You can define things however you want, but words do have meaning. Conquest implies direct political control over a place.

Eh. The US really has no interest in actually conquering the Middle East. Outside the main US territories, the US is a trade empire, not a settler one. The US is never going to try and annex territory in the Middle East and make it a state. The US just wants to make sure the oil keeps coming out of the ground and that it keeps getting exported at an affordable cost. It’s primary goal is to prevent Middle East nations from using their oil for political leverage or for purposes other than export. It would have made a lot of sense economically for a country like Saudi Arabia to not get into the oil export business. Instead, they could have kept their oil domestic, built up a supply chain of value-add products, and export those. Instead of exporting raw oil, they could mainly export plastics, highly refined fuels, and the things made from plastics. But the West wants cheap energy, and they want the higher places on the supply chain.

It’s ultimately all about the oil. The day the oil runs out or the day oil is no longer needed, Israel will be abandoned and left to its own devices.

They are more subtle, but they are there. And it does have an atmosphere. It’s substantial enough that communication to the surface can be lost for months due to planet-spanning dust storms. Yes, it’s only 1% the pressure of Earth’s at the surface, but that’s enough, especially when you allow forces to act over geological time scales.

And yes, they can be as varied as those on Earth. Life doesn’t actually increase the biome variety as much as you think it does. The kind of life you get in any given biome on Earth is a direct function of the geology and climate in the area. Input a given altitude, rainfall, temperature, and soil conditions, and you’ll get a similar biome anywhere on Earth. Yes, there are different individual species in the rain forests of South America vs the rain forests of Africa, but they’re both rain forests. They work as biomes in similar ways. Wherever the local climate and geology support rain forests, rain forests sprout up. The only exception is isolated islands that can’t be reached by certain species.

This is why Mars can have the same biome diversity as Earth. The living components of Earth’s biomes are a direct mapping to the nonliving components. Earth’s living biomes are no more diverse than the underlying geology and climate.

And this is before we even consider Martian life forms, which almost certainly exist. We know of bacteria that exist deep in the Earth’s crust that, if you transported them to deep under the Martian surface, would be able to survive and thrive just fine with zero modification. We know Mars used to have vast oceans and all the ingredients necessary to get life started. And we’ve seen numerous bits of circumstantial evidence of bacterial life present in some capacity on Mars today. While scientists are loathe to affirmatively proclaim life on Mars. The extant existence of bacterial life on Mars today really isn’t that an unusual claim. If life could get started on Earth, there’s no reason to believe it couldn’t have started on Mars. And that’s before you consider pansperia. If nothing else, we know life can comfortably exist deep in the planet’s crust. And who knows how such life might affect conditions on the surface.

…Yeah…

Mars is rocky desert or rocky desert with canyons.

Mars has river deltas. It has flat plains. It has shifting rolling dunes. It has mountains and valley. It has a twisting series of canyons so constricted they’re called the Labyrinth of Night. It has vast ice sheets and polar caps of frozen carbon dioxide and water. It has caves and frozen mud flats and a thousand other varied forms.

Mars is a world. It is a place. It has biomes as varied and unique as those of Earth.

Pluto is ice ball or rocky ice ball.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Depending on the setting, that could make a lot of sense. Imagine a planet settled entirely by the descendants of a single expedition. That planet wouldn’t be a complete cultural monolith; not everyone would be identical. But an entire planet with the cultural diversity of a small place like Iceland really isn’t unreasonable. If it’s a species’ home world, that makes less sense.

Or, a really dark bit of head canon? Every time you find an alien species that lives on its home world and has a single culture? Inevitably this means a cultural evolutionary bottleneck existed in the planet’s past. If it’s not a colony planet, then something else must have caused that bottleneck.

My head canon? Any planet like that is one where an alien Hitler won. When you encounter a planet like that, it means that some time in the last thousand years or so of that planet, a Hitler-like figure came to power and achieved global hegemony. They decided that there was one and only one right way to live. Everyone was either forcibly converted to that lifestyle or done away with.

The Pacific Northwest? Aka Stargate…wherever planet looks like the hills around Vancouver…

Much of it comes from Christian theology.

Suicide has long been considered one of, if not the, worst possible sins in Christianity. At least in the Catholic tradition, sins can be forgiven by confessing your sins to a priest and having them absolved. But you can’t do this with suicide. Per Christian theology, even a murderer or child molester can some day repent, beg forgiveness, and be forgiven of their sins. They won’t be absolved from the earthly consequences of their actions, but they’ll be forgiven in the next life. That is a core message of Christianity - no actions are truly irredeemable as long as you still draw breath.

But with suicide, this isn’t possible. You can’t confess your sins after you’re dead, and suicide means that your last act on Earth will be a mortal sin. I suppose you could maybe do confession along with assisted suicide. Maybe you have a priest on hand, swallow the poison, and then immediately confess your sin. But most religious scholars would likely argue that doesn’t work. Your contrition has to be genuine for it to count.

Anyway, pardon the digression. But this really is the root of it. Even in modern Western societies. Even among people who aren’t themselves active Christians. Even among those who’ve never stepped inside a church. Secular Western society is still heavily influenced by Christian philosophy. A strong aversion to suicide in any form is a part of this. For most Christians, voluntarily signing up for euthanasia is the easiest direct path to eternal damnation that one can achieve. The only quicker more direct way would be a murder-suicide. We’ve never had that same worry with animals. Christian theology doesn’t assign souls to animals. And even if it did, they would have no moral blame for us choosing to put them down.

[Go outside at dawn, breathe deep]

Ah, nothing like the taste of fresh satellite in the morning!

That’s a good question!

Why can’t we just go back to reporting volumes in bushels, like God intended?

There is a metric. The metric is one truck!

Fuck it. Let’s just outlaw time. Let’s just make it illegal to own a clock!

Calendars too. We’ll just live in the eternal now.

And are we talking a reasonable work truck, or one of those American abominations referred to as ‘pickup trucks.’

The vaporized materials themselves are a problem. When we’re building these mega-constellations, we’re putting some real mass up there. We’re introducing all sorts of exotic materials into the stratosphere that would not naturally occur there at those concentrations. And remember, this is a very sensitive environment. The actual volume of CFCs we introduced into the stratosphere wasn’t that large. The volume of all our AC refrigerant and hair spray cans was nothing compared to the atmosphere. We may actually not be that far from the sheer volume of satellites affecting the ozone layer as they decay.

The stratosphere is an environment like any other. It has a finite ability to absorb and process any form of pollution without noticeable and significant effects. I’m not qualified enough to estimate the number of satellite reentries to damage the ozone layer or to have other deleterious effects, but at least from that study featured in that video, we may not be far off. The story of civilization has been repeatedly realizing that what we once considered infinite dumping grounds were anything but. And the stratosphere is no different.

Edit: may have misinterpreted parent comment and went off on a wild tangent.

I mean, if we’re going to go with retribution-by-improbable events, I have to stick with the classics. There’s nothing quite like an evil leader being smote by lightning bolt. It just has that “wrath of an angry God” effect like nothing else.

I mean…do all Namekians look alike to you?

I think Mr. Piccolo belongs to the Bigoted Racial Stereotype community.

Whoops, mixed up Popo and Piccolo

A book you get from your local library.

I once quit a well-paying job on the spot.

I was asked to write nuclear reactor safety specifications that I did not feel remotely qualified to write.