Headscratchers / Ringworld

• In The Ringworld Throne, one of the other primitive hominids points out that if the Grass Giant king finds out something's been going on behind his back, he'll "go off like a volcano". How, exactly, does a primitive Ringworld native know there are such things? Why would their language even have a word for "volcano"?
  • It may have been creative license on the part of the translation device, actually referring to some sort of explosive Ringworld phenomenon. Perhaps a word for when a meteor impact forces the ground up?
• Early in his explorations, Louis concludes that, because the various shallow seas are full of fresh water, he might be the only being on the Ringworld that requires salt in his diet. Right, like a man who's supposedly pursued every career imaginable has never picked up enough basic biochemistry to know that sodium chloride is vital to every organism that has a nervous system...
  • He's also old enough to have forgotten half of what he's learned over his long life, even with Boosterspice keeping him forever young.
  • The supposition that he might be the only being on the Ringworld that requires salt in his diet because there are no salten seas would only make sense if all life on the Ringworld had EVOLVED on Ringworld. By that I mean ORIGINALLY evolved from a primortal sea. While there's no doubt life does evolve on Ringworld, all lifeforms on the Ringworld originally developed on a "normal" planet. Remember, Ringworld is a construct. Of course, the evolution of life on the "normal" planets in the local system may have occurred in freshwater if the planets had only freshwater seas but that is unlikely - both because the normal mechanics of fluid/water vapor transfer on a planetary scale would preclude large bodies of fresh water but also because life is unlikely to have evolved in fresh water - the salt creates electrolyte balances that allow for the transfer of energy at the moleculer level necessary for life to exist. That is, of course, unless you are an Outsider!
  • It just means that Louis may need more salt than a diet of typical local foods will provide. Even on Earth, it is possible to eat a natural diet deficient of enough salt and suffer the consequences like inadequate stomach acid.
  • Or maybe he just overlooked the blatantly obvious: that the Ringworld is an artificial habitat built to harbor creatures that drink fresh water, not salt. Therefore, even if it had existed long enough for erosion to put salt in the seas, there'd be some kind of desalinization mechanism to keep them drinkable for the comfort of the residents. The animals of Ringworld can get their salt directly or indirectly from the plants, which get it out of the ground, just like practically every non-marine organism on Earth does.
• Why is Nessus so squicked by his own species' reproductive method? Wouldn't it be normal (for a given value of normal) to him?
  • There are plenty of humans who are squicked out talking about Human biological functions, yes?
  • Puppeteers seem to conceal their reproductive method from other species mostly because they know other species may be squicked by it. When Nessus appears to be uncomfortable talking about Puppeteer reproduction he is merely pretending to be squicked in order to avoid revealing details that will squick his audience.
• The Puppeteer's cowardice makes no sense. Their species has been space-faring since before mankind appeared on Earth. This level of exploration, if not driven by necessity, is done by curiosity, which means acknowledging and overcoming fear. This must have been done countless generations ago which means many have since been raised with this knowledge and ability. Yet they still have a fear of space travel while they even use teleport—a technology that takes the occupant apart on an atomic level before putting them back together in another location! Nessus has a panic attack in which he panics that Earth is too close to the asteroid belt and he, on the surface of Earth, might be hit by one. Again, any space faring civilisation must know and overcome such relatively trivial dangers, and overlook the very real probability that Earth, being space-faring and advanced too, is probably monitoring everything in the solar system with particular focus on anything approaching Earth and have the capability of destroying/diverting it before it becomes a problem. It is implied that their cowardice is due to a need to survive as a species but the survival of the species is not down to individuals living day to day lives but the species as a whole, ideally by spreading out and increasing number.
  • Hindmost explains that, in times of crisis, Puppeteers will promote one of the "insane" to their leadership positions. He said when they had to move their planets there was a lot of insanity as the danger broke the minds of a lot of Puppeteers, but it was necessary for the survival of their species.
  • Puppeteers obviously are able to overcome their fear when necessary. Nessus does so on several occasions. That doesn't change the fact that as a race they are generally more cautious than other races and worry about dangers other species do not, and other races perceive this as cowardice.
  • An earlier Puppeteer story further establishes that more adventurous Puppeteers like Nessus and the Hindmost are considered insane by the rest of their society. Society might not be wrong: the Puppeteers willing to take risks often exhibit co-morbid symptoms like bipolar disorder. Puppeteer society finds these individuals useful and necessary but they don’t want them around the house.
• Why do the Puppeteers, a highly advanced civilisation, subscribe to luck? Surely they must recognise that everything is a case of probability rather than relying on an intangible force?
  • Because their experiments showed that luck can in fact be bred into a species? Teela Brown really is lucky, just not in quite the way they thought she would be.
• Earth's method of population control, which is tantamount to eugenics, doesn't take into account the option of using an expanding population to colonise other worlds. As mentioned above with the Puppeteers, a species' survival is done by increasing number and space occupied to avoid an extinction even and expand in general. Instead they seem to want to stay on Earth with no export in the population and arranging for the continued survival of 'desired traits' such as increased intelligence and longer lifespans, along with the ability to make money (regarded as a survival ability in itself) and good teeth, and put on death matches to earn the right to have a child by killing the opponent and keeping the numbers balanced.
  • To keep up with population growth with the current world population, we'd need to export 385,000 people per day. With an Earth of 18 billion, this is probably closer to a million people a day. Space travel is a lot more common in the Known Space setting but it's not routine, for hundreds of years Earth was only able to send a few hundred people at a time to colony worlds. Consider also that, even in the FTL era of Known space, there's only about a dozen human colonies in our sphere of influence extending about 30LY from Earth, and they are not very populous. How are they supposed to absorb hundreds of thousands of immigrants EVERY DAY even if there are thousands of huge starships able to transport them?
  • Earth does export population to other worlds, it's just that colonization isn't quick enough to relieve Earth's overpopulation without also having the draconian population controls in place. Plus some of the laws were manipulated by the Puppeteers.
  • The 'Known Space' setting is based on 1960s-era assumptions about population growth rates and treats overpopulation in much the same way many works of similar vintage do. When Larry Niven was born in 1938, the US population was 130 million people. In 1968, shortly before he wrote 'Ringworld,' the US population was 200 million people. Imagine that your expectation is that population will grow by 50% or more every thirty years, indefinitely. Starting from a world population of about 3.7 billion in 1970, it's easy enough to extrapolate a population of 8.3 billion in 2030, 42 billion (!) in 2150 (the 'Gil the ARM' era), 213 billion in 2270, and around 1.6 trillion (!!) by 2420, the timeframe of the end of the Man-Kzin Wars. Now, starships in 'Known Space' are common mass-produced items. But while they can be quite large, they're "large" in the sense that real world ships are large, not "large" like mountains or cities are large. And they take weeks or months to travel between stellar colonies. Thus, at "Baby boom" levels of fast reproduction, it would almost certainly be impossible to ship colonists off Earth fast enough to relieve population pressure from a population of tens or hundreds of billions, even with hyperdrives, let alone with the sublight ramscoop drives available before the 2400s.