RAR : Becoming a Q

[Rabid]

In this RAR, Q appears in front of you one day, and tell you he is becoming quite bored. He tell you that in order to stave off his boredom, he is going to offer you his powers.

His offer is clear : he would uplift you, and you would become yourself a Q, with all associated power and knowledge. However, he tell you, he would include a programming in your uplift that prevent you from killing, injuring, or directly interacting in any hurtful manner with him. This is a level of programming even another Q could never crack, ever.
Q would also conserve his own powers, just taking a little step back in order to admire the show he is expecting you to put on. He is not going to fuck with you directly, however he may very well interact with some of your own plans in order to entertain himself.

So, what do you say ? Do you accept ? And if you do accept, do you have any plans ?



Note : This thread is a challenge to SDN to see if it can come upon a RAR and not shit it up as described in this thread.

[Zablorg]

I accept and send China back to the Boxer Rebellion.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I accept and transform our universe into the Stargate universe, whilst removing the Goa'uld and other bad guys. For the lols.

[Rabid]

I accept and send China back to the Boxer Rebellion.

Honorable mention.

[evilsoup]

Well the obvious first thing I would do is brute-force an end to human suffering: make sure everyone in the world has enough food and basic amenities, create magical electrical systems (based on I don't know, solar power) and super-duper internet for everyone, magic into existence helpful Culture-Mind-level intelligent clean factories all over the world (which would explain how they work to anyone interested in knowing) . Basically make sure everyone is materially cared for first of all. I would also replace all guns with an equivalant mass of fragrant flowers, all nukes with giant beanstalks, etc. With Q powers and knowledge, I figure that'd take like 24 hours, tops. I'd also flood the internet with information about what I've done, appear in public to world leaders (I'd probably avoid angel's wings and hallelujah chorus as that would temp Q into playing satan, but it'd be impressive).

Once I've created heaven on Earth, I'd zip off to look at the universe. Maybe rearrange some stars so that they spell out my name when seen from the Earth. If there are alien civilisations out there, I would observe them for a while and then uplift them the same way I did humanity. I'd check back on the Earth every once in a while, and also check back on all the aliens I'd uplifted.

[Lonestar]

I would totally create "God's Final Message to his Creation" and just leave it there.


And yes, it will be exactly what you think it is.

[Enigma]

For shits and giggles, I'd turn every single person into Jean-Luc Picard and give them each a fully staffed E-D for them to zip around and call for Q just to annoy him. Each and every one of the seven billion Picards will have their own form of annoyance for whenever Q shows up.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

I spent a while considering how I would shake up the world, create new worlds, etcetera, but there's really one scenario that really tickles me.

From now on, things in dreams occasionally come true. Beings, situations, abilities, what have you - the barrier between the spaces we inhabit when we dream and those we inhabit awake becomes a bit more permeable. There's no controlling this, specifically, but lucid dreaming or particularly vivid imaginations will help.

Aside from checking in on this every now and then to make sure the world doesn't destroy itself or anything - basically acting as that sort of storybook god who doesn't interfere in any really helpful way or make himself available but makes sure everything turns out okay in the end - I think I'd probably fill my time by creating little alternate realities and playing with them - just change one event, then watch what happens to history and society and art organically, without any further interference. Just looking at how television and film would change based on the butterfly effect would entertain me for ages. What if JFK wasn't shot? What if he was blown up? What if he was given a modern iPhone? What if I filled Tasmania with a vibrant society of centaurs shortly before the European arrival? This would occupy me for some time.

Eventually, I suppose, petty thought experiments and vain playing at God would lose their novelty, and I would desire to do something more, something better, something really challenging and important and grand. I could build a great clockwork universe, but then, how much better would it be than the original? I could help out one person, but then, why not help out all of them, save everyone, make everyone happy? But then, how interesting would the Universe really be to me? How meaningful would I find 'Everyone is happy forever in a perfect world' once I made one, or a hundred, or a million parallel versions of it? Why not just put the world in a bottle? Of course, finding something to challenge myself as a nigh-omnipotent trickster god would be tricky, and such a power just so that I could build castles in my sandbox that only I could see the breadth of?

In all likelihood, my last finger-snapping reality warp would be to send myself back to being me, here, sitting at my laptop, with maybe a few small improvements - a little prettier, a couple tasks completed, enough money so that me and my friends can achieve some of our aspirations together - and a memory wipe to forget the whole Q thing entirely.

[Purple]

Firs thing I would do is uplift human kind. And not in the way you think. I would not hand out magical technology or what have you. What I would do is change the human cautiousness and nature to exterminate greed, selfishness, stupidity, bigotry, religion and other diseases of the mind of this nature. Come next morning and the brain dead bigoted KKK member ultra Christian would wake up start solving complex math problems for fun and laugh at his own idiocy from the years before.

Or in other words, I would transform human kind of today into the human kind of the TNG federation. Than I would look to see what happens.

[hongi]

Destroy world hunger, reduce human suffering, etc etc.

The problem with god-like power is that I know exactly what to do with it. And once that's done, the world would be so different that I can't relate to it, let alone imagine it. In other words, such a world, as desirable as it is, is nothing more than fantasy to me. And I'm not interested in such a fantasy. So I would actually prefer an imaginary scenario that gave me less power.

[Ahriman238]

Reducing human suffering is good. Turning the Sahara into a garden of eden and so on. But I really don't want to fuck with people's heads, even if given the power to do so. And even if I didn't at least half suspect this was a hidden test of character like the one and only time we've seen Q do something similar.

I spend a few weeks screwing around with the guys at CERN, giving them data they'll be arguing about for decades. Then I make it rain fresh fruit over most of Africa, write dirty messages in the stars, and generally enjoy myself while doing good and giving the human races a few months of glorious insanity it will never forget. Then I turn all the shit in my septic tank into gold and give up my powers. No one should be a god for too long.

[Cesario]

I look through the SDN archives and start implementing RARs from ages past in the real world and comparing how people actually react to how they expected to react. Then clean up the mess, press the cosmic reset button and try the next one.

[Purple]

One thing to consider here that IMHO many people are forgetting is that it's not enough to make the world a better place. You have to keep it that way. It's all fine and well to give people food or wealth or fertile land but come a decade or two and human kind will find a way to (excuse my language) fuck it up big time. And that's not even going into the part where human greed and malice will lead to such resources only being exploited to create an ever more unsustainable abomination of consumerism all over the world. Say you top off all the worlds oil fields right now. Do you think people would see it as a second chance and change? I don't think so.

In contrast, human kind even without any physical aid just with a changed state of mind could make due quite nicely with what we have today. If human kind was to suddenly renounce consumerism, stupidity and greed and embrace enlightened humanism we would quite easily solve the problems of world hunger and such. And more importantly, they would keep things good for as long as human kind exists.

As for me, I would keep my power and live out many life times as a common man on Earth, watching over human kind to make sure they don't revert to their old ways and periodically topping off the oil fields and undoing unpredictable disasters. Or as god in Futurama put it. "The best way to do something is to make it look as if you newer did anything at all."

[evilsoup]

Well see I think that by changing people in such a fundamental way you are actually replacing them with completely different people in the same bodies, I would consider that tantamount to mass murder.

And if I give everyone ready access to intelligent superdupertech backyard universal constructors and all the resources they could need, what possible reason would there be for them to fight? You realise people aren't actually evil bastards in general, right?

[Shroom Man 777]

Before one can administer, with his newfound powers of godhood, the vast and incomprehensible and magnificent on mere mortals as one was previously, one should also transcend the limitations of his own awareness too. If I'd become some sort of great deity in the vein of Q, I'd probably go on a bizarre trippy reality-altering spirit journey to expand my horizons - and perhaps this, sharing these divine alterations of the mind, could be the basis of the randome altarnate realty hippotheticel scenarieos I'd administer on people. Send them on space odysseys, let them touch giant black space rocks and go crazy and transmogrify into space fetuses after a psychadelic 5-dimensional acid trip through space and time. And see what the results are, on what this new, greater, expanded consciousness would be like.

Yeah. I'd like that. I've been going on constantly about the limitations of imagination and such and such. So with my gnarly incomprehensible Q powers, I'd like to smash down those barriers, those limits, and see just how strange and bizarre and inhuman the previously human mind can become. The very first experimentation would be on myself. It will be the dissection of the human soul.

Would Q be entertained by a man's transmogrification and metaphysical metamorphosis into an eldritch being?

Because that's what I'd do. Like Cronenberg's The Fly. I will be like Jeff Goldblum. But instead of mutating into a horrific deformagrotesquetitude, it will be my ascension into a god, which may very well be the same thing.

[Purple]

Well see I think that by changing people in such a fundamental way you are actually replacing them with completely different people in the same bodies, I would consider that tantamount to mass murder.

How so? I am not removing what it is to be them. They will still have their personalities, their tastes, talents and even flaws. All I am doing is basically giving them decades of brainwashing sensitivity education all crushed into a single nights worth of sleep. Even the intelligence bust (if it can even be called such) is just giving them the kind of mindset and skill set primary school was supposed to give all people anyway.

And if I give everyone ready access to intelligent superdupertech backyard universal constructors and all the resources they could need, what possible reason would there be for them to fight?

Two reasons. First, becouse there will always be things you can't magic into existence. Even star trek still has barbers and bartenders. But that one is less important.

The real bugger is the second one. The one I already mentioned and you did not notice. If you just hand an abundance of resources to human kind we won't change. Top off the oil wells and people will just keep driving their cars and running their refineries until we end up living under domes and eating soilent green. Give us universal constructors that make stuff out of nothing and people will just pollute more than ever. To put it in another way. Forget hybrids and recycling, you just gave everyone infinite oil and his or her own 20 wheel hummer bling car that consumes 20 liters per kilometer for joy riding. An abundance of cheap resources combined with the current nature of man kind would spark a renaissance of consumerism sending our world into a downward spiral of doom which you, the caretaker of human kind will have to be forced to clean up over and over again.

You realise people aren't actually evil bastards in general, right?

You are trolling now right?

On a serious note. No, we are not as a rule bastards. But we are bent on maximizing momentary gain at the expense of long term viability. We could, given our resources today easily feed the whole of Africa for example. But we prefer to make sure every family has two cars and a big screen TV.

[Shroom Man 777]

We are bent not by our nature, but by the artificial environments manufactured and fabricated by those in power.

Perhaps an interesting social experiment could be had with Q powers. In trying to create a new society that could be free of the corrupting influences affecting here and now or something.

[evilsoup]

People are as good as circumstances allow them to be. Nobody would fight if there's no reason to fight. Nobody would bother using fossil fuel burning cars if they can have personal friendship-powered carbon-clean jetpacks instead. My plan would also render everything about capitalism (and communism and every political philosophy) completely irrelevant - there would be no need to commute to work, there would be no need for work! People would travel for leisure, to see beautiful parts of the world and meet everyone everywhere. They would write plays and carry on with physics experiments and write poetry, and hell maybe some people would choose to build their home by hand, as a form of art.

I think you may be misunderstanding me, Purple. Those poor in Africa and around the world would have access to these miracle machines just as much as you or I. That's the whole point. They could have fuckoff 88-inch TVs and super-HD video cameras and whatever they want, on top of all the food they could eat. Basically I would turn Earth into the Culture.

[lordofchange13]

With my new found powers i would bend reality around like a pretzel and reshape Earth in to a bigger version of Xanth. Then bring the universe i have written about into reality, so that i can be their literal creator god. On the same note i would make all video games and books real, and connect them all together. After that i would create the absolute most perfect afterlife and allow the dead to go there, watching as they spend eternity in "bliss". Just to see if my idea of immortality is right.

[SpaceMarine93]

Rewrite the laws of Physics to allow easy access to faster than light travel, add way to control universe destroying vacuum collapses, somehow reduce devastating effects of cosmic phenomenas such as supernovas, adjust power of Vacuum energy to make it a safe and potentially exploitable infinite energy resource, stop Entropy and Universal Heat Death. Build parallel universe hopping escape hatch at heart of existence just in case.

Biologically increase all sentient lifeforms in the universe's ability to feel empathy (or whatever equivalent) and use logic, decrease their ability to feel negative emotions that results in conflict, greed, apathy, sadism, paranoia and all kinds of sentient-induced suffering.

Remove all cosmic horrors. Send out something to systematically locate, categorize, study and develop means to fight any potential galaxy terrorizing cosmic horrors and eldritch abominations, and subliminally plant knowledge in every sentient species' minds. Also clear out anything (and I mean anything - objects, people, monsters, etc.) lovecraftian and horrible that would compromise normality for sentient beings in horrific ways.

Plant databases of advanced knowledge around the universe along with safeguards in case sentient species fumbling results in disastrous backfire.

Find out how the universe come to being. In fact, find out how the universes work altogether rather than just be able to control its workings. Hopefully without being driven mad by the revelations.

Build paradise dimension to hide in, sit back and watch, intervene whenever something goes wrong that is beyond all sentient lifeforms' ability to handle. Who knows, maybe I would raise a pantheon or something. Not that I have any delusions of Godhood.

Create means to easily destroy Q Continuum level beings and plant subliminal knowledge in all sentient beings' minds, then erase that plan from my head. That's just in case I go power-crazy and needed to be stopped.

Should I go further and plant sublimal messages inside the minds of all sentient races now and to come to guide them to develop their society in ways that suits my beliefs (e.g. Universal Healthcare, United Government, Democracy and various Freedoms, Environmentalism, Pro-Science)? Or will that be going too far to infringe free will?

[lordofchange13]

[quote="SpaceMarine93"
Remove all cosmic horrors. Send out something to systematically locate, categorize, study and develop means to fight any potential galaxy terrorizing cosmic horrors and eldritch abominations, and subliminally plant knowledge in every sentient species' minds. Also clear out anything (and I mean anything - objects, people, monsters, etc.) lovecraftian and horrible that would compromise normality for sentient beings in horrific ways.[/quote]
Why kill then, why not just enhance humans till these creatures are no longer cosmic horrors in comparison. Plus now that you have Q's powers i think you would classify as a Eldritch abomination, what with being so far beyond human minds.

[Purple]

Remove all cosmic horrors.

[ERROR] FATAL UNHANDLED EXCEPTION: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference Q-SpaceMarine93 not set to an instance of an object

In less poetic terms. Considering the powers you just attained and the things you plan to do I think that for many of the denizens of the galaxy (those you deem cosmic horrors especially) you are the cosmic horror. The whole point of these things is that they are not malicious or evil. They just are. Its the fact that they are so alien, so different and powerful that to us they are like we are onto an amoeba that makes them horrors for us. By destroying them, you become a cosmic horror your self. Only worse since you are doing it on purpose and not by accident and lack of understanding. By reshaping the universe, you become the destroyer, the evil god of change playing with destiny and creation. And so, if you should chose to go down this path, and if after that you truly desire to destroy a cosmic horror you have no one to destroy but your self.

[lordofchange13]

It's not that their evil it's that we(beings of the material plane) are all stupidly small and insignificant in comparison. comparison: You and a Hydra.

[SpaceMarine93]

[quote="SpaceMarine93"
Remove all cosmic horrors. Send out something to systematically locate, categorize, study and develop means to fight any potential galaxy terrorizing cosmic horrors and eldritch abominations, and subliminally plant knowledge in every sentient species' minds. Also clear out anything (and I mean anything - objects, people, monsters, etc.) lovecraftian and horrible that would compromise normality for sentient beings in horrific ways.

Why kill then, why not just enhance humans till these creatures are no longer cosmic horrors in comparison. Plus now that you have Q's powers i think you would classify as a Eldritch abomination, what with being so far beyond human minds.

Fine, remove only any Eldritch Abominations which shows a deliberate intention to cause harm to normal sentient beings. Set up rules make it abominably clear to the Eldritch Abominations and Cosmic Horrors to avoid harming less powerful sentient beings even if they are indifferent to them, or else. Put in place automated systems in universal functions or create an incorruptible police organization of cosmic entities to enforce rules.

And why uplift humanity to Cosmic Entities levels when you could let them find a way to do it for themselves?

[lordofchange13]

And why uplift humanity to Cosmic Entities levels when you could let them find a way to do it for themselves?

Uplifting it a better alternative to your original plan. But now your only killing the non-existent evil ones, you don't need to uplift humanity.