Trivia / Known Space

• Science Marches On:
  • Larry Niven sold "The Coldest Place" to Analog magazine, but its premise that Mercury was a Tidally Locked Planet was disproved prior to its publication. Niven offered to return the check, but the magazine decided to publish it anyway because at the time it was written, the story was scientifically accurate to the best of Niven's knowledge.
  • In the introduction to the Tales of Known Space anthology, Niven notes that Science was Marching On while he was writing:
    You may feel that Mars itself is changing as you read through the book. Right you are. ... If the space probes keep redesigning our planets, what can we do but write new stories?
  • Any time Niven mentions Pluto, this happens. After "The Coldest Place" he had the spectacular exploding Pluto from World of Ptavvs, which he's stated he wished he could change if it weren't such an awesome scene and kinda necessary to the story.
  • The whole Pak/human connection became subject to this trope when the genetic relationship between primates and every other taxonomic group on Earth was decisively proven by molecular biology. Likewise, both molecular genetics and basic mycology refute the premise that all extant life descends from yeast.
  • Sirius is much too young to have been around in Kzanol's day, and furthermore Sirius A's habitable zone would bring Jinx's primary much too close to Sirius B's orbit. Destabilization would ensue.
  • Also, evidence from the Cassini probe indicates that Saturn did not have its fantastic ring system yet in Kzanol's day.
  • The Galactic Core explosion now seems extremely unlikely, as we now know that the Milky Way's central massive object is Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole, rather than a dense star cluster.
  • The Bussard ramjet appears frequently and they're often discussed as being the fastest possible ships, collecting interstellar hydrogen for fuel using magnetic fields. While this was a cutting edge theoretical design at the time, it's now understood that the ramjet design is impractical for interstellar travel due to both space being too empty to easily fuel it and the friction with any hydrogen it collects slowing it down in the process.
• Technology Marches On:
  • In the Kzinti story "Cathouse", the human protagonist has a pocket computer with a capacity of a whole 100 megabytes!
  • Remember all that transplant surgery and organlegging? Here and now, a combination of 3D printing technology and stem cell research promises to make it possible to literally print cloned organs on demand within the next few years.
• Torch the Franchise and Run: "Down In Flames" was intended to be this, had it ever been completed. Instead, Niven wrote Ringworld and rendered the prospective 'verse-ender obsolete.