Sounds like a case for xkcd's what if
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2025
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This reminds me of the sketch from Chris and Jack, where one person tries to outsmart a genie with the perfect wish and almost succeeds, but ultimately fails.
Chris n Jack are hilarious!
Fun fact : Jack is Jack de sena - Voice actor of sokka from Avatar the Last Airbender.
They have cameos from other voice actors from the show as well in their skits.
1.) I wish the speed of light were 60 MPH.
2.) I wish nothing could travel slower than light.
3.) I wish for the genie's freedom.
- Granted. The definition of a mile is now 1/60th of the distance travelled by light in an hour.
- This is already the case, as matter travels through time and space at the speed of light. The speed of light is the only speed, the only variable is how much of that speed is used in space or time.
my wish is to change the mass of the proton.
To 23 lbs
Did someone read The Laundry Files? What you are describing is approximately used in making a Basilisk Gun
What will 1 extra electron do? Destroy universe?
Is it like every Proton has an anti-proton and if it wasnt perfectly balanced the universe would fall apart? Ive heard something like that before...
Lots of things become conductive.
or would mess with the chemical bonds of all chemistry, likely breaking up every single molecule into individual atoms, immediately killing everyone and destroy everything
It'll be like a Coulombic explosion, but with an excess of negative instead of positive charges.
Everywhere in the universe where matter forms lumps, they would disintegrate.
The real question isn't if the universe ends...
It's if the genie magic expands outward from the source at the speed of light, or if it's instantaneous everywhere, which would allow information to be transmitted faster than the speed of light, allowing for violations of causality, and destroying our fundamental understanding of the universe before we all died.
This assumes the genie doesn't have access to some weird higher-reality or higher-"dimensional" power. For instance, if the universe is a simulation, then perhaps the genie has access to a console.
real question, is there a difference?
In theory yes, but for any observer, it won't matter and it's all the same to them, as they cannot observe any difference in either case.
Not if the universe is inside the genie.
It's genies all the way down.
It's really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really fun to think about taking a speed of light ride.
You wouldn’t have any time to appreciate it.
Well, it's not a bowl.
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Wish granted: the same electron is added to all atoms in the universe.
This one single electron is created in a quantum state described by a wave function that is uniformly distributed over every atom in the universe. This wave function collapses nearly instantaneously to a single position, and the end result is that one random atom in the entire universe gains one electron.
Nothing of interest happens.
go with the one electron theory, how can you add an elecron to every atom when there's already only one electron in the whole universe.
Well now there are two electrons in the universe and their job is way easier.
except that in the single electron theory, all electrons and positrons are the same object going back and forth through time, bouncing from the end of the universe and the big bang, adding another electron might double the mass in the universe
Can the wish include a --dry-run option before going for it fully?
That's the Chris and Jack sketch currently listed above somewhere in this thread on my client.
-whatif
The genie granted two wishes at once. The other was from a speed runner.
During the race, an ionizing particle from outer space collided with DOTA_Teabag's N64, flipping the eighth bit of Mario's first height byte. Specifically, it flipped the byte from 11000101 to 11000100, from "C5" to "C4". This resulted in a height change from C5837800 to C4837800, which by complete chance, happened to be the exact amount needed to warp Mario up to the higher floor at that exact moment.
Considering how intentionally malecious the side effects of typical genie-wishes tend to be, the extra electron probably comes to rest in the wishers hypophysis and causes a free radical that leads to a rare sort of cancer that prevents the wisher from falling asleep ever again, so he dies in madness scratching out his own eyes.
0r something similar along that line.
0r something similar along that line.
I'm really bothered by that zero 0 instead of an o O.
Oh, you are right...
Sorry, handwriting recognition sometimes has its own mind.
And this error must have slipt my prove reading as it is just too well camouflaged...
Using a drawing pad for typing, and spelling the word “slipt” !?! could a prophet truly be among us???
No, just using the standard Gboard on Android. It has build-in handwriting recognition which for some reasons I like better than the standard virtual keyboard.
And regarding the remaining typing errors: just take them as an indication that I'm very likely not an AI ;-)
The "slipt" was probably caused by a false-friends-like scenario based on the translated word in my mother tongue: "entschlüpft".
Notice the added "t" at the end that denotes the past tense.
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So that's how matter won over antimatter.
Classic case of "history is written by the victors". You only call it antimatter because it lost, if it won, you'd call it matter.
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just choose an electron somewhere random in the universe, and declare said electron to be the legal property of every atom in the universe. problem solved
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Turns out, there's a rule against exterminating all life in the universe with a wish, but the genie doesn't know what an electron is or what adding one to every atom will do, so you've found yourself a loophole.
I'm a physicist, not a genie, and I have no fucking clue what adding an electron to every atom would do. I can't even begin to fathom the question.
I don't know either, I just think the consequences would be universally negative.
break all chemical bonds immediately, there will probably be further consequences regarding a universal electron imbalance, but we would already be atomised
Whatever it is that happens, it would be pretty violent.
"What If" had a slightly different, more localized but more concentrated premise it covered once:
Electron Moon
Quote:
"This is, by far, the most destructive What-If scenario to date."
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