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If You Could Change the World, What Would You Do?
Windbit
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
There's no denying that there is a lot of things wrong with our world and the people who live on it. If you could have one permanent, world-changing wish granted, what would it be?
I hate discrimination. I hate it when people are ostracized for being different, whether it be differences in religion, race, ideals, physical appearance, etc. I don't care what a person's reasons are for treating others unfairly: it's not right.
So, I think my wish would be to eliminate the seemingly natural desire to designate certain groups as "the enemy." Discrimination causes vast disparities in quality of life, and no matter how many forms of discrimination are deemed politically incorrect, more take their place. Gays and fat people are really popular targets right now, but even if something happens to lessen the stigma towards them, who knows what group will be deemed a threat next?
I hate discrimination. I hate it when people are ostracized for being different, whether it be differences in religion, race, ideals, physical appearance, etc. I don't care what a person's reasons are for treating others unfairly: it's not right.
So, I think my wish would be to eliminate the seemingly natural desire to designate certain groups as "the enemy." Discrimination causes vast disparities in quality of life, and no matter how many forms of discrimination are deemed politically incorrect, more take their place. Gays and fat people are really popular targets right now, but even if something happens to lessen the stigma towards them, who knows what group will be deemed a threat next?
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You can accomplish a lot of things in a lifetime if you have unilateral, uncompromised power over 6.5 billion people.
Edit: Plus it'd give me a chance to cosplay Caesar.
like, i see a this horrible shit people do, and I can't even conceive of doing it. I wish it hurt more for people to do horrible things to each other.
even for non awful stuff. I think the world would be better if people were more aware of the pain the inflict on others. Hell, even get the carrot effect of doing good things for other folk.
I think it would help a lot.
So, you want to get rid of /b/, then?
But seriously, I agree. It's also kind of frustrating that whenever you express empathy, most people will call you (a) a fag (b) a vagina (c) a castrato. castrati. Whatever.
When did fags gain the monopoly on empathy? Also, if you've ever known any flaming guys, you know that empathy is definitely not something that most gay guys posess.
Uh, what?
Also: Explain to people how much energy they waste waging war and doing violence and so forth.
Evil is inefficient.
I'd probably make people stop caring about consumerism anymore. Or something.
People just need to stop being such dicks all the time, that's really it. Blame it on religion, discrimination, cultural differences, whatever. People just need to stop being such dicks all the time.
This dude across the hall keeps coming over and bitching about how he wants to punch his roomate in the face. I'm so sick of him just whining about it, and then he fucking confronts the guy in the middle of the hallway with everyone in earshot and is just like 'dude you're fucking gay'. And he keeps telling me about how if the kid won't stop being annoying, he's going to send him home crying. What a fucking hardcore champ.
Just make people stop being dicks I guess. Unless they're funny about it.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
you don't talk to other people about your relationships? You've never hooked up with someone at a bar, and talked about it the next day?
that's all I meant. dish was probably the wrong word.
Hell, I used to go clubbing with some co-workers who were gay, and one of them would talk all sorts of shit at work. Knew a mechanic for a grand-am team who was the same way.
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But yeah. The whole "Don't be a Dick" philosophy is pretty much the #1 issue throughout history. Everything else becomes much easier once you remove antagonism and malice from the equation.
If I could change the world, I'd help people to see that gay folks are just like other folks. Who we sleep with and find attractive has nothing to do with our personalities. You know, just like you straight people. The same for people of other races, cultures, etc.
Except Furries. To hell with them.
Like 9000.
Alternatively, I'd wish for an energy source so cheap and plentiful as to be essentially unlimited. It would pretty much open the door for any endeavour imaginable.
I don't know if I'm making any sense here.
BUT.. if I absolutely had to pick one thing to change, it would be to make me more ignorant and naive.
I know that was probably a joke, but this would have a number of curious implications. If there's no limit to the speed of light, then effectively light travels infinitely fast. Aside from making relativity irrelevant since you can never gain a finite fraction of light speed, it would allow us to view the rest of the universe (aside from things blocked by other things) as it is right now, which would undoubtedly be a boon to astronomy and allow us to ascertain the true size of the universe and not just the observable universe. On the other hand, we wouldn't be able to measure red-shifting or blue-shifting, so we couldn't deduce the motion of distant galaxies or stars.
CRT monitors and televisions would no longer work, nor would any technology that depends on using electric fields to deflect particles.
Signals would travel instantly from one computer to another, so latency would become solely a function of the number of switches a packet had to pack through rather than that and distance.
If extra-terrestrials exist, establishing two-way contact will be much easier if you can send a signal an arbitrarily far distance instantly. That way you'd have a significant swath of the universe available to contact instead of just whatever portion is close enough so that you're willing to wait for an answer.
I'm unsure if the brain would be affected in any significant way.
Unless we have a method of getting excess people of this planet and to others, world peace, curing disease, preventing hunger, etc will have long term detrimental effects on us all.. in a world where mankind's only real predators are each other, war, hunger and disease are the only thing even vaguely keeping our population in check.
As tempting as it is to go the total dictator route, that would just open up a huge can of worms that I don't think anyone is capable of handling without getting overwhelmed or insane with power.
No sickness sounds nice, but opens the door to overpopulation.
More empathy would be my second choice, but choosing what degree everyone is going to be empathetic at is difficult. Too little and you have a situation similar to what currently exists: a bunch of people shaking their heads at the 6 o'clock news and going right back to their dinner with no further action. Too much and you have everyone falling over themselves to help one another, which, thinking about it, leads to global communism and the stagnated forward progress that inevitably comes with it(which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on one's definition of "forward").
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The Planck's constant thing however was a joke. No good can come out of a universe with a constant that high.
Alternatively, I'd use the 9/10ths of people as settlers for other worlds, so as to start the human galatic empire. I, of course, would rule over the home base of Earth through a dynasty of clones with memory implants.
But, you know, whatever suits you.
Mostly it's just a lot easier to handle fewer people, and controlling populations tend to breed more slowly than the populations who get all uppity and want or require change.
Rich apathetic Americans feel the starvation pains of Sudanese children? Yeah, I can dig it.
They are not aggressors. Try again dude.
I don't think Americans are 'aggressors' simply from not helping... although if that did happen, I'm sure the world would become very socialistic. By force.
The problem is that if every human being lived a first-world lifestyle, the maximum population the earth could support is 1-2 billion by multiple estimates.
Furthermore, as countries approach first-world economics, their population growth slows until it approaches the point of economic unsustainability where there aren't enough young productive workers entering the workforce or enough new consumers entering the market. (See Italy and Japan as examples.) The countries that have the most people and the highest birthrates are, in general, not the countries that are most rapidly destroying the environment.
So to solve the problem of sustainability through population, we'd need drastic, immediate negative population growth. That's unlikely to happen and even if it did there would be serious, possibly catastrophic economic side effects. But it's easy to argue for. It's easy to say "we should make less babies" because that doesn't directly affect you. It doesn't require any serious lifestyle sacrifices. Since most people in the first world plan to have fewer than 3 babies anyway for simple financial reasons, arguing for ZPG makes you feel like you're already doing your part. "I'm eco-friendly because I'm not planning on spawning any more humans." Uh, no, you're not. Not as long as you eat food that was grown 300+ miles away and use colossal amounts of energy mostly wrapped up in fossil fuels.
No, what we should do is:
- Drive only when absolutely necessary and use the cleanest-burning cars possible.
- Grow our own food if possible, or, at the very least eat only food that was grown less than 100 miles from where it was sold.
- Accept smaller, more easily heated/cooled housing closer to our workplaces.
- Use heating and air conditioning only when absolutely necessary. Use natural heat, light, and ventilation whenever remotely possible.
- Put serious economic and legal pressure on developers to build clean, green buildings that utilize natural heat, light, and ventilation in every way possible.
- Recycle/reuse more.
- Switching to nuclear couldn't fucking hurt, either.
I'm probably missing a few items in that list, but I think I covered the major ones. Reducing the population in any realistic fashion is not going to do a damn bit of good until we start improving our lifestyles.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.