Ringworld - Niven

When you think of classic science fiction you always start with HG Wells.  And then you can say Isaac Asimov,  or Arthur C. Clarke.  But you can’t go too much further without saying Ringworld.  You may not say Larry Niven directly--although you should---but you can’t, not, include the title Ring World in the same breath when mentioning the greats.  When you pull science fiction apart, there is the improbable and the probable.  HG Well was always inside the probable.  Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, to some extent, try to be.   Larry Niven is so far outside the probable, as to be light years into the future and somewhat beyond that…  Not only is a Ringworld itself so improbable, most of the concepts contained within Niven’s novel are also improbable and to be entirely accurate, physically impossible.  Even his notion of probably, the math he tries to imbue, not just the science, is wrong.  Let’s just completely forget about  physics, let’s forget science, let's forget math…and go for it. Well, it is fiction, after all… 

Thus Ringworld, and who wouldn’t want to live there, can’t be real.     A mere factional wedge (or belt)  of a Dyson sphere inside the Goldielocks zone circumscribed around its central star. Perfect is all it’s design detail.  Safe from anything that might threaten it.  Engineering to hold not the people of an overpopulated planet, but perhaps a universe full of people.   From the tiny thread that holds the sun shades in orbit above the ring surface to the speeds necessary for the travelers in the story to get to Ringworld, Niven is completely wrong.   All of it.  To wit, Larry Niven pushes back against his critics and says to them with his own theories and axioms, when Arthur C. Clarke tells us, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, Larry Niven says, bite me, rather more correctly, “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."  Niven breaks the paradigm and as the greatest novelist of all has told us, just for the fleeting instance we stretch our arms out further, and beat back against the current of the genre, Ringworld is magic.  Magic that is brought alive through Niven’s narrative. It is pure science fiction.  No wonder it won awards.  No wonder it still inspires me today.  No reason, necessarily, to read further into Niven series…and I never have.  What must follow in his series (pure speculation) can only be at best an improbable defense for the indefensible  or at worse an apologetic

Yet here we are with such a fantastic story, without much of the defining detail as to how? To me, to provide that defining detail would be crushing. It would  lose it’s fantastic nature.  Even millions of years into the future.  There is no physics that could possibly support any of it. So don’t try.  This scale rivals the scale of human comprehension.  It is massive and beyond understanding. And the result is breathtaking.   Three  million times the surface of the earth--with walls around the edges stretching 1000 miles high. A lifetime just to walk across it’s 100,000 mile width laterally, let alone head out toward the base of the arch…a mirage of the ring, disappearing behind the horizon and reappearing as the ring itself.  I don’t know what Niven was thinking…but we are so much richer for him having created it.  A book shelf needs bookends…Ring World is my book end for science fiction. 

When I read Ringworld in my teens it was real.  Not the reason I became an engineer…but certainly an  influencer.  Reading it again in my 50’s it’s so physically wrong as to be laughable but so fantastically right with regard to what science fiction ought to be.  Too many writers are trying to stay within the realm of physics as they know it…not courageous enough to take their potential detractors head on.  Again, bite me, it’s fiction.  It’s a magnificent flight of fancy.  If you want exactly the engineering required and accept no possibility of magic, read Weir.  Despite the many  criticisms, Niven’s awards are absolutely  justified and the book itself will always stand the test of time.  It will always be millions of years in the future…at the time when spooky magic at a distance is understood and magic becomes ubiquitous.  But there is so much more beyond technology.

Niven also dealt with several sticky social aspects of multiple alien species living together, super advanced life forms (Nessus the puppeteer), warlike species that look like giant cats(Speaker to Animals a Kzin, and the humans (Wu and Teela -- who are on a life extension program).  Niven has been criticized, probably by the woke generation, for being somewhat bleak in his portrayal of women…given that he wrote this in the 60’s can’t we give that a pass?  He’s characters are all somewhat of a stereotype.  Turns out stereotypes exist for a reason.  Wake-up woke people and chill the hell out. Yes cat’s eat meat.  Carnivores eat meat. Get over it.

Yet despite his somewhat old fashioned view of women and despite the  colossal  story and engineering behind the existence of the Ringworld itself,  the actual story being told, and the hero of the story is the female human, Teela Brown.  The story actually isn’t about technology, Niven just needed a backdrop for what he calls the luck of Teela Brown. The real story is about what Einstein calls, shooting craps with the cosmos.  Does God roll the dice?  Can it happen? Does it happen? What happens when it happens?   Beyond the gift of Ringworld, Niven has given us the gift of Teela Brown.  Whereas Teela never became the messiah, it’s not too far of a stretch to understand that’s where Niven might have headed had he not gotten caught up in the debate over the technology.  Particularly if the Teela Brown character would have been slightly more appealing.  Had he written her character today, and dressed her in prose to resemble a smarter character, a Lizebeth Salander for example, he might have given us a Christ figure. What we do have, from the Marvel series, is Domino.  Cute…and powerful…but not the messiah.  Marvel gave us Domino in 1991.  Twenty years after Niven gave us Teela Brown as the savior of Ringworld. Niven’s aspirations for her must have been incredible.  And certainly the math he chooses to use/or ignore, is just as fantastic.  He does state early on that random flips of a coin have no memory. He must have hated that…or couldn’t understand it.  To review,  one flip of a coin is 50/50 heads or tails.  Another flip is 50/50.  Just because the more recent flip was 50/50 there is no bearing on the subsequent one. The next flip is again, 50/50.  And so it goes, as Kurt Vonagut might say.   If you are looking for a heads-up coin flip  every time, Teela Brown is that coin flip.   The problem here is that Niven, while examining the material, never quite understood what was going on…and couldn’t explain it sufficiently.  Had he argued the math, only slightly better, he might have been considered a theoretical genius in the area of statistics.  He might have handed us mathematicians of the world a conjecture with consideration.

So here’s what’s happening with Teela Brown…that Nevin couldn't prove, but wanted to.  I’ll call it the Niven conjecture.  He might not have understood what he was saying either.  Teela Brown is not  flipping the coin repeatedly and landing on heads.  She’s switching her choice back and forth as the coin is being filled, seemingly without memory, and choosing heads or tails.  But in her case, she’s always right. She always makes the right choice.   The first time you flip, it’s heads or tails. Then you flip it again and you have heads, or tails, but also the branch of what might have been.  Then you flip it again, and you have heads or tails and what might have been and what might have also been.  Then you flip it again and have heads or tails and what might have been and what might have been and what also might have been.  This goes on forever.  Everybody’s life plays out according to one of those paths, Teela’s life plays out precisely because she is always on the path that is correct as to the flip of the coin. The longer the flips go on…the longer the sequence.  Those with an infinite mindset know that there are an infinite number of paths and thus if an infinite number of monkeys were seated at a typewriter and were allowed to hit the keys continuously, one of those monkeys would type out the novel “War and Peace”.  Well I can’t find the number of letters in the novel but Tolstoy put 587, 287 words into “War and Peace”…so loosely multiple x  five so maybe three million individual characters…allowing for spaces and punctuation.  Call it five million unique characters a monkey would have to tap out all in exactly the right sequence all in order to create the book.  So if that were the case it would not take an infinite number of monkeys…that number also is finite and knowable…it’s just very big.  It would take 5 million factorial x 26 plus a few special characters.  (5,000,000! X ~26)  That’s 5,000,000 x 4,999,999 x 4,999,998 x 4999,997… all the way to 1.  It’s a big big  number, a really really big number…but it’s not infinite.  

But that’s also not what’s happening with Teela Brown either.  Day to day, minute to minute, we don’t have to make a life and death decision.  Evolution has seen most of that already over the past six billion years. We already have much of the luck of Teela Brown behind us.   Thus the remainder of our life isn’t random monkeys typing “War and Peace”.   We live perhaps for 35,000 days.  We don’t even make a life or death decision every day…if we would do that, a lot more of us would be dead.  The question correctly posed, is how many near death experiences befall us throughout  our lifetime.  That is for sure, a much smaller set.  Thus, the number of monkeys required to sit at the keyboard and type our life is a lot closer to the book “Goodnight Moon”.  There are 131 words in Goodnight Moon.  So let’s go with 131 characters that a smaller set of random monkeys would have to strike the keys on a typewriter to randomly write the story of Teela Brown's life so 131! X 26 or 2.2 x 10 raised to the 223rd power.  The question is can you find such a person living…and if they found that person in Teela Brown?    To be sure the number would need to be much smaller…the number would need to be on the order of no more than 15 life or death decisions…and you actually could find such a person…given that about a trillion people were your sample size.  1 x 10 raised to the 12th power. 

Anyway, that’s not the conjecture.  The Niven conjecture isn’t about doing the actual math.  Because as we’ve learned, math from statistics will not work here.  It’s wrong. Statistically Teela Brown will not win. She will lose, and lose quickly.  As she begins flipping the coin will lose, if not at 15 flips, shortly thereafter.   Beyond that the numbers move toward infinity, or as close to infinite as the human mind can comprehend.  That must not be what’s happening statistically.  If we are to believe there is math behind it, something else must be going on.  I can’t figure it out.  But someone, somewhere might.   The conjecture therefore  is more about whether or not  something mathematically magical is happening on the way to this  infinity.  And the answer is, yes.  It must.  Why? Because we are all here to observe the outcome of this math.  Every single life form on planet earth, animal, insect, plant, has survived though time to be living and breathing the atmosphere of our Earth.  Everything, to exist today, has been done so with the Luck of Teela Brown. Is this magic?  Is this deterministic?  Is this proof of God?  That’s what Niven was really talking about when he wrote Ringwold.  And beyond the technology we have the math behind his magical thinking.  I like that Niven is a magical thinker.

I five Niven 5 full stars for Ring World.  It’s just what science fiction should be…extra-ordinary science (and probability)  wrapped up in brazen fiction!