Freely and with absolutely no expectation of recompense, Bill Gates gives you your $1,000,000,000-in Monopoly Money. Congratulations! You can now buy 40,000 dozen hotels on Boardwalk!
I wish I had Bender, from Futurama, appear through one of Prof. Farnsworth’s portals and become my new best friend.
He does, and immediately kills the first police officer he sees. Since he’s only a robot, you get charged with murder, for programming the robot to kill, and spend the rest of your life catching for Tyrone the Bull Queen of Cell Block C, your new Best Friend.
Granted. The game is now invisible to you when you open the SDMB. Since you can’t see it or choose to click into the thread the game is technically over for you. Even if told the game is continuing without you, you immediately forget what you were just told and get immediately distracted by something shiny.
Since the universe is inherently and unavoidably contradictory, it (and everything in it) now instantly and irrevocably ceases to exist.
On the next incarnation of the universe, I wait eons until I arrive again at this particular point in time and space to put forth my next wish: I want to bring Socrates forth into the present day and give him a bunch of money to run for President of the US.
Done! Socrates shows up, takes your money, and runs for president. He loses in a landslide, thus proving once and for all that a coherent and consistent is detrimental to the electiblilty of a politician.
If, at that point in time and space, Socrates as we know him to be, is a viable candidate for President of the US, you have just corrupted his chances of winning, or even being listened to, but giving him a bunch of money, instead of relying of his intellect and skills at oratory to win over the people.
Done. Socrates, after being showered, shaven and shorn, goes on the stump and and wows the electorate, thus winning by a landslide and then some. Unfortunately, somehow Congress is now a majority of the other party, which limits his power to rule and set mandates, and Socrates doesn’t believe in vetos or signing statements.
I wish I knew how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.
In the spirit of fighting ignorance, you take a great gross of Tootsie Pops, and lick each one until you reach the center, and average the results. Licking 1728 lollipops causes extensive damage to your teeth, which spreads to the rest of your skeleton. You die before you complete the research. The world will never know.
In the grand Douglas Evansian tradition, you find yourself in an authentic US Army Rangers uniform-50,000 feet above Death Valley, sans parachute. You have precisely 215.867 seconds to contemplate life, the universe and everything before you go splat. Good news is that your carcass helps feed a near-starving family of California Condors, and they eventually become so numerous (chaos theory remember) that by 2800 they’re as commonplace and annoying as pigeons are today.
I wish I had a miniature parachute pack (from the far future) which will allow me to pop the silk whenever a crazed terrorist blows up the plane or building in which I might find myself.
Poof! You’re a fish. You flop around on the top of your desk and your keyboard for several painful minutes before asphyxiating, regretting in the back of your fishy little brain that you hadn’t wished for a tank of water, too.