The 10 Worst Fictional Planets to Live On

These days, our home planet of Earth is looking a little dire. Climate change and a wobbly economy (and the Pentagon finally admitting that aliens exist) are causing some of us to look to the stars and wonder what’s out there, and if it could possibly be better than what we have going on down here. Movies like Avatar imagine lush extraterrestrial environments full of fantastical creatures and fascinating local inhabitants that seem like great places to take a quick vacation on, if only they existed. But the jungle moon of Pandora is an outlier: most science fiction takes place on planets you'd rather escape from as soon as possible.

Because this phenomenon is pretty entertaining — and because it makes us feel much better about the world we live in now, we found the ten worst fictional planets you could possibly get stuck on, from the waterlogged death trap of Christopher Nolan’s most ambitious space opera to the volcanic setting of Star Wars’ greatest tragedy. While so many fictional worlds are meant to be places we'd want to escape to, these ten planets are places we'd rather escape from.