The Doctor Who - Star Wars face off

Doctor Who has been a children’s TV series on the air (on and off) since 1963. One of the things which is nostalgically remembered about the series was the lack of any money for production. This meant as far as exotic locations for alien planets went, a single location, that of a gravel pit seemed to be used for outside filming to double as an alien world.


Star Wars came along in 1977, and this franchise with it’s rather more generous budget managed some much more exotic locations in terms of Tunisia, Norway and California.

However, looking at the NASA Viking images sent back from Mars, it seems the guys at Doctor Who were right, and the surface of other planets do look more like gravel pits than anything else …

But it doesn’t end there, because take a look at Russia’s Venera 13 pictures of the surface of Venus, the overall impression is undeniably gravel-pitish.

And most recently the NASA Huygens probe landed on Saturn’s mysterious moon Titan. It’s pictures from the surface of that place? Erm, like a gravel pit.

Overall then it seems that the representation of other worlds is scientifically proven to be more constant with the Doctor Who model than that used in Star Wars.

It also seems that it would seem all terrestrial bodies with an atmosphere seem gravel-pitish in their nature. The Earth itself must have been predominantly gravel-pitish in it’s early stages, evolving differently to the rest of the Solar System over time.

So fancy visiting another world? Don’t waste money on expensive space tourism ticket from Richard Branson, just get yourself down to your local gravel pit this weekend …


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