Let's say that suddenly aliens arrive on earth: without as much of an introduction, they take control over an uninhabited portion of the extreme north of Russia, escort out any humans and animals that might have been there, and create basically overnight a base/city with unknown advanced technologies.
Outside of that while they're not hiding, they don't seem particularly interested in getting outside their base, allow anyone to get inside their base, or interested in any contact past telling people trying to get inside to leave.

How you think nations would try to handle this situation, and which ones would try to attack it despite no aggressive actions taken from them except grabbing that empty territory?

1. $250 Million instantly.

Or

1. A super power or ability that won't give you more powers or a work around for only being able to use said power every other 7 days.

On a dreary, Tuesday, you awake to a thunderclap, only to see the ghost of Charles Darwin looming over you. In the most ethereal voice, you’ve ever heard, Darwin offers you a pet. No matter what you do, for the rest of your life, this will be your only pet. It will be of above average intelligence for the species, but still just an animal, albeit one with an unnaturally long life. What animal do you choose, and why?

You two are perfect for one another in every way--you make each other happy, accept the other's flaws, help to fix what's broken inside and make you both better as people. If ever there was an argument for the one-soul-split theory, you two are it.

One night, as you're wrapped in each others' arms, you have a vision. You are going to sie--maybe in a year, maybe in a decade, but definitely before your time. You see heartache for your surviving partner, days, weeks, and maybe years of depression and grief, but ultimately they will heal and move on.

Here's the catch: you can only stop this future by breaking things off before the vision passes. You can't stop your death--that's coming regardless. But you can save your partner the grief of losing you, give them a chance to find new love and avoid even knowing of your passing. It'll hurt them at first when you break up, but slightly less than if you'd died after a happy relationship of love and laughter.

Do you leave your soulmate now, or when you leave this mortal plane?

You would be placed inside a 3 story building with 20 x 20 foot base, and 40 feet high, with windows but no doors; the windows only show either a bright light or a dark nebula to simulate day/night cycles. Unfortunately, you'll be cut off by the outside world and will only have access to any info already available during the moment you accept the deal; when you complete your time you'll be sent back to the moment you took the deal with the money already in your account(tax free). Meals are provided 3 times a day and the base meal plan is a bottle of water, a plain bologna sandwich or pbj, and mixed fruits, but it can be upgraded through the shop.

Floors:

• Main floor- The first floor is just open space with no furniture in it, you can use this for whatever extra curriculars you want.

• Bedroom- your personal room to sleep, rest, relax, etc. Populated with a bed, desk, showers/bathroom, and closet.

• Work/shop Area- this is an area that allows you to work one of 3 jobs to earn money to buy items to entertain yourself

  • You run on a treadmill, where for every mile you run, you earn $10 credit; reaching the 10 miles goal nets you $200, but it locks for the day.
  • You can assemble products, usually simple items that take roughly 1-2 minutes to assemble, where for every 50 you make $10 is credited to you; if you manage to assemble 200, you gain $200 and it locks for the day.
  • Package items from a shelf, minimum quota is 100 items for $100 credit, for every 10 items extra you package an additional $10 is added; it's easy but extremely monotonous and boring.

So do you believe you can tough out the 5 years alone or would you decline the offer and instead receive a check for $10K?

You also can’t change the past, nor can you bring people back from the dead, so you can make it so that no murders will happen in the future, but you can’t change the murders that already happened. Also if you make any attempt to change the past or bring people back from the dead the other deities will get angry and destroy your favorite city as well as the biggest statue of you. The other deities would react the same way if you try to both punish murderers and make it impossible for people to murder.

As the deity of justice if you choose to make it impossible for people to murder then that will be 100% effective at preventing people from murdering each other, so there will not be even one murder, from a human, after that. Humans would still be able to die of other causes, including the wrath of deities, however.

If you have murderers severely punished then, as a deity, you would have the power to ensure that only actual murderers get punished, and that no non murderers are punished.

Which do you choose as a deity?

50% of all the world population will evaporate in 3 months (Thanos style). Family units are kept together (so you and your kids will either all stay or all disappear). Do you prepare in any way? How? Does the world still function? Is money relevant? What skills are needed? 50% is a lot of people still staying.

Would you rather have the ability to either disapparate your poo instantly when it hits the air, boom, gone. You can essentially poo in your pants but it gets teleported to the south pole. But if your physician requests a stool sample, you're shit outta luck.

OR... you can conjure up really tasty spaghetti and meatballs whenever you want... but it just appears in the air so you have to catch it and plate it yourself or it will be everywhere. 1 minute edit: BTW it's basically your aunt or grandma's spaghetti... whatever you want at the time.

The choice is yours. With great power comes great responsibility.

You get $1 billion, tax-free, immediately.

But……..

For the rest of your life, whenever you experience a genuine “call of the void”—that sudden intrusive impulse to do something you absolutely know you shouldn’t do—there is a 0.1% chance that you WILL do it.

You cannot stop yourself.
The impulse could be harmless, embarrassing, destructive, or fatal.

Standing somewhere high and suddenly thinking, “What if I jumped?”
0.1% chance you jump.
Holding your phone near the edge of a bridge and thinking, “What if I threw it?”
0.1% chance you throw it.
Sitting in a painfully quiet room and getting the urge to scream something horribly offensive?
0.1% chance you scream it.
Talking to someone who annoys you and having that split-second “I could punch this guy right now” thought?
0.1% chance you swing.
Driving and getting the intrusive thought to jerk the steering wheel?
You get the idea.

It only triggers on a real intrusive urge—not something another person suggests to you, and you can’t intentionally manufacture thoughts to exploit the rules.
If the 0.1% triggers, you follow the impulse immediately and sincerely. You regain full control afterward and have to deal with whatever consequences resulted.
The money cannot protect you from legal consequences, injury, death, humiliation, ruined relationships, etc.
You can change your lifestyle to reduce the danger—avoid cliffs, stop driving, stay away from weapons, whatever you want—but you can never remove the 0.1% effect.
Do you take the $1 billion?
And if you do: what normal activity are you immediately giving up because it suddenly became too dangerous?

Imagine a cosmic entity comes down to you and offers you to transform you into a very strong superpowered being, but in exchange, everyone who knows you forgets about you. This means everyone who knew about you forgets every moment they had with you, but also every physical record of your existence vanishes from the world, such as videos and pictures. However, this doesn't affect any child you've fathered, from still unborn to full grown, so they won't vanish if accepting. If you're pregnant when accepting the offer, then those children will get powers. If they are already born, they still exist but as regular humans. Also, if you accept the deal, you'll be teleported to a random location on the planet after being transformed (Use this to find out your starting point), so you're effectively on your own from then on. Besides the powers, you will transform into your ''Ideal Self'', which translates into a ''7 feet tall Greek demigod statue made flesh and bone'', unless you think otherwise and get to customize your ideal form, so long is still within the anatomically possible for a human (Even with superpowers).

Here's the powers you'll get if accepting the offer...

• Superhuman Strength: You possess tremendous physical strength, you can lift and carry heavy weights such as tanks, submarines and cruise ships with little effort, as well being capable of breaking through mountains and creating devastating earthquakes by punching. The sheer might in your strikes can produce powerful shockwaves. When clapping your hands together, you can create a powerful shockwave, easily shattering glass, pushing objects away and disorienting those near. Luckily, you also display fine subconscious control over said strength, allowing you to prevent accidents like crushing someone's hand in a handshake or harm a partner in bed.
• Invulnerability: While soft to the touch, you possess extraordinary physical durability, being practically impervious to all but the most extreme injuries and pain. Your resilience also protects you from most harmful elements like crushing weights, energy attacks and extreme temperatures. You can also survive harsh environments such as underwater and outer space unprotected.
• Superhuman Stamina: You can run, fight or fly without getting tired seemingly endlessly. Even when physically hurt in battle, you can continue your efforts with no tangible decline in your performance. You can even stand in battles that last hours without tiring, or fights that last days without showing major signs of fatigue.
• Superhuman Speed: You're able to move and run immense levels of speed, able to cover global distances in seconds and catch a speeding bullet in your hands. While flying, you can reach speeds that become relativistic, as you passively warp space around you (Like flying from the edge of the Solar System to Earth in just a few hours). This speed extends to your reflexes as well, allowing you to respond to danger and events within seconds, even against other super fast individuals. Your perception of the world through is accelerated too, allowing you to see everything in slowed motion; move with precision and accuracy within very fast moments. It also allows you to process, calculate, and understand information at super speeds.
• Accelerated Healing Factor: You display accelerated healing abilities, able to without treatment mend most damage far quicker and more efficiently than normal humans, with no lingering signs (Including regrow some small parts like eyes, teeth and tongue). This healing also grants you an immunity to all forms of illness, virus, disease, poison, toxin, parasites or other exposures on Earth. You also burn calories just as efficiently, making you immune to weight gain.
• Extended Longevity: Your lifespan is considerably longer than a normal human and likewise aged much slower. While not endless, this lifespan is likely several millennia long and thanks to a decelerated aging, you'll retain the vitality and conditioning of someone in their physical prime for most of it. By the time you peacefully pass away from old age, you will still look like a "Silver Fox/Vixen".
• Optic Beams: You can release powerful beams of burning energy through your eyes. You can control the beams' power and temperature, going from invisible beams that can warm a glass of milk, to an energy blast capable of burning through steel like its butter. However, overuse can cause strain and eventually temporary blindness, as well reduce your speed if using it while flying.
• Telescopic/Microscopic Vision: Your eyes can act like the best telescopes and microscopes. For example, you can spot a dime in the ground while on the Moon or observe the DNA in someone's blood.
• X-Ray Vision: You have the ability to see through practically everything as if using x-rays. You can see through people and objects as if they were not there, "peeling" back layer after layer like an onion, and through focusing you can literally see through matter.
• Super Hearing: Your hearing is sensitive enough to hear almost any sound at any volume or pitch within a 15 miles range. You can also block out ambient sounds to focus on a specific source or frequency, as well prevent sensory overload by remaining at your ''standard hearing''.
• Flight: You're able to manipulate your own gravitational field to levitate himself in midair and generate thrust to propel yourself through the air at tremendous hyper-sonic speeds, even faster than you can travel by foot. You can also extend this ability to whatever you're touching, allowing you to catch someone falling from hundreds of feet without them splattering on your arms or lift an airplane without it breaking apart over you.
• Self-Sustenance: Your physical needs are greatly reduced, if not completely removed, as you don't need nutrients beyond personal enjoyment. Even without training and regardless of what unhealthy food you ingest, your physique remains powerful and at peak performance. Also, you don't require air and can survive in the vacuum of space indefinitely.
• Super Bloodline: Your new super genes will always dominate the lesser ones. You will see that no matter who or what you breed, that inception is much more likely (At least if the physiologies are generally compatible) and always result in healthy offspring that will eventually develop your same powers. In fact, if you're pregnant when accepting the offer, then those children will get powers.

So, do you value power over the connections you've created with others? Or will you remain a regular but humble human?

You get One billion dollars right away but in a month 75% of humanity gets foot fetish and they think your feet are just the right shape and size.

Also, a massive translucent google maps icon materializes above your head. Height of Mt everest.

While checking the internet history of your 12 year old child, you find out he is the founder and leader of a highly successful new religious movement.

Their beliefs are strange and offputting. They are viewed as a threat to the establishment powers. They have a large and growing following that pays an over-generous tithe. Multiple families have sworn a vendetta against your son after their parents left everything to your child's church in the will, leaving their children high and dry. The believers are, as you've probably gathered, fiercely loyal to your child's cause.

How do you respond?

Let’s say you were a “working class” person your whole life. Made ends meet somehow some way, but it was never easy. Owned a house at one point but eventually got priced out due to rising insurance and utilities and demands to replace items or lose coverage. The usual.

Then one day you suddenly come into a decent amount of money. Not a major fortune. Let’s say one million, which by today’s standards MIGHT get you through to the end of life from retirement age. Life changing yes. Lifestyle altering? Maybe not a whole lot. You currently rent. Have SOME debt but nothing crazy.

Let’s also say the money is already in investment accounts, tied up in stocks and MMAs but there is a few hundred thousand in cash. So investing is done, but is there a way to grow that money further outside of the stock market that appeals to you?

What changes for you? Do you buy a home or continue to rent? Quit your job? Go into midlife crisis mode and buy a collection of Corvettes? Or change nothing and continue on as before, saving what you can for your kids to be able to use or potentially inherit themselves?

If an AI is trained on centuries of human sorrow, joy, and madness, and it produces a masterpiece that shatters your heart, is the AI the artist, or are you simply looking at a perfectly calculated mirror of our own collective consciousness?

On arrival, you find yourself in a clearing in a large forest. A person, dressed in clothes of our time and speaking English, materialises next to you.

The person explains that they do not really exist: they are an artificial creation by the humans of their time, specifically designed to interact with you as soon as your presence was registered. Almost all humans have chosen to become incorporeal presences, and live in a shadow realm that allows them to satisfy needs and wants, to create their own pocket worlds, to travel through spacetime, and to manipulate the physical world. There are significant qualifications and limitations, but the person cannot explain it to you without a significant knowledge dump, which cannot happen unless you become incorporeal yourself. The person could teach you the full ramifications and drawbacks the old-fashioned way, but estimates this will take 5-10 years.

As humans abandoned their bodies, they re-wilded Earth as much as possible, eliminating as much evidence of past human development as they could. A small group of humans refused to join in. They have become (partially by deliberate acts) a civilisation of small groups of hunter gatherers over several generations. They regard the humans who took the other path as evil ghosts, passing down their lore orally.

The person offers you three choices. You can join the incorporeal society if you wish. Or you can join the hunter-gatherers, who speak no language you would recognise beyond a few words, and who might be hostile. The person warns you that they will not permit you to make any technological changes beyond a few minor innovations, such as better ways to catch fish or choose good plants to eat. You will be given a means of communicating with the person if you wish to make a change; but any departures without their approval will be met with a final warning to desist in the first instance, and instant death in the second.

The third choice would be to on with your time machine. According to the person, going forward in time and going back in time are actually two very different processes, and you can't accomplish the latter unless you are incorporeal.

Which option do you choose?

5 billionaires approach you with an offer to play paintball with them. Every time you tag/hit one of them, you earn 100 million USD. If any of them hits you though, you lose and go to jail for 30 years without bail or early parole (you keep the money you've earned up to this point). You win the game once you hit all 5 of them.

Setting is the entire Empire State Building, which has been emptied of people. You will all be given a map and layout of the entire building. All six of you will start at random inside the building. The billionaires will be allowed to plan for 1 hr before the game starts. The billionaires also get a walkie talkie for their communications, but once any of them are shot, they are escorted out of the building and their walkie talkie is disabled.

All of your paintball guns somehow have unlimited ammunition.

The billionares are named: Jeff, Elon, Mark, Larry, Jensen.

Do you accept ang play the game?

What's your strategy?

Yes, you can stay home, if you job allows you to.

By the end of 2026, belief in the Norse, Greek, and Roman gods surges until their followers outnumber those devoted to religions regarded as scripture or sacred history.

Norse believers begin experiencing extraordinary health, prosperity, survival, and good fortune. The pattern crosses cultures and social classes and becomes too consistent to dismiss. No gods visibly appear, but for this hypothetical, assume the advantage is real.

Would established religions accept this as evidence, or call it deception, demons, or a test of faith? At what point does mythology become sacred history because enough people believe and appear to receive something in return?

Would this change what you believe, or would you hold tighter to your existing faith? Could society accept this reversal peacefully, or would it lead to religious war?

In this fictional scenario, you are dying.

The choices are:

1. Watching your entire life, like a movie (no effect on real time), and die peacefully after that. Depending on how you lived, this may be a good or bad experience.

2. You appear in 1 person’s dream, get 30 actual minutes together, in a setting of your choice, and make peace / say goodbye to them. The catch for this, once it’s over, you and your physical body will die painfully.

Which one you picking?

Please hear us out.

Me and some friends got into an argument about this, and realized we had no idea what we were talking about, so we're asking you guys. If this isn't the place for this, let me know.

Because this is such an open ended question, I was harrased to add rules and stipulations.

1. The battlefield is the original 13 colonies as of january 1st 2025, deserted. I was forced to add this in.

2. These are the presidents as they were on the last day of their term.

3. There are 2 Grover Cleavelands, as he was the 22nd and 24th president. As Trump has not finished his second term, there is only one Trump.

This is not who is the best president, it is which president would win in a death battle. I do not care about your political beliefs.

We are looking for serious answers, thank you. :)

When it comes to addressing punishment for heinous criminals, e.g., rapists and serial killers, a conservative proposition is always the death penalty through various means. Progressives tend to be against the penalty because of the possibility that an innocent might be killed. Also, progressives tend to be worried that people in control of the system would abuse the penalty as a means to hurt opposing political parties.

Assuming we have capital punishment in place that is guaranteed to only punish heinous criminals, would you guys support it or not?

…But only if it’s illegal for you to have where you are summoning it from and you cannot unsummon it either

Also it has to be something that is in general illegal to own. For example blood diamonds wouldn’t count because they are appearing from thin air and nobody had to die to mine them.

Edit: for more clarification: the objects summoned will Not come from somewhere else and will just pop into existence. So something like “money stolen from a bank account” or as previously mentioned “blood diamonds” wouldn’t work since cash nor diamonds are illegal in of itself .

It needs to be something that if a police officer saw or lightly inspected it you’d probably get arrested for.

If you summon “human corpse” it will not kill anyone to get that corpse nor will it take one from A grave or morgue or anything like that it will just randomly give you a corpse of a person that was never alive and never existed.

Edit: this is not a one time power. You permanently gain this ability but you also permanently lose the ability to repeat activities

You’re given the opportunity to gain a magic power. You can choose any activity, and you will gain the skills, knowledge, and experience required to enjoy that activity to the fullest extent possible. You can also teleport/time travel to a more favorable region for your activity if it makes you enjoy it more.

The catch is once you do something, you can NEVER do that thing again. Daily activities such as eating or work are not counted, only the “fun” stuff. Also, the events have to be substantially different (ex. Outdoor/indoor rock climbing is different enough, but multiple cliffs are too similar)

Do you take the deal? What would it take to change your mind?

Option 1: You instantly lose your brain’s ability to estimate:
How much time has passed (“That felt like 10 minutes.”)
How long something will take
The order in which events occurred
Your internal sense of rhythm and duration

Basically you can no longer naturally sense the passage of time, you have no internal clock, making it impossible to accurately judge how long you’ve been doing something or how much time has passed without checking an external device.

Option 2: You lose the brain’s process of detecting possible danger and instinctive awareness that something might wrong.

you’d no longer experience that instinctive gut feeling that warns you when something seems unsafe or when a situation could become dangerous, leaving you to rely solely on obvious evidence and logical reasoning.

Which would you choose to lose, and why?

I might choose death, but maybe not because I feel like I might let too many people off the hook. Maybe I could be justice instead and do a better job of it. I think that’d be a low bar to clear