All Planets Are Earthlike/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: All alien planets resemble Earth to a lesser or greater degree.

  • Straight: The crew of an intergalactic spaceship, The Armada lands on the planet Brrakh, which looks exactly like Earth.
  • Exaggerated: All planets, everywhere, look exactly like Earth, right down to every continent, every country, every street, house, or person; they are all identical.
  • Justified: Planets are made inhabitable to humans through terraforming, or colonization of non-Earthlike planets is irrelevant or just not discussed.
  • Inverted: Aliens arrive on Earth to try to "terraform" it into something more like their planet.
  • Subverted: Although the planet is said to be "M Class" and looks similar to Earth, the crew that lands on it discovers the entire surface of the planet is covered in quicksand.
  • Double Subverted: The planet turns out not to be covered in quicksand as the crew thought, they just happened to land in a swamp.
  • Parodied: See Exaggerated. Or ???.
  • Deconstructed: The planet has a superficial resemblance to Earth, but close examination reveals it to be wildly different.
  • Reconstructed: But being different is what makes it diverse.
  • Zig Zagged: The crew of The Armada land on Brrakh, which is remarkably Earth-like (water, oceans, soil, fossils, plants, animals) and is a pretty good place to set up a long-term colony. But the analogues of Earth fauna and flora are strange, in some ways very different from the Earth one and are also inedible. There's a more thinner atmosphere with different composition of atmospheric gases, higher/lower gravity and also a very unstable climate.
  • Averted: The crew of The Armada land on Brrakh, only to find that there is no oxygen, the gravity is ten times what they're used to, and the planet's surface is covered in an acid that burns through metal.
  • Enforced: "Our budget's low and we can't afford to have set design make us a planet, so...let's just shoot this outside."
  • Lampshaded: "Here we are, on an uncharted alien planet! ... That looks exactly like Earth."
  • Invoked: In A World In A Universe where humans are all alone, humanity has terraformed all planets in order to spread across the galaxy.
  • Defied: "We're not making Brrakh just another Earth clone."
  • Discussed: "You know what, you're lucky this planet is so much like Earth or you wouldn't be breathing right now!"
  • Conversed:"I don't think they hire very competent set designers for the sci-fi space shows. Every time they go to an alien planet, it looks like they just went out to their backyard."
  • Played For Drama: A new alien Big Bad tried to take over Earth, but other planets nearby look so much like Earth, that he destroys the wrong planets, killing thousands in his wake.
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