Sudden unconsidered wish-granting in a modern setting

[rasmuswagner]

So, what if....

magical space bats suddenly grant everyone the thing that they are wishing for right now.

The first thing that comes to mind is that basically only kids would have superpowers. Adults wish for another hour of sleep, for their boss to spontaneously immolate, that sort of thing. Only kids go around wishing they had super strength or energy blasts.

[OgreBattle]

So, what if....

magical space bats suddenly grant everyone the thing that they are wishing for right now.

The first thing that comes to mind is that basically only kids would have superpowers. Adults wish for another hour of sleep, for their boss to spontaneously immolate, that sort of thing. Only kids go around wishing they had super strength or energy blasts.

China explodes from 1 billion disparate wishes

[Chamomile]

Do people have to be specifically wishing for something at that moment, or do the magical space bats grant one wish per customer based on most recent wishing? That has a huge impact on the scale. Do like 99% of people get nothing at all because they were focused on something else or asleep or just generally happy at the moment, or does everyone get something?

If the latter, scale issues become a problem. A lot of people suddenly find themselves falling in love with people they previously hadn't considered before, and population goes up by (guesstimate) 5-10% as several departed loved ones are wished back to life and soul mates are wished into existence, either with specific attributes (ballerina dominatrix video game enthusiast who's really into chubby guys) or more ambiguously defined ones ("the girl for me," although this one could also result in being automagically matched with whichever currently extant woman is most compatible with the wisher, and could actually turn into one of the few wishes that works out great for everyone, modulo the terrible side effects of everyone else's wishes). Population probably goes down by less, as death wishes are mostly focused on the powerful few.

Every celebrity from 18-35 is suddenly married to several dozen or hundred people. Every political party is simultaneously wished into power and ruin in a way that I'm not sure how to resolve. Likewise, many politicians become lich kings as they are simultaneously wished both death and an infinite term in office. Contradictory policies are wished into law in every nation with a sizable population, which either has to be resolved the same way the political parties sudden ascendance/demise or else results in the sudden Balkanization of all major nations, such that this United States has a total gun ban but that United States has unrestricted gun ownership, or else every nation suddenly gets very states rights-y as it is technically true that "the United States" has unrestricted gun ownership because the state of Missouri now allows the sale of bazookas, thus technically satisfying the wish of Tommy Harker from Florida.

Large numbers of people suddenly gain massive amounts of wealth, but depending on how the wish was interpreted, this could either result in a sudden but very uneven skyrocketing in standard of living or a sudden and horrible market crash as the world is flooded with hyper-inflated currency, with the most stable currencies being whichever ones belong to countries too small to have too many people in them whose most recent wish was "if only I had a billion East Caribbean dollars, I could own one of these yachts instead of working on them."

Then there's the sudden depopulation of the Earth from racists targeting various ethnic groups and wishing that they were evicted from the wisher's nation or exterminated completely. It's entirely possible that the only survivors are people whose wish required their indefinite survival or who belong to a racial group too small to be hit by wishes targeting "all black people," "all hispanic people," etc. etc. Ironically enough, Latin Americans might get out alright, since a lot of racists idly wishing for their extermination are probably phrasing it as Mexican extinction. But you might also get a few nations down there suddenly wiped out when an El Salvadoran wishes death on all Hondurans as vengeance for the Football War. Not that that's a particularly raw wound or anything, but it only takes one guy out of the six million living there to have happened to be wishing for that, even if he would never even consider wasting his only wish on that if he knew that wish granting space bats were listening.

And yeah, children (and teenagers) are probably the only ones getting superpowers out of the deal, but if you were hoping to get a charming "kids as super heroes" premise out of this with maybe some dark background implications of middle managers being suddenly incinerated across the world, you should probably go back to the drawing board for how to arrive at that premise.

[Dogbert]

Probably you'd end up on a barren rock, since all it takes is ten people wishing for "all the X to die", and unless wishes can preclude other wishes, wishing for superpowers doesn't preclude for a Tori/GOPer/1%er wishing all the poor died (just like I'd probably wish for the rich to die, depending on what news I'm reading atm).

[Longes]

It takes only one person wishing everyone would just go to hell for the barren rock scenario, and they don't even need to be from [evil demographic of choice].

[Iduno]

It takes only one person wishing everyone would just go to hell for the barren rock scenario, and they don't even need to be from [evil demographic of choice].

I was thinking "humanity's done, just wipe out Earth." But that kinda means the only people left would be whomever was wished back by other wishes at the same time.

Good news is, you can trivially have people find the love of their life or whatever they wished for during the ensuing "everyone dies."

[Dogbert]

Good news is, you can trivially have people find the love of their life or whatever they wished for during the ensuing "everyone dies."

Tumbling down, tumbling down, tumbling down...

[00dani]

How are logically inconsistent wishes resolved? Do they cancel out and have no effect? Does one take precedence over the other? Or does the planet just vanish in a puff of logic?

[rasmuswagner]

Okay, the hypothetical clearly needs some adjustment.

Iteration: Only wishes that can be fulfilled inside a 6-meter bubble surrounding the wisher are fulfilled.

[Fwib]

Okay, the hypothetical clearly needs some adjustment.

Iteration: Only wishes that can be fulfilled inside a 6-meter bubble surrounding the wisher are fulfilled.

Does that mean wishes are fulfilled, but changes are cropped to inside the 6m volume?

How do continuing violations of physics as we know it work?

Better hope that not too many people are wishing for something that results in conversion of a 6m volume to antimatter.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

How many big tiddy goth GFS does it take to collapse Earth into a singularity?

[Chamomile]

Do people who aren't wishing right that moment still get a wish? And do wishes which affect people who aren't in the six meter bubble but could easily fit inside it cause those people to be teleported there and effected, or do they have no effect? If the latter, then the "I wish my boss/other party's politician was maimed/killed" and "I wish [insert friend or celebrity here] loved me" wishes won't go through, which will wipe out a lot of casual wishes. People wishing for a fictitious soulmate will be able to get one unless they're into extreme gigantism or...long distance, I guess? Bad luck if you wished to have a significant other waiting for you at home rather than just in general. Do dead people's remains have to be within six meters, or does wishing for their return count as "within six meters" because the revived person can be teleported (or fabricated) at that position? Do people wishing for money in their bank accounts get their wish, because the phone they're imagining looking the money up with is on their person, or not, because the server the data is stored on is far out of range? People phrasing or picturing the wish as having lots of paper money will probably be fine. You could definitely still run into the hyper-inflation problem unless a wish for wealth is interpreted in terms of buying power rather than literal dollars in bank account.

[Whiysper]

I love this forum. Nothing to add to the thread other than that .

[maglag]

How many big tiddy goth GFS does it take to collapse Earth into a singularity?

Depends on how big you want the tiddies to be in relation to the rest of the GFS.

Like, according to some comics already in existence one really big tiddy GF would be enough to collapse the Earth if not the sun/galaxy/universe. If anybody's reading one of those when the wish happens...

[Count Arioch the 28th]

How many big tiddy goth GFS does it take to collapse Earth into a singularity?

Depends on how big you want the tiddies to be in relation to the rest of the GFS.

Like, according to some comics already in existence one really big tiddy GF would be enough to collapse the Earth if not the sun/galaxy/universe. If anybody's reading one of those when the wish happens...

Considering I have a minimum requirement of at least DDD, it might not take many.

[Thaluikhain]

Considering I have a minimum requirement of at least DDD, it might not take many.

Many goths with DDDs, or a smaller amount of goths with multiple sets of DDDs?

[angelfromanotherpin]

• The smallest black hole discovered to date has a mass of 3.8 solar masses, ~7.56 x10^30 kg.
• The woman with the heaviest breasts in the world is Annie Hawkins-Turner, whose rack weighs in at 40.3 kg. That's probably more than most people want, so I'll take it as an upper limit.
• Let us assume that the rest of the abstract BTGGF is a very conventionally attractive woman. I'll go with Alexandra Daddario, who weighs ~61 kg, which is similar to many women in various sexiest-woman-alive lists. Minus Alexandra's own boobs that weigh an estimated 0.64 kg, we have a total mass of ~100.66 kg.
• Dividing the so far minimum mass for a black hole with the approximately maximum mass of a BTGGF, we get ~7.5x10^28 (or seventy-five thousand trillion trillion) as the minimum number of BTGGFs required to form a singularity. Enough for every person on earth to have 10 quintillion BTGGFs.

[Thaluikhain]

You put rather more effort into that than I was expecting to see expended.

(Would fantasy GFs have the same breast density (or other bit density) as ordinary humans? If you've been watching too many badly animated chests, would you desire something solid that didn't move like normal human tissue?)

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I don't think I could handle 10 quintillion partners at once.

[Iduno]

• The smallest black hole discovered to date has a mass of 3.8 solar masses, ~7.56 x10^30 kg.
• The woman with the heaviest breasts in the world is Annie Hawkins-Turner, whose rack weighs in at 40.3 kg. That's probably more than most people want, so I'll take it as an upper limit.
• Let us assume that the rest of the abstract BTGGF is a very conventionally attractive woman. I'll go with Alexandra Daddario, who weighs ~61 kg, which is similar to many women in various sexiest-woman-alive lists. Minus Alexandra's own boobs that weigh an estimated 0.64 kg, we have a total mass of ~100.66 kg.
• Dividing the so far minimum mass for a black hole with the approximately maximum mass of a BTGGF, we get ~7.5x10^28 (or seventy-five thousand trillion trillion) as the minimum number of BTGGFs required to form a singularity. Enough for every person on earth to have 10 quintillion BTGGFs.

Also, you'd have to fit them into a 6-meter (radius or diameter?) bubble.

[Trill]

Also, you'd have to fit them into a 6-meter (radius or diameter?) bubble.

11.2 km radius

Well, that sphere will inevitably shrink due to gravity causing the bodies near the center to be squashed together.
The question is: Is this enough to cause them to collapse to a black hole by themselves? And if not, how many do we need to add for it to happen?

[Prak]

Okay, the hypothetical clearly needs some adjustment.

Iteration: Only wishes that can be fulfilled inside a 6-meter bubble surrounding the wisher are fulfilled.

How does this affect wishes to the effect of "I wish I had $TEXAS in my bank account?"

Does everyone wishing they would find large sums of money in their bank account, as opposed to on hand, just get fucked?

[Hicks]

I imagine those bank accounts would be flagged as fraudulent, seeing as how there are alphabetic characters in a memory address dedicated to real numbers. Assuming they did online banking on their cell phone.