Getting hit by a bus, drinking poison, or catching a virulent infectious disease could still kill you. It's an edible substance rather than an intrinsic property of humans because you might want to treat some non-human animals, and because some people might want to not eat it and see what it's like to age. It's ubiquitous (shall we say as a mold of distinctive appearance that forms on human hair moistened with saliva) so that it can't be effectively monopolized or prohibited anywhere.
2) Every human will have the ability to control pain and fear at will. If you do not want to feel pain or fear, you can attenuate or completely eliminate either or both. Even if you're trapped in a burning car or being attacked by a shark, you can consider the situation as calmly as if you were sitting in a library.
3) Every human will have the ability to telepathically subvocalize or share sensory experiences with any other human located within a sphere 1 astronomical unit in radius, with the signal propagating at the speed of light in vacuum, as long as all parties are willing participants. Nobody can listen in or even tell that communication is taking place without the consent of all participating parties.
Like the Cornucopia Machine wishes, I think this would be enormously destabilizing. Unlike the CM, I think it would almost exclusively destabilize aspects of the world that shouldn't be stable. People could no longer be controlled, disabled, or silenced by pain, fear, censorship, old age, or any non-fatal injury or medical problem. If we acted now to cause problems decades or centuries later, it would be us and not hazily envisioned future generations who would face the consequences.
]]>"I want a one solar mass black hole -- HEY, WAIT --"
]]>This saves time hunting down the real bastards and dispatching them, because they (1) never got to screw anybody over and (2) never felt the desire to.
And if a genie doesn't understand SLACK it's a Pink genie and will probably screw you on the wishes anyway, so stay away. Mr. Spiggott would be the best you could hope for.
]]>1) I wish for the World as Myth theory to be true and the ability to access and return to these worlds at will. Essentially a variation on Robert Heinlein's 'Number of the Beast' where you can flip between any universe of an infinite number of universes as long as you know something about that universe (ie, you read about in a book you assumed to be non-fiction, but was really a clever window into that universe). I wish for this mainly because I want to revisit my youthful dreams of exploring all these worlds, meeting Lazarus Long and his family, etc., etc., etc.. Because of this wish, I can skip a lot of other wishes (I wish for a world where Magic is real, for instance) because I can go visit that world when I want.
2) I wish for everyone a life as long as one's choosing with good health, the ability to apply one's talent, skill, or desire and earn a comfortable living, and the intelligence and compassion to be positive contributors to society (with Charlie's golden rule wish tacked on here). In theory this should result in humanity coming together to solve the world's problems "Hey I can live forever if I choose, I want the world to be in good shape."
3) I would give the third wish to the genie/witch/god to free themselves from any future obligations that weren't self imposed.
]]>For #1, you need to read Divided by Infinity by Robert Charles Wilson. If you can't die but are doomed to live forever, the vast majority of your life will sweep by after everyone you care for has met their end. In fact, most of your existence will happen long after the Earth has ceased to be capable of supporting human life. Or, indeed, after the universe we live in has ceased to be capable of generating human-inhabitable planets with biospheres powered by luminous stars.
For #2, you need to read "Palimpsest" by, er, me. (Time travel, standing outside the time stream, is not likely to be a bed of roses.)
Wish #3 is basically cheating (you're asking for unlimited further wishes).
]]>Horrifyingly dangerous.
Remember E = mc2 ?
The energy locked up in any piece of mass is proportional to the square of lightspeed.
You just tweaked c by 10%? Great: the light from all the spontaneous supernovae will begin reaching us in a few years! But first, you'd better have some sun block -- you just turned up the sun (not to mention melting down all our nuclear reactors, heating up the Earth's core (which is partly heated by radioactive decay) and destroyed all our electronics).
]]>Wish (1) -- you just upped the partial pressure of O2 in the atmosphere high enough to combust all the extra fossil fuels you wished for. It's now probably high enough that waterlogged organic matter (us) is combustible, too.
Wish (2) -- you seem to have a touching faith in the 1950's propaganda about fusion reactors being free of unfortunate side-effects like, oh, neutron-activated secondary radioisotopes.
Wish (3) -- you want a panopticon singularity!
]]>I can't help asking those questions when I read about someone altering time somehow, and it's all due to Daniel Keys Moran.
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