It's a Small World, After All

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

— Rick Blaine, Casablanca

A specific case of Million to One Chance: the laws of probability are nothing compared to the power of Narrative Causality.

Often seen in franchises involving space travel, possibly because Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale and can't figure out how big a single planet is, let alone an entire galaxy. It often occurs in real-life settings as well, albeit on a smaller scale.

As a corollary:

• If you're instructed to find something on a planet, and don't know where on the planet that something is, just land at a random spot. Most likely, you will land not far from your destination. If you were told to seek a person, they may even find you themselves.
• If one of your friends has a long-lost relative they last saw on some distant planet, be assured that you will bump into said relative shortly after landing on the next planet, whatever it happens to be.
• Every planet will have one capital city or another "spot of activity", and controlling that spot means instantly conquering the entire planet. These planets are also almost invariably 100% monocultural, with only one government that needs to be factored in to any plan.

More often than not, said planet also happens to be a Single-Biome Planet, Baby Planet, and/or a Planetville. On the aforementioned smaller scale, this often happens to countries. A gentleman spy who hears his nemesis is "in China" will take a day to find them, not years of detective work to cover all the land area, the immense population, etc.

In Video Games, this trope is taken to the logical next step, such that any Video Game that allows the protagonist to travel from one planet to another will probably have very little area in total that the protagonist is physically able to visit within each world, either constrained by boundaries that one would not expect an inhabited world to impose, or literally representing the entire world as a very small space.

A Sub-Trope of Contrived Coincidence.

See also Convenient Enemy Base and Conveniently Close Planet.

Not to be confused with the Disney ride (or its dang song) and It's A Small Net After All.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• In Cells at Work!, out of trillion cells in the large body, the main cast always manages to bump into each other whenever the plot happens.
• In Inuyasha, Feudal Japan appears to be populated by a total of about twenty people, all of whom are at any given time within convenient brawling distance of one another.
• Kanon. Although this may be due in some small part by miracles, it's still damn unlikely for Yuuichi to run into people whenever he steps outside.
• Kobato. seems to constantly run into the same person until she fixes their emotional problems, and then promptly never sees them again.
• Lyrical Nanoha Nanoha has some pretty unlikely meetings, such as Arf and Alisa Bannings, or Hayate, Fate, and Nanoha in season two. Vivio also happens to run into Riot Force Six rather than, say, a police officer.
• Rent-A-Girlfriend establishes in the first three chapters that Kazuya and Chizuru are neighbors and schoolmates, with their grandmothers being friends and patients in the same hospital.
• An extremely mundane example appears in episode 11 of Servant × Service. When Saya goes out to town on her off day, she muses about the possibility of meeting people she knows and ends up meeting practically the entire cast (with the exception of Touko, who's studying at home) in various places.
• In Star Blazers, the man that Queen Starsha rescued from the Gamilon ship that crash-landed on Iscandar just happens to be Alex Wildstar, Derek's long-lost brother, presumed dead.
• Your Name has a downplayed example - The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue shows that Takagi and one of Mitsuha's former tormentors ended up working in the same Lawson convenience store.

Comics

• In Bruce Wayne: Fugitive, when putting all the pieces together as to who framed Bruce for Vesper Fairchild's murder, he's more than convinced that it was sheer luck that a government agent, acting on Lex Luthor's behalf, hired David Cain to do the deed, neither of them realizing he knew Bruce was Batman.
• Inverted in Flash Gordon. Mongo was a big, extremely multivaried place. Then again — at least in the early days of the comic and most TV & film adaptations — the main characters are stranded on Mongo and can't visit other planets, so it makes sense for Mongo itself to be portrayed as a richly diverse world.
• In NYX it turns out that the gang banger who gunned down protagonist Kiden Nixon's father right in front of her as a child, is none other than X-23's pimp and now major criminal and gang leader in his own right, Zebra Daddy, who has been chasing them for almost the entire second half of the story.

Fan Fiction

• Shows up in the LDD-fanfic, Bridge to Terabithia 2: The Last Time in the Distant Epilogue. What are the odds that Jess' ex-girlfriend, Sonia Taylors, would end up marrying his ex-bully, Scott Hoager? Or the fact that the daughter of Jess and Leslie would have a puppy love crush on the son of Scott and Sonia, despite the latter being ex-bullies to the former?
• Christian Weston Chandler in Survivor: Kujira-Jima plays this for drama. By complete coincidence, Kenny ends up playing Survivor against the man who attempted to murder his brother.
• In The Legend of Fodlan, Link has already met Bernadetta in the past, thanks to him saving her uncle. A few years later, and he gets involved in Kostas' attack on Garreg Mach's students. This leads to him meeting Bernadetta again, who has become a student herself.
• The Power Rangers fanfic, Of Love and Bunnies does this with the whole francihse:
  • Adam and Aisha from Mighty Morphin (and the former from Zeo and Tubro) are neighbors with Operation Overddrive's founder, Andrew Hartford, and he himself is friends with Dino Thunder's Anton Mercer (who in canon knew Adam and Aisha's teammate, Tommy).
  • In addition to being the nieces of Ninja Storm's Big Bad, Lothor, Kapri and Marah are also the nieces of Tubro's Big Bad, Divatox.
  • In an OC example, the night manager of the Angel Grove Inn is friends with Secret-Keeper Carrie the Reporter.

Films — Live-Action

• In Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, two characters are picked up by a bee, flown all around the yard which to them is now 3-miles long, and conveniently dropped off not far from the others. "It's a small world after all", indeed.
• In Johnny Mnemonic, after his one contact in Newark betrays him, Johnny is presumed to be running around the city with no leads as to how to "download" the data he is carrying, but fortunately for him, every single stranger he crosses paths with just so happens to have important and extremely helpful ties to either La Résistance fighting the gangs and corporations that are after Johnny's head, the intended recipients of the data Johnny is carrying, or both.
• In The Knowledge, Chris happens to meet Gordon leaving his mistress's house, on two occasions.
  Chris: It's a big place, London. It's so bloody big, you forget how small it is.
• In Pitch Black the ship crashes on the planet, conveniently within walking range of the settlement, though it was intended as an aversion. Ken Wheat, the original writer of the film with his brother, Jim, explained that in the first draft of their script the ship had detected the settlement and tried to land near there so as to be near an area where there might be supplies.
• Serendipity: Sara's best friend Eve knew Halley in college. Unbeknownst to to Sara and Eve, Halley is going to marry Johnathan (Both Sara and Johnathan fell in love with each other the only night they met together a few years back).
• Major Chip Hazard of Small Soldiers says this word-for-word when he finds Alan's house.
• Star Trek films:
  • In Star Trek (2009), when Kirk just happens to run into Spock Prime while marooned on Delta Vega. The latter was sent to a location where they could observe a certain unexpected astronomical event, while the former was, presumably, dropped within walking distance (or getting eaten distance) of a Starfleet base, with no reason whatsoever for the two locations to be anywhere near each other — apart from the Theory of Narrative Causality, of course. Lampshaded in the novel adaptation.
  • In Star Trek Beyond, what's left of the Enterprise saucer section crash-lands within easy walking distance from where another Federation starship crashed many years ago.
• Star Wars
  • In A New Hope, despite the surface area of the Death Star being millions of miles, Luke and company end up within jogging distance of everything and everyone of importance to their errand - when they had no control over what part of the space station they were going to end up inside. Of course, given Vader's plan to track the rebels to their hidden base, this is likely not a coincidence.
  • The Empire Strikes Back
    • When the Imperial probe droid arrives on the planet Hoth, it slams into the ground not only fairly near the Rebel base, but close enough to Luke Skywalker for him to see it land.
    • Luke is told to look for Yoda in the Dagobah System. That's all he's told about where to find Yoda. And not only does he get the right planet, but he even lands within a mile or so of Yoda's hut.
  • The Phantom Menace: Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi arrive in the Naboo capital city at the same time and place that the Queen and her entourage are being moved by their combat droid guards, allowing the two Jedi to rescue them.

Literature

• In Dracula, the Count's identity and nature are exposed because his lawyer's wife's best friend's ex-suitor's onetime mentor just happens to be an expert on vampires.
• It happens on smaller scale in Feliks, Net & Nika. What are the chances that in city of more than million people children of two men working in the same top secret facility will turn out to go to the same (regular) school and to the same class?
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Whilst jumping around the British countryside entirely at random, our heroes land within a few hundred meters of a group of people they know, and Harry just happens to wander by them while they discuss plot-relevant events. Britain, remember, covers some 210,000 square kilometers.
  • And in the film, they just happen to Apparate right in the middle of of a group of snatchers.
  • This happens in favor of the villains in the background of Goblet of Fire. Pettigrew decides to stop at an inn on the way to meeting Voldemort, and runs into a Ministry official who happens to know the location of a loyal Death Eater, secretly being held under house arrest by his father and assumed dead by the rest of society.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The first humanoid alien Arthur meets after he goes into space is a guy who crashed a party he'd been to. The second is the Earth woman that guy hit on at said party after Arthur had been chatting her up himself. They acknowledge that this is weird, although this is the Improbability Drive in action, so... A Sci-Fi Scientist Did It? Zaphod Beeblebrox is also related to Ford Prefect just for a gag about Bizarre Alien Biology.
• In Dan Simmons' Illium and Olympos this is justified and deconstructed. Everyone lives close to the teleporters all across the planet because there is no need to go very far from them. The unfortunate result is that they've managed to forget about the entire rest of the planet.
• Les Misérables: Characters we thought we left behind have a way of popping up again as the plot demands it. Not that this is a bad thing. And when the action is in Paris, it's slightly more justifiable — Paris is one city, and fairly small, as far as European capitals go.
• The Ship Who... books try to justify this to a degree by often having Courier Service ships, like most of the protagonists, visit colony worlds with small populations. If they have to find someone on the planet Annigoni and there's only one settlement on that planet, it's a bit likelier that they'll run into them at 'random' after landing at the spaceport. In The Ship Who Searched's case, Tia works for an archeological department and is often sent to dig sites with no more than a couple hundred people involved. Still, these characters remain quite lucky in who they find "by chance" at stations and etc.
• In Robert E. Howard's "The Slithering Shadow", Conan the Barbarian, running away from a Zerg Rush, gets dropped through a Trap Door to where Natala has been abducted, Just in Time to save her from the Living Shadow.
• The Star Wars Legends novels take this to absolutely ridiculous extremes. Just a couple of examples:
  • The prison ship that just so happens to find a Star Destroyer infected with a Zombie Apocalypse ( A.k.a Project Blackwing) just so happens to be holding Han Solo and Chewbacca in solitary confinement.
  • Jaden Korr (of Jedi Academy fame) happens to be in precisely the correct spot in all of space to intercept an Old Republic Jedi master who was flung into the future due to a hyperdrive malfunction.
• Older Than Radio: In Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), characters who are travelling separately are forever running into each other at inns along the road. Critics have tried to justify these remarkably convenient coincidences by making learned references to the average speed of a stagecoach and the density of coaching inns along the major roads in Georgian England.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • In The Vor Game, Miles Vorkosigan is on a space station several wormhole jumps from home, and just happens to get tossed into a holding cell that contains his old friend Emperor Gregor. And later, on an entirely different station, he runs into General Metzov, the man whose career he had ended in the opening chapters of the book.
  • In The Warrior's Apprentice, one of the first people Miles meets after arriving on Beta Colony is the freighter captain that his mother had conned into giving her a lift off the planet eighteen years earlier. And then, several planets away from both their home worlds, he runs into Elena's mother.
• In The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, Emiko is running for her life and looks certain to be killed when Anderson Lake just happens to be riding past in his rickshaw and rescues her.

Live-Action TV

• Present in Angel season 2, in the Pylea arc. After lengthy discussion of how two people going through the portal might wind up halfway across the world from each other, -and- coming up with a plan to stop them from doing so, Angel, Wesley, Gunn, and Lorne get to Pylea and find they're a few miles from where Cordelia ended up after her own trip through the portal. Cordy herself came through about the same place that Fred had, on yet another trip. Possibly justified in that it's mentioned that the portals need psychic energy to open. The Pyleans, and a few of the wild animals nearby, produce quite a bit of said energy.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003):
  • Double subverted. Starbuck crash lands on a barren moon and a big deal is made of how difficult it is to find one person on a planet when all you've got is "visual scanning". At one point they even show a map of the moon with the comparatively small area they've managed to search drawn on. They then throw this out the window by having Starbuck find a crashed Cylon Raider that apparently came down not far from where she crashed. Contrived Coincidence maybe, maybe not, as she personally shot it down before she crashed from damage it inflicted.
  • Later in the series, Starbuck makes various similar leaps with predictability especially during the final episode where she manages to make an FTL co-ordinate out of the song she and the Final Five kept hearing, just in time to avoid the collapse of the Cylon colony ship under nuclear attack, only for this to turn out to be a new habitable planet, precisely what the fleet had been looking for since the planet formerly known as Earth had turned out to have been nuked by humans attacking earlier Cylons. Not only do all of those ducks get lined in a row, but it turns out there are indigenous humans genetically compatible with the humans on the fleet, despite total biological isolation of the two populations prior to this episode. Lucky coincidence indeed. Although given the number of straight-up supernatural events in previous episodes it might be a whole other trope...
• Blake's 7
  • In "Time Squad", Blake decides to make contact with La Résistance by landing on the planet Saurian Major and moving from one location to another until someone contacts him. Good thing Cally, the sole surviving member of the rebel forces after the rest were wiped out by biological warfare, is in the area!
  • Justified in "Cygnus Alpha" when it turns out Blake and Avon both worked on the abortive Federation effort to develop a matter transporter. When this trope is lampshaded, it's just pointed out that it was a very large project.
  • In "Aftermath" the script just throws up its proverbial hands and acknowledges the Contrived Coincidence when Avon and his Arch-Enemy Servalan survive a massive space battle only to run into each other while stranded on an alien planet.
  Servalan: You don't sound surprised.
  Avon: Why should I be? It has a perverse kind of logic to it. Our meeting is the most unlikely happening I could imagine. Therefore we meet. Surprise seems inappropriate somehow.
• Very obvious in Doctor Who, where the TARDIS never seems to land on the opposite side of the planet from wherever the local intrigue is going on. The episode "The Doctor's Wife" tells us that the TARDIS is doing it on purpose, even in the early seasons when the ship's flights were entirely random. For example, despite having an entire planet to argue over, the Thals and the Kaleds apparently live within walking (or gliding) distance of each other in "Genesis of the Daleks".
• In one episode of Farscape, Zhaan searches for her missing crewmembers by asking a bartender on a random planet nearby. Because clearly there is only one bar on the entire planet which they could have visited if they had been there, which, thankfully, they did not.
• The first season of Heroes suffered badly from this. Characters just seemed to run into each other all the time, even when they came from distant places like Tokyo. Perhaps the most blatant example was when Hiro met Nathan at a roadside diner, and shortly afterwards, Sylar also happens to show up on it (in time to kill Hiro's new love interest.)
• Cleverly lampshaded in the original Land of the Lost (1974), where the artificial pocket dimension the Marshalls are trapped in is not only small, but warps over on itself, so that if you walk far enough in one direction, you will return to your starting point. The local "mountain range" is, in fact, just the endlessly repeated image of the same mountain, and if you stand on its peak and look at the neighboring peak with binoculars, you can see your own back.
• In the M*A*S*H episode "A Smattering of Intelligence," Trapper quips "What a small war" after being met by his pal Vinnie Pratt.
• In Sliders, they would always randomly appear in the precise place and time where four strangers could, over the course of a few hours, completely alter the way of life on the planet. (We did briefly see the Sliders in universes where they had no particular impact, usually at the very start of an episode. Presumably, there were any number of such banal slides and the network was only showing us the interesting ones.)
  • Discussed in one of the first episode, where the professor tries to see which way they should go: should they interfere, are they sent there by a form of God, or should they take up a "Prime Directive" of sorts of not interfering. They chuck it out the window in favor of doing whatever they want or what they consider moral.
  • Deconstructed in a later episode, where Quinn is obsessed in three consecutive worlds apparently given to him by fate as chances to save his long-lost school girlfriend. In the last world he ends up almost literally breaking that world. They quickly forget this "little" incident and start poking their noses where it (usually) isn't their business after this.
• Stargate Atlantis, where those who live in deadly fear of the human-eating Wraith never move away from (or block) the stargate the Wraith ships emerge from - generally making it easy for the ships to fill their human quota in about half an hour.
• Justified in Stargate SG-1. Very few civilizations see much advantage in venturing more than a few kilometers from the Stargate, it usually being the only way on or off the planet (or, for primitive cultures, being integrated in the local religion since the "gods" come through it).
• The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?". An alien from Mars comes to Earth and finds himself at a diner owned by an undercover alien from Venus.
• In episode 5 of Wizards of Waverly Place, the characters zap themselves to Mars and just happen to land right next to a Mars rover. Mars is a pretty big place and this is vanishingly unlikely (though as a comedy it runs by Rule of Funny anyway).

Roleplay

• There are over a dozen characters in Dino Attack RPG explicitly said to be ex-military, and somehow all of them were in the same platoon together.

Tabletop Games

• Space 1889 sort of justified. Humans on Mars are not that common and tend to hang out among themselves, and Victorians usually socialize with and write letters to primarily adult people of their own gender and social status. Knowing a little bit about all humans on Mars of your gender and social class is doable. If you don't know a person of your gender and social standing on Mars, someone at your club is bound to know him or her and can introduce you.

Video Games

• Everyone in Dead or Alive 5 seem to run into each other in completely obscure corners of the world and they recognize each other as well with no introductions needed, though regarding the latter, considering it's the fifth game, that's to be expected to some extent.
• Averted in Final Fantasy IV, where the heroes travel to the moon and find that, though it is indeed smaller than the normal world, as one might well expect of a moon, it nevertheless does have a fully detailed worldmap. It's just... rather sparsely inhabited. Again, as one might expect of a moon. This is also because all of the humanoid inhabitants are sleeping below the surface, and the only other people living there, the Humingways, occupy one cave.
• Averted in Haven: Call of the King, a game which goes to show exactly why it's played straight most of the time. In the later stages of the game, you're tasked with finding 12 hidden dungeons in order to get the best ending. You have a space ship, and have to check the game's several worlds for them. As these are full-sized planets, it will literally take hours worth of flyovers in your space ship to find one, partly because your ship doesn't move nearly with the kind of speed you'd expect of an intergalactic vessel.
• In Kingdom Hearts there used to be one big world, until the Keyblade War shattered it into thousands of small shard-worlds, separated by the Darkness. Thus, the game is full of "worlds" small enough to be single video game levels (albeit, one made even smaller for the sake of only showing the important bits).
• The The King of Fighters meta-series has several of the oldest fighters (Takuma, Saisyu, Chin, etc.) having either known each other superficially or being old friends. Specially, Takuma Sakazaki knew Jeff Bogard rather well, and he also was an acquaintance of Kyo Kusanagi's father Saisyu; also, Chin Gentsai was an old friend of Tung Fu Rue. Noticeable in that the "Takuma knew Saisyu" angle was pure fanon at first, then became canon.
• The Knights of the Old Republic games take this trope to an even farther extreme than the Star Wars movies. Regardless of whether the protagonists land on a desert planet, an ocean planet, or a planet that is one big city (Coruscant-style), their destination is always just a few zones away, perfectly walkable on foot, even if they don't know its location. Also applies when their spaceship crash-lands in the middle of nowhere.
• Mass Effect's planets generally consist of about a square kilometer of mountainous terrain. You can see areas beyond the tiny map, but you're not allowed to go there - and, at any rate, all the stuff on the planet worth exploring is within a short drive of everything else.
  • "You're leaving the bounds of the operational area, you're leaving our scopes, you need to turn around Commander" says Joker every time you try to go a little too far out. Although on one particular planet there's an annoying bit of ore that's JUUUUUUST outside the operational area and you have to very, VERY carefully inch over to it on foot or Joker picks you up and deposits you back at the "beginning of the level". Great scanners you got there, Normandy...
  • Everyone that you meet in the first game shows up in the sequel. EVERYONE. At least, everyone who isn't dead. Most of them are emailing you, though, and comment something like "Man, it was hard to get your address!" ...an address belonging to a terrorist organization wanted in all of Citadel space. Then again, given their penchant for plastering their logo on everything, it wouldn't be surprising if it were something like "[e-mail]"
  • Played straight with searching for Liara. The smallest to which your superiors can narrow down her location is a sector with four navigable star systems. Although they do recommend starting the search on "the planet with the Prothean ruins", without even specifying its name. Likewise, Liara can only narrow down the Conduit's location to "somewhere on Ilos", and you only find it by locating Saren and airdropping right behind him.
• Ratchet & Clank series
  • A great many worlds can be visited, and each one consists of a single action adventure zone, no larger than the levels in Sly Cooper, (which are all set in various parts of one single world). If it weren't for Chairman Drek's Evil Plan and its importance to the plot, there would be no reason for space travel at all.
  • Averted with Metropolis, where the portion explored is completely different in the first game, third game, and Tools of Destruction.

Web Comics

• In El Goonish Shive, runaway Grace sought Tedd after the Goo incident became public, and...
  Grace: (thinks) I don't believe this! How can he be Tedd's father?!
  Mr.Verres: (thinks) Is that — Shade Tail?!
  • Grace and an Immortal she just met and didn't know anything about discovered they got a few common acquaintances...
  You're dating Tedd Verres?!
  You know Tedd?!

  • Technically, though, he only knew Tedd's father, who is the head of the American The Men in Black.

Western Animation

• Whenever the Mooninites in Aqua Teen Hunger Force have some new kind of Zany Scheme, they only ever try it out in the Aqua Teens and Carl's neighborhood, not anywhere else on Earth, seemingly just because they lack the imagination to try anywhere else.
  Frylock: Why do you guys always come down here and mess with us? There's like fifty billion people on this planet.
  Ignignokt: (genuinely confused) There are?... Since when?
  Frylock: Long time.
  Ignignokt: ... How long?
  Frylock: Very long!
• In the episode "Around the Berry Big World," Strawberry Shortcake goes on an "Around the World in 80 Days" style trip and is deflected at every turn, yet she always manages to end up near one of her international friends (from the "World of Friends" line).
• Parodied in the Futurama episode, "A Taste of Freedom", where aliens manage to enslave the entire Earth by winning a single battle and then leaving a single occupying base — once that is destroyed, the invasion disappears. When Zapp Brannigan handed the defense codes over to Hugh Man he apparently crippled Earth's entire military force (which often seems to consist entirely of the Nimbus, which was blown up in the battle).
• An Al Brodax Popeye cartoon (from Gene Deitch) had Popeye at a school for adult learning. He falls asleep and dreams he's a genius kidnapped by spies. When he awakes, it appears Olive (attending as well) had the same dream. "Ain't it a small dream world?" they say in unison.
• Top Cat plans an all-you-can-eat pizza binge for him and his pals in "Rafeefleas" but picks the wrong pizza shop to do it:
  T.C.: A thousand pizza parlors in New York and we had to pick the one run by Officer Dibble's cousin!
• Inverted during The Real Ghostbusters episode "Slimer, Come Home". Ray sits down rather than searching. When Egon asks what he is doing, Ray says he is working on a theory that if you stay in one place long enough every person you've ever met will eventually pass by. Egon is about to comment on the sheer ridiculousness of this when one of Ray's grade school teachers stops and says hello.
• Star Wars Rebels: Subverted. Darth Maul discovers that his old enemy, Obi-Wan Kenobi, is on Tatooine and goes there to confront him. Nine episodes later, he's still wandering the desert, because "somewhere on the planet" just isn't enough information.
• Steven Universe: With one known exception, every time Gems fly to Earth in the modern day, they wind up in or near Beach City. This could be because Gems are magical, and corrupted Gems are known to be drawn to the Crystal Gems' temple (which is on the outskirts of Beach City), but they do this even when they're not specifically looking for Gems (such as when Aquamarine and Topaz come to Earth to capture humans for the Human Zoo). This seems even stranger when one considers that there are ancient Gem facilities all over the planet, several of which are frequently visited by the main characters. The one exception is when Blue Diamond lands in Korea, because that's where Pink Diamond's palanquin is.
• In The Transformers, the Autobots and Decepticons fight all over the planet, not just the Rockies. Yet, it takes less than two hours for Optimus and the gang (a group of cars) to get from Colorado to Central Africa. The same goes with their adventures in India, Peru, and wherever else.

Real Life

• It actually is a small world... when comparing urban centers to rural. The reason humans tend to run into each other — even across the Earth from where they met — is they tend to hang around cities and other places where humans live. If the entire human race of several billion people were put into a megacity at the same population density as New York City, it would be the size of the state of Texas. Seems big, but compared to the amount of available land on the earth is pretty tiny - .0046% of the total land area of the Earth. Still, if you landed at the central space port of that city, the droids you were looking for would most likely not be within any kind of walking distance, let alone on the route you have randomly chosen.

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