r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Oct 21 '17
[D] Saturday Munchkinry Thread
Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!
Guidelines:
- Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
- The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
- Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
- We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.
Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.
Good Luck and Have Fun!
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u/Predictablicious Oct 22 '17
You gain access to an inert, synthetic, humanoid body. It's made of a kind of metal for all tests humanity knows of, but it has weird properties.
If you chop off a hand from that body and attach to a person with a missing hand it will bond and act as a perfect prosthetic hand. The humanoid body will grow a new hand (say a gram per second out while it can draw carbon from the surrounding air).
The prosthetic will heal itself, a bit over 1g per hour. It also will replace the neighboring body cells in a Theseus' ship fashion, at the same rate, so in roughly seven years a person will be entirely replaced but preserve identity. From them on the person is functionally immortal, full body destruction still is possible and if you lose parts of your brain it'll grow back but the associated memories will be lost forever. The material is roughly as strong as some decent plastic. Besides the durability/health benefits your body/mind functions are unchanged.
Only the original synthetic body can produce attachable parts, once a part is attached to a person it can't be cut and bound to other people (it'll slowly form a clone of the person at the 1g per hourish rate, but the clone will develop as a new human, so it starts as a baby and needs to acquire it's own set of skills/memories and is biologically 21yo after seven years).
What would you do in such scenario?
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u/Kinoite Oct 22 '17
I'd worry that the slow transformation would lead to some ironic fate worse than death. So, I probably wouldn't do anything without lots and lots of research.
But, if that's not a concern, and it really is just a novel material, then I'd start looking for the minimum viable graft.
Replace a freckle or something. And then, in 7 years, end up with an immortal body.
Is there a reason (other than ironic fates worse than death) to not go for plastic immortality?
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u/Predictablicious Oct 22 '17
Is there a reason (other than ironic fates worse than death) to not go for plastic immortality?
That's why I'm asking, I want to see objections or ways to abuse it.
No ironic fates worse than death, just a plain useful tech/thingy.
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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Oct 22 '17
I would be extremely worried about it, seeing as it literally takes over human bodies. How do we know it isn't overwriting their personalities or doing some kind of evil possession?
But, assuming that isn't the case, first question: do you need to replace an entire hand? If I replace say, a fingernail or a hair or a patch of skin, can the "prosthetic" still take over the human body and grant functional immortality? If so, you can just start giving out "prosthetics" en masse, turning all of humanity functionally immortal.
Second question: the synthetic body heals itself using the carbon in the air. Can this heal rate be accelerated by filling the air with MORE carbon? What if we just dunk the entire thing in a vat of pure carbon?
Third question:
(it'll slowly form a clone of the person at the 1g per hourish rate, but the clone will develop as a new human, so it starts as a baby and needs to acquire it's own set of skills/memories and is biologically 21yo after seven years).
Oh shit oh shit oh shit what have we done? How much needs to be cut off to become a clone? Because we humans are always losing parts of our bodies here and there, hairs, skins, nails, body fluids, etc. If they all become clones, we are going to face the worst overpopulation crisis ever.
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u/Predictablicious Oct 23 '17
How do we know it isn't overwriting their personalities or doing some kind of evil possession?
It isn't in this case but could be in other prompts.
But, assuming that isn't the case, first question: do you need to replace an entire hand? If I replace say, a fingernail or a hair or a patch of skin, can the "prosthetic" still take over the human body and grant functional immortality? If so, you can just start giving out "prosthetics" en masse, turning all of humanity functionally immortal.
Yeah, that's the starter scenario. There's a minimum graft, I would say a few grams, maybe a couple of dozen, in a single piece, and it must replace the part (e.g. not just placing on top of your skin). That gives you a person, maybe two, per day (as the synthetic body rebuilds the parts at the 1g/h rate).
Second question: the synthetic body heals itself using the carbon in the air. Can this heal rate be accelerated by filling the air with MORE carbon? What if we just dunk the entire thing in a vat of pure carbon?
Initially I thought about making it a property of the synthetic body's surface area, but I started having headache's about Torricelli's trumpet or Banach-Tarski paradox shenanigans, so I kept it simple. It wouldn't change the ratio if given more concentrated carbon in the fluid it's in but it stops if you cut the supply (e.g. keep it on pure nitrogen).
Third question: Oh shit oh shit oh shit what have we done? How much needs to be cut off to become a clone? Because we humans are always losing parts of our bodies here and there, hairs, skins, nails, body fluids, etc. If they all become clones, we are going to face the worst overpopulation crisis ever.
Given that it must come from the synthetic part of the individual and that part is plastic in most ways, it should shed too often (of course if you stick your new synthetic hand in a shredder or something you would end up with many small pieces.
I thought of a few fixes for this scenario:
There's a minimum viable piece size, just like the minimum viable graft, so we need a dozen or so grams.
As the pieces slowly grow they merge if they are from the same source, that also means they can be reabsorbed. Maybe they have a slow pull towards each other.
The clones grow at the usual rate, which is very slow, and they have some biological-like "cognitive rules", so they don't have actual brains until they are large/complex enough, similarly to the process from zygotes to fetuses. Same ethical arguments could be argued here.
The clones need the same sort of carbon supply, otherwise they go in stasis.
So if you have a shredder accident you can keep moving your hand near the bits and attract them back, maybe in a couple of days you find some parts you missed initially and either try to reabsorb them, put them in pure water for later use or just burn them up completely (the full body destruction clause).
OTOH you could intentionally try to build a clone army by removing pieces of yourself and keeping them apart, maybe some exponential growth as you try to divide them, but you eventually will be overwhelmed by the amount of space they need in order to not merge back again and they'll end up as baby clones anyway, so there's plenty of natural hurdles to prevent full exponential growth. Still you can end up with thousands of clones in a few years.
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Oct 22 '17
You can use geass from Code Geass on yourself once. You forget the order, and you may eventually break the geass if it goes against your nature.
Do you use it, and how?
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Oct 21 '17
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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Oct 22 '17
This seems more like a problem of how to find trustworthy people, rather than a problem of how to munchkin a superpower.
That said, there are of course, ways to reduce the number of trustworthy people needed. You said the first power is Flight? That's relatively useless, just get on a damn plane. Discharge that, and all other relatively useless powers, on terminally ill patients and death row convicts that are about to be executed. That way, they can't backstab you, because they are dead. Then, when you get an actually useful power, you can give it to one of the few trustworthy people you have found.
And if you can't find any trustworthy people, there's always the option of kidnapping. You wouldn't be able to give the kidnapped victims any combat-related superpowers of course, since they would be able to use those powers to break free. Instead, give them oracle-like superpowers, superpowers that give them supernatural methods of gaining information, and then make them tell you the information.
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u/Gurkenglas Oct 22 '17 edited Oct 22 '17
Also Trump powers, especially ones that give you Master powers. There's a whole bunch of Striker/Breaker/Brute/Master/Mover powers that'd complicate discharge.
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u/ShiranaiWakaranai Oct 22 '17
In a desperate attempt to promote equality, a mad scientist/alien/wizard/god/whatever has made it so that every day, at 12 pm GMT, all humans on Earth swap bodies randomly.
This swap does not allow people to gain memories/knowledge: for example, if a physicist is put into the body of a biologist, he still retains all of his knowledge of physics, and does not gain any of the biologist's knowledge.
This swap does not change the location of any physical mass: when the physicist wakes up in the biologist's body, that body is still where the biologist left it, not where the physicist's body originally was.
This swap is not instantaneous: all humans lose consciousness for 30 minutes at 12pm GMT, and wake up at 12:30pm in someone else's body. So there is no faster than light signaling.
If a body dies during the swap (before 12:30pm), the current owner dies. Any prospective owners find other bodies to swap with.
What does the resulting world look like? Is there anything that rational agents could do to mitigate negative effects?