WMG / Ringworld

Boosterspice and Tree-of-Life both somehow affect telomere degradation.

ledge: Ringworld Children has significant plot points involving boosterspice, nanotech, tree-of-life and the protector transformation which are never explicitly outlined in the book — The Details Are Left To The Reader. After getting a chance to read and think about a final draft of the story, I thought that a possible justification for both boosterspice and tree-of-life being effective for anti-aging is that they both must somehow affect telomere degradation.

Telomeres are repetitive sequences of genes on the ends of chromosomes that prevent the chromosomes from "unravelling" during mitosis. (Like the little things on the ends of shoelaces.) They degrade slowly over time as cells divide. Different cells seem to degrade their telomeres at different rates and with recent medical research telomere degradation seems to be a major factor in cell senescence. When genes are changed in flatworms that affect the rate of telomere degradation, they can live up to three times longer than non-modified flatworms and with a significant difference in behaviour. ("Old" modified flatworms don't exhibit much different behaviour from "young" modified flatworms. "Old" non-modified flatworms are sluggish and relatively inactive.) A similar experiment has been done with modified eye cells - they exhibit virtually no indications of senescence after many more times of cell division over non-modified cells. In fact, the recent Nobel Prize for medicine went to scientists who did some of the original research on telomere/telomerase activity.

Back to Wild-Ass-Guessing... The reason that boosterspice interferes with transformation into Pak via tree-of-life virus is because the tree-of-life also tries to prevent telomere degradation by a different process, so the two end up causing cellular failure instead by flat out screwing up mitosis. It could also explain why, past a certain age, the protector transformation also fails: telomeres are already too degraded and therefore the transformation also causes mitosis failure.

The reason Louis Wu is able to transform into a protector after being almost 250 years old (well beyond the age which hominids should be able to successfully go through the transformation, not to mention also being a boosterspice user) was based on the fact that he got jammed into the nanotech medical box and "regenerated", part of the process being to "reset" any existing telomere degradation as well as removing whatever effects boosterspice may have had.

When I brought all of this up on the Niven mailing list - and how the boosterspice/nanotech/tree-of-life things are major plot points and how it could be resolved based on what we actually knew about medicine and aging at the time the book was written - I got a response of, basically, "yup."

Obviously it's a long way from a Nobel Prize on telomere research to making boosterspice but it is another amazing example of Niven once again Showing His Work. And since it was never really explained how boosterspice or tree-of-life worked in the first place, it's not even a Retcon!

If the author of the work says you're basically right, does that no longer make it Wild Mass Guessing?

... come to think of it, if the guesser has shown his work is it even guessing?

• Nope.

Fist-Of-God Mountain was created intentionally.

Just exactly the right height to avoid spilling atmosphere? And the impact was supposedly powerful enough to vaporize a body the size of Earth's moon yet didin't knock the unstable Ringworld into the sun or even the Shadow Squares, despite it barely being able to avoid doing so from a simple solar flare? No, someone put that cone there as an escape hatch. Prime candidates are the original Protector builders or the City Builders— the City Builders, as they've been proven reckless with Ringworld technology before, and were the only Ringworld species to have off-world planetary colonies to escape to; Protectors because they could have engineered it into the original design of the Ring and made it look old as a misdirection for the later races (just as they did with the Map of Mars).

• The impact wouldn't have knocked the Ringworld into the sun if it happened before the City Builders took apart the attitude jets to build ramships.
• It could have been artificially created, but not by the Pak. In the first book Louis cannot find Fist-Of-God in the map room they discover, because the map room is replaying old recordings from when City-Builder civilization was at its highest. Presumably Fist-Of-God was created after that recording but before the fall of the City-Builders and their exodus into space with 95% of the attitude jets. I do agree that it is a little too convenient to be random (random results in the punctures that create eye-storms).
• Actually I think in "Ringworld Engineers" the Vampire protector - Bram, wasn't it? - admitted to being the one to create Fist-Of-God mountain. I forget the page number, but what happened was that he'd awoken as a protector, found his way to the room, and killed the protector that was already there. The asteroid came before Bram knew how to run the solar gun, so he wasn't able to destroy it.
  • Not Engineers- Teela's the only protector on-screen in that one. Throne, maybe? Donno- I've only read the first two.
    • It's Throne. I remember now. Louis and the others met Bram in Throne, then Bram was replaced by Tunesmith, who became the boss in Children.
  • Bram tells the whole story if he can be believed. Bram knew the impact was coming and knew the reigning proto-goul protector would go to the repair center to stop it so he and Anne waited in ambush there and killed him. Then he found nothing to indicate how the proto-goul protector was going to stop it and he had to let it happen. Bram was not the smartest of protectors so he may be regarded as an unreliable narrator even if he did not lie.
• It's nowhere near "just exactly the right height" to avoid spilling atmosphere. It's something like an order of magnitude higher than that. The thing is bleedin' enormous.
  • It's also necessary that it be that size, if it's to exist at all. If it was smaller, all the air would have been lost and nothing would be living on Ringworld. The smaller punctures are problematic, unless they are all very, very recent; while the Ringworld is foogin' huge, how long would it take even a small puncture to drain all the air away, let alone many of them? As to how the City Builders would have used it, they wouldn't. They had the 'walk through walls' device that let them walk through the scrith to the spaceports outside.

How does puppeteer reproduction really work?

Louis speculated that "the puppeteers bred like digger wasps: their progeny ate the flesh of a helpless host." Some readers have criticized the idea that a herbivorous species would go through a carnivorous stage in their life cycle. So what if it's not actually the host's flesh that the fetus is eating? Suppose all sex for puppeteers is oral: the two "males" deposit their gametes down each of the throats of the "female"/host, and fertilization occurs in the host's stomach. The fetus continues to develop in the stomach, absorbing nutrients from the plant matter that the host eats, causing the host to slowly die of malnutrition. When gestation is complete, the infant uses his hind leg to kick a hole through his mother's abdomen and emerge. This also explains why sane puppeteers are reluctant to kick with their hind leg as a means of self-defense: they consider it to be obscene.

Fist-of-God was not created by an asteroid, but a small black hole.

It passed through and continued to pull the scrith "upwards" as it did so. There's the issue of the black hole going into that sun - maybe it didn't have time to do much damage before the Ringworld left that solar system altogether.

• Maybe an unknown-to-us defense system was able to deflect the black hole away once it came between the Ringworld and the sun (after making Fist-of-God). The Powers That Be had detected the black hole coming and were ready for it, but couldn't deflect it until after it impacted. The creation of the mountain was an acceptable loss.
• Deflecting the course of a small black hole using carefully prepared equipment is not impossible in the 'Known Space' setting; there's a Beowulf Shaeffer story where he encounters a man who is doing exactly that. Nevertheless... strictly, no defense system would be required. The black hole may have been moving fast enough that it was well above solar escape velocity. If so, it could have come in on a hyperbolic trajectory, crashed through the Ringworld, and kept going back out into interstellar space without ever slowing down enough to be captured by the gravity of the sun. Think of the asteroid Oumuamua, sighted in 2017, which came from interstellar space and quickly returned to it.