The American Southwest was the location for rocket and atomic bomb tests in the late 1940s and 1950s, and thus served as the backdrop for popular images of the future. Arid southern California served as the landscape for many Hollywood science fiction films of the 1950s and the alien planets in Star Trek: The Original Series. The succulent plants that grow in the deserts of the American Southwest appear "alien" to the unconscious anticipations about life on Earth held by western Europeans, people exposed to the wet, cool temperate environments on either side of the North Atlantic. Finally, the earliest images of the lansdscape of another planet space were of the desert-like Mars. Ergo, other planets are desert worlds.