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this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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No but seriously, why DO continents/landmasses on other planets give a sense of unease/uncanny valley (at least to me)? Is it just the lack of familiarity?
It's an artist's impression. We almost certainly got no idea what its continents look like at that distance.
I understand this, but I also get unease from RNG maps from games like Age of Empires or Anno, and I've talked to a couple of other people who also have experienced this, so I was wondering if there was an underlying psychology to it. However, it's not an easily Googleable query, and I refuse to ask an AI chatbot about it.
Abnormalities from "normal" were a critical self defence feature, for our ancestors. E.g. a lack, or change, of bird song might indicate a predator in ambush. Unusual lighting might indicate a storm coming in.
Our brains are wired to learn normal patterns. When those patterns change completely, we are fine with it. When they change subtly we don't like it.
The threshold for this is different for different people. Personally, I'm fine with completely different maps, but off put by modified real maps. I also cannot watch soap operas, they are too close to "real" and trip alarms at their mismatches. Conversely, sci-fi and fantasy are fine, they are different enough to not set off my alarms. I know others who are set off by sci-fi, but soaps are within their norms.
I think a lot of it is humans are used to maps formed by tectonic plates shifting, glaciers forming and melting, storms and other weather, etc... When it's just an RNG heightmap it's missing all those familiar features like rivers, mountains, and dry lakebeds
Why not, all you have to do is take a blurry photo of it and just keep saying enhance, right?
Beyond what's been said already, we 100% do not have any way to take a picture of a planet outside our solar system that shows any detail of the planet's surface, and no plans to make a telescope that can do that. What we do right now to even tell if there are planets around other starts is look at the star's light and see if it gets slightly darker on regular intervals, indicating that a planet is crossing between us and the star in a regular orbit. Right now we can barely take a decent picture of Pluto, which is in our solar system. And checking the light brightness is really only good for looking for large planets the size of Jupiter and Saturn.
It's like seeing a car at night on a mountainside 4 miles away with its headlights on. It's just sitting there and you are wondering if it's a car or something else. It's hard to even tell it's 2 lights, it just looks like one light from that distance. But what would we see if someone walked in front of the car with the headlights on? The light get dim on one side and bright again, then dim and bright again on the other side. Sort of the same thing.
As for the uncanny valley part, it's because whoever came up with the graphic just did a random splash of water and land. The planet could be orange and magenta-colored, we have no idea. They used colors familiar to us looking at images of Earth because the intent is to make you think "it's like Earth, but different."
I get the same feeling when looking at fractals.
On one hand I want to explore everything but at the same time I know it's impossible to grasp.
Our own Earth has fixing points from man made stuff, so I sort of know what's where, but then I zoom in on the archipelagos in south Chile or the lakes in Lapland and I get confused again because it seems soo randomly generated.
I think in part because speculating what the land looks like on an alien planet is actually really hard to do, and the vast majority of artists just wing it. With sufficient planning and rigor, alien planets should look normal.
For instance, I think the landmass of Tira-292b looks pretty natural. It's a hypothetical planet created for the Alien Biospheres project, a YouTube series that tries to build up an alien ecosystem as accurately to science as reasonably possible
It's a seriously underrated series, I highly recommend everyone check it out
I just googled Tira-292b and you know what, it doesn't set off that uneasy feeling for me. It just...kind of looks like Westeros? Which is based on parts of Earth so I guess that makes sense.
Also, thank you for the recommendation, I WILL be checking this out, if only to test my uncanny valley triggers to this a bit more. Time to experiment on myself 😭
Oh, the spider-squids definitely will trigger your disgust response. At least they evolve into something nicer after a while