained why they're a single culture instead of being like humans).

[Axiomatic]

Country? I've always felt Science Fiction planets were vaguely city-sized.

Well, if you look you'll see I originally said "County", not "Country". But I get your point.

Huh. So you did.

It's probably budget constraints that relegate entire worlds to "the entire planet is a seedy bar and a narrow alley, you can't miss him," but that doesn't excuse people without SFX budgets like writers, who just let what they saw on TV infect them.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Realistic monoethnic or monocultural worlds tend to reference some kind of unification war at some point in their (usually distant) past, and global utopias tend to be built on a violent event of positively dystopic brutality. Still others may only look like a monolithic nation-state when it comes to interstellar imperialism, defense and foreign relations while the metropole remains carved up between rival factions. These planets that have unified peacefully have no business having a monolithic culture or ethnicity though. That's bad writing.

I always liked how the Orions got away with that in the Starfire books.. yeah they were monocultural but it was because in the distant past they blew the ever loving shit out of themselves and the winning clan or whatever was what remained (at least if I'm remembering right, I do know how it's explained why they're a single culture instead of being like humans).

Yes.

Ivan Antonov tried again.
"You see," he began as he poured another round for himself and Kthaara, "your race's unity came after a series of wars that almost destroyed it. Whole nations and cultures vanished, and those that were left were smashed down to bedrock. So when one group finally established control over what was left of your home planet, it was able to remake the entire race in its image. Culturally, the slate had been wiped clean." He paused, saw that Kthaara understood the expression, then resumed.
"So all Orions today share a common language and culture. We got off lightly by comparison. Our Great Eastern War was destructive enough, but not on the scale of your Unification Wars—there was no wholesale use of strategic nuclear weapons, and we avoided biological warfare entirely. So our cultural diversity survived our political unification, and today we still cling to what's left of it.

Combine that with the fact that they have a highly centralized culture, a rigid code of honor & conduct, and a bloodthirsty attitude towards those that violate it, and you have a pretty good excuse for why they are a monoculture.

[RedImperator]

This all assumes that someone would be out to crush/conquer them, of course. If you have a small, well-armed militarist band of dissidents settling on a harsh, poor world, why would anyone necessarily want to live there with them in a galaxy/universe/whatever where inhabitable planets are common (as they are in most SF)? It would be much more likely that people would simply leave that nutbuster colony alone and settle someone else.

They're small, they're poor, and they're at the bottom of a gravity well. It would take virtually zero effort for anyone capable of interstellar travel to destroy them--a few Tunguska sized impacts would do it. And even if habitable planets are common, that doesn't mean it's trivial for another group to settle somewhere else. An STL-only setting makes it very likely other groups won't know the planet is settled, and an arriving colony ship could not go anywhere else.

Then there's the problem that since they've settled on a planet, they can't do anything about other colonists building settlements elsewhere in the solar system. If after a century or two the isolationists are surrounded by a developed interplanetary civilization, they're not going to have any choice in the matter.

But just for fun, let's assume they can keep all immigrants out. After all, in a setting with FTL and rich with Earthlike planets, they might indeed just be left alone. Then what?

Change might be very slowly coming if isolation is coupled with single-mindedness. Granted, people in different cities might have different accents or clothes, but they would still share language, religion, ethnicity and, on the whole, culture. For a dictatorship that actively enforces this uniformity, it would be even stricter.

Let's do some math. Let's say you start the colony with 100,000 settlers, and that the minimum population needed to sustain a presence in space is 100,000,000 (I think that's a very generous number, considering the infrastructure and specialist knowledge required, but let's run with it). Let's also assume a 5% per year rate of population growth. That's a fantastically high number, which has the population increasing 2.5 times per generation, higher than any known human society has ever sustained, but we'll say the Great God Om has ordered all the women to have as many babies as they can afford, and the society has averaged 5 kids per woman indefinitely (or, alternately, that the sex ratio is somehow permanently skewed so that there are many more women than men, each having a smaller number of children). How long does it take your initial population to grow to one hundred million?

143 years.

At the same time, this society is either rapidly spreading out over the surface of the planet or (for some unfathomable reason) packing itself in at higher and higher densities in a small area near the landing site, and building and expanding a technological infrastructure to support both this astounding raw population growth and economic growth in general. If the population is spreading into new territory, it is encountering a variety of new environments at the same time central control is necessarily weakening. If it's not, the people will be suffering increasing environmental and social strain as the settlement becomes more than twice as crowded every generation. Under these conditions, are you seriously arguing that culture will remain static and uniform for almost a century and a half, when there is absolutely no reason for it to do so and considerable pressure for it to change to adapt to varied local conditions? You've posited a dictatorship to hold culture in place, but even with only 100,000 people, that is going to require a big, expensive bureaucracy strictly enforcing draconian laws, in an environment where people can pull up stakes and make for the hinterland any time they like, and the problem only gets worse as people spread out and a proportionally bigger bureaucracy is needed (we need watchers in the Great Leader's palace to watch the watchers out in the distant villages, after all), and there's no guarantee whatsoever the dictatorship itself won't change.

Compounding all of this is that I gave you three generous assumptions to start: a starting population the size of a small city, a low threshold for the colonists to regain space and therefore matter worth a damn to the galaxy at large, and a sustained birth rate closer to that of rodents than humans. Give them 10,000 to start, half a billion to support space infrastructure, and a 2% growth rate, and you are now expecting a planetary monoculture to survive five hundred and forty-nine years with no cultural drift, schisms, or deliberate change.

[Adrian Laguna]

What if our hypothetical society builds the Cloning Vats secret project?