The rule could be anything, as funny or as serious as you want. The universe will progress in a similar way that it has up until this point, unless your changed rule prevented it from doing so.
Some examples might be:
- The invention of currency is not allowed.
- Iron is slightly less stable.
- The Ancient Greeks are able to cultivate Silphium, which does not go extinct now.
Base 36 counting becomes predominant.
0 1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 A B
C D E F G H
I J K L M N
O P Q R S T
U V W X Y Z
Also the point at which hundred changes over to thousand gets pushed back by a power, so 6KL2 is Sixty Kay Hundred Elty Two, while 8,A59G is Eight Thousand Ayty Five Hundred Ninety G. Same with the changeover to Millions, Billions, Trillions, etc.
Probably wouldn’t change that much practically, but it’d make “Ten” a square that’s also the product of two prime squares, and it’s divisible by a lot more ways than the current number base, and it makes “One Thousand” the square of “One Hundred” the same way “One Hundred” is the square of “Ten” and that “One Million” is the square of “One Thousand.”
Okay but now you only have 3 fingers on each hand
Found the nerd
deleted by creator
Our solar system would have a greatly reduced speed of light so as to avoid being attacked by other sentient life.
Explain to me please but also wouldn’t that have to mean there was a black hole really nearby
It’s a reference to a book. But essentially yes you would manipulate the curvature of the universe to put something similar to a black hole around the solar system so that nothing could escape. A Black Domain, or a Light Tomb.
No black domain for me thanks. Even with A-A around
Thank you for validating my scifi reference. I feel seen.
I see you and so do the Zophons.
The strong nuclear force doesn’t exist.
bam!
No more questions about “What would you do if you were suddenly given power over everybody else?”
All this what-if-you-were-god stuff is subconsciously programming us to lean in when given the opportunity to control others.
As AI, surveillance, and extended bureaucracy undermine the concept of “freedom” as an inherently good thing, there will be more and more opportunities to control other people.
Indulging in this kind of question — what would you force all people to do if you could? — is normalizing the actual usage of those systems as they come into existence.
AI is a good thing as long as it’s open-source non-commercial used by normal people (not govcorp), nothing wrong with proompting some images in the same way there’s nothing wrong with pirating some plugins and throwing a fun track in FL together or even a remix or forking a GitHub project and changing it etc etc. Corpos and/or closed source can fuck off though. Information wants to be free.
It’s certainly not comparable to “extended bureaucracy” (read: regulations that protect people from predatory big tech corpos and far-right leaders of that industry like Musk) and surveillance, which you just kinda threw in there to fill out the buzzwords. Like that one is obviously a bad thing but has no rhyme or reason to be with the rest.
AI enables all the telescreens to be watched all the time. I thought the connection was obvious.
Just don’t use corporate software products
Photons now have mass.
Wonder what would be the advantages if it has mass?
The universe would have collapsed back into itself shortly after the big bang, which would avoid a lot of suffering.
laughs and giggles?
No more Pauli exclusion principle. I’m not smart enough to describe what that world would look like… which is exactly why I would do it.
I’m pretty sure that would result in all matter compacting down to a single point again…
Life isn’t possible
Native Americans are immune to European diseases.
Boom! /thread right here. This is a goooood one.
My question is, do we get native American diseases that Europeans are immune to?
Oh shit I really like this one.
Instead of leap days time just runs backwards to keep the calendar in sync.
A necessary requirement for higher intelligence is proper, functioning empathy. If you lack this, you’re just… Incapable of intelligent thought beyond that of a particularly stupid dog
Humans do generally have proper functioning empathy
CEOs and similar psychopaths don’t, though.
(Though those already tend to have the intelligence of a particularly stupid dog anyway, so I don’t really see how this would change anything.)
I thought the thing about psychopaths is not that they don’t have empathy or that it’s something that’s completely bizarre and alien to them, but rather that they have a switch where they can turn it off.
Like most of us would recoil in horror at watching a video of somebody being beheaded on the internet and many of us have had that unfortunate experience, but a psychopath has the ability to not feel anything at all about it if they don’t want to.
a moral impetus, informed directly by empathy, that is so overwhelming that the feelings of others are tantamount to one’s own
I’m guessing this is their meaning. Sounds interesting. Maybe that version of humanity would have far fewer nukes and a lot more good sex.
Sadly, I have a hard time believing this.
The problem is that basic empathy only goes so far. But we [almost] all have it.
dogs, too. such a strange take
I feel like we would still have many of the same billionaires if not all
Have to say this wouldn’t affect me, not because I don’t have any empathy but only cold, logical political solidarity, but also because I wouldn’t really class myself as particularly intelligent. I’m just walking here
Is hard to pick one.
Altruism is the default instead of selfishness
Cancer doesn’t exist
No harm could come to children. No one would have wicked thoughts towards them. They’d fully recover from any non-lethal injury. They could get sick.
Stupid thoughts become painful.
"It’s not painful bro you just need to feel it for longer you’ll get used to it. Ow.
Unfortunately, you didn’t get rid of masochism, so now they’re stupid and cumming.
Humans don’t evolve, we bring noting to the table of life and dont want to share.
No suffering, no dis-pleasurable state, no undesirable reality exists. Everything that is, is deemed good by all beings that can judge it (if any). This has, as a consequence, no moral dilemmas, no conflict of wills and interests, no tragedies, etc.
Then all life would have likely gone extinct long before they even developed spinal columns.
Remember, pain is a fantasy your brain creates to keep you from injuring yourself.
Getting rid of that will mean zero survival instinct.
What happens if I light my head on fire
I can think of two scenarios. The first one is you do that and everyone, including you, feels it and perceives it in a good way. Which I guess could end up in weird situations. Geeky example, but do you know Magic the Gathering? There’s a faction there called “The Rakdos Cult” with a demon and a lot of deranged characters that simply enjoy the bad things. The Rakdos cards often portray a little gorey scenes with people enjoying it, so I guess we could become kind of that but without victims, only enjoyers.
But the other scenario is that we wouldn’t have a need to prove or try such things because we often do it out of negative feelings such as emptiness, pride, competitiveness, etc. We wouldn’t feel those things so we wouldn’t behave as erratically as we do now.
That if we exist at all, though… Maybe existence as we know it is incompatible with my first comment.
