Science Meets Fiction

In Larry Niven’s Ringworld, the alien Puppeteers have secretly been selectively breeding humans for being lucky, which they believe (correctly) is actually a psychic probability manipulation ability. (This seems a little weird because natural selection already involves a lot of luck on the individual level, but let’s just roll with it.) They had concluded from Earth’s history that humans were already lucky, and they tried to enhance this trait by encouraging an overpopulated Earth of 18 billion people to set up a lottery for the right to have children (one of several allowed methods of qualifying).

Two hundred years later, the Puppeteer Nessus is recruiting people for a very dangerous mission to Ringworld. In order to ensure the mission’s success, he recruits an extremely lucky human named Teela Brown. Teela’s ancestors were all winners of the Birthright Lottery for the past five generations, and Nessus hopes that her good luck will help the entire mission survive.

However, the mission eventually goes badly, and Nessus decides that Teela wasn’t lucky after all because if she were, she wouldn’t have wound up on this very dangerous mission. Their pilot, Louis Wu, disagrees. He says that Teela’s luck simply doesn’t rub off on the people around her. In fact, if someone attacks them, they’re going to miss her, but that makes them more likely to hit the person standing next to her.

I’ve always thought Louis didn’t go far enough, though. He didn’t seem to recognize the full implications of the situation. Nessus was indeed wrong; Teela Brown was lucky, but she was even luckier than either of them seemed to realize. And that fact should terrify Nessus far more than if she wasn’t.