Inspired by Mean_Mr.Mustard’s Frozen Hypothetical.
This one is clearly backed by magic. Do not worry about the (im)possibility of creating whatever you pick. No nitpicking over where you get the necessary matter/energy. On the other hand, you probably should think about what effect your production will have on the Real World.
So, some Genie appears to you and announces you have been picked to be the Grand Price winner in the Genie Lottery, This means you will become a Golden Goose, able to cause something to appear near you. As in, Poof! There’s a BMW. Poof! There’s a ten pound heap of flawless 1 carat diamonds. Poof! There’s a Gutenberg Bible. No unpleasant emerging from bodily openings involved, it’s just there. Maybe there’ll be a little puff of smoke, and crash of cymbals, and a few sparkles for the amusement of any onlookers.
The Rules:
You need to touch a real Example of whatever you want to produce in order to form a mental pattern. You will ‘use’ this pattern to create an exact atom-by-atom replica of it whenever you choose. So if you created a pattern of the Mona Lisa, it will include any damages/repairs/security markings that were there at the instant you touched it. If the Louvre later decides they need to add an additional marking to show that theirs is THE Mona Lisa, that change will not appear in any of the copies you produce.
This means you can’t choose something that doesn’t exist for you to touch. No “a pill that cures any disease,” no living Stegasaurus, no working time machine, no “the complete Library of Alexandria as it was before it was burned,” no “world peace, love and happiness for all mankind.”
The pattern cannot be changed. Whatever you pick, that’s the only thing you will ever be able to magic into existence. If you choose “a two scoop Rocky Road ice cream cone,” that’s what you’ll always make. Too bad if you decide later on that you’d really prefer Maple Walnut.
OTOH, there’s no reason your ‘thing’ couldn’t be “a fully loaded semitrailer of assorted ice cream flavors leaving the Ben & Jerry production plant on the way to some grocery chain warehouse.”
3, Your Pattern can be any size or nature or complexity. It could be one living cell of algae or grain of sand, it could be a fully grown blue whale or the Great Pyramid or a complete working nuclear power plant.
You can make as many of your product as you want, but it has to be the complete version of what you picked each time. As in, if you chose a carton of a dozen extra large chicken eggs, that is what you produce. If you only want two eggs right then? Well, make the dozen appear and take two out of the carton. OTOH you can make that dozen eggs as many times as you want, four or forty or forty thousand – as long as the boredom of doing the same thing over and over doesn’t doesn’t stop you.
You must use your ability at least once each 24 hours you live or it goes away forever. (Expressed that way to ward off quibbling about time zones/date lines.)
Your product will appear in reasonable proximity to you. As in, sitting on the ground at your feet if a smallish thing, or maybe a few hundred yards away if you picked that Great Pyramid.
Unfortunately this means you can’t decide to end world hunger by making a one pound bag of rice appear beside each living human every day. You CAN make 8 billion pounds of rice appear (maybe make your example an oil tanker filled with the rice and crank out copies like mad?) but they’ll all be appearing at your location, and getting them spread around to everyone will be a major hassle to work out.
Any legal snags that result – income taxes, copyright violations, illegal substances, etc. are your problem. There are no Genie lawyers.
So, what do you pick? (I’ve been mulling for a while, and settled on an answer, but I’ll wait a bit so as not to influence others.)
Oh, btw, the Genie is slightly reasonable. You don’t have to answer it off the top of your head When you’ve made your choice, just travel to wherever you need to be to touch a sample, snap your fingers three times, and he’ll show up to witness what you touch and implant the pattern and ability into your mind.
Granted that the template object has to actually exist, but is there any special provision for me to gain access to it? Like, there are places where one might find a one-kilogram sample of pure plutonium, but I don’t have the clearance to go any of those places myself.
Also, if I pick “the Earth” as my object, how “reasonably close” will the copies appear?
Ooh, good one. You could create a “planet B”, do it a could of times, and then stop. We could have someplace to colonize that’s friendly to human life.
Unless it was already populated with copies of all of us…
A twist on the scenario, especially since the genie is slightly reasonable, is that given a sufficiently credulous, curious, or otherwise gambling co-conspirator, you could convince an investor, or governmental agency to assist you in gaining access to something otherwise beyond your personal reach. Then you summon the genie, and are able to replicate said item.
It would absolutely restrict your freedom, but may well insulate you from the legal snags depending upon your sponsor.
I have several ideas, but I’m choosing not to answer. Mostly because this scenario once again boils down to picking a solution that benefits you, or the world (sometimes both) and for the moment I’m tired of making that choice. Not a complaint, just personally tired of making fairy-tale ethical decisions of consequence when I personally have so little power IRL to fix even the smallest thing (still voting though!).
Find a large, good-quality mammoth or mastodon tusk. Have it x-rayed to make sure it doesn’t have any hidden flaws. Then make ivory so plentiful and so cheap that elephant poaching becomes unprofitable.
Assuming you solve the access problem, don’t go wild, eh? Apparently critical mass for plutonium is only a bit over 24 pounds. It’d suck to have a new crater wherever you hang out, wouldn’t it?
Hmm. I hadn’t thought on that large a level. Well, the rules said the new object would sit on the ground near you, but far enough away to not immediately smush you under it. So NewEarth appears sitting on the ground, far enough away that the combined curvatures of both planets add up to more than your height, right? But I have no idea at all how to calculate that.
But I think that ‘safe height’ won’t stay that very long, as gravity does its thing to press the two worlds into one body. Would the weight of NewEarth be enough to crack through the crust of OldEarth and NewEarth? And let all that magma come gushing out everywhere? Not to mention the atmospheres of both planets would be forced out from between them right away, leaving you sort of in the eye of a hurricane, maybe. But probably not as calm.
Bzzzt! Bad choice! Thanks for playing, anyway, no departing gifts unfortunately.
And depending on how you worded your request to the Genie, I’ll bet PuzzleGal is right and NewEarth had its own load of 8 billion people. So at 16 billion dead, you’re the Greatest Killer Ever. (No prize for that, either.)
From here: Elephant tusk DNA can expose poaching networks, analysis finds : NPR
“It’s estimated at least 10,000 African elephants are killed each year, with the ivory then packed into shipping containers and transported to ports throughout Africa.”
How much time do you want to spend recreating elephant tusks one at a time?
And permanent residence in some really heavily fortified military base, Also likely a bullet in the brain once you’ve made all the plutonium they think they could ever need. Just can’t take a chance of some villain kidnapping you.
Ah, nice one! Maybe you can’t cure all the world’s ill, but why not settle for fixing one rather than throwing up your hands and saying I give up.
I asked my sister about this earlier today, and she said she’d ask for just $100 in twenties. Endless walking around money, and she would give big tips to everyone who serves her, every beggar who asks, every charitable fund raising effort, on and on. She thinks it’s a small enough amount that it wouldn’t get her into trouble with the IRS (since there would be little record of any of it) and yet make her life more pleasant in small ways and help others as well.
Zapping once per second, in a few hours I could match the production of the illicit trade. Since mammoth ivory is legal, I could auction the tusks publicly. I am confident I could make a dent in the price of the illegal ivory.
Whoops! Okay, how much do those Loonies and Toonies weigh? They’re about the size of quarters, right? A couple of rolls of quarters aren’t painfully heavy in the kind of purse my sister tends to carry. She’ll just have to move to Canada.
I’m assuming (because I’m a D&D player) that each use of the ability takes about six seconds. So you could get an order of magnitude more production just by spending a few minutes per day on it. And your ivory also wouldn’t have any of the costs associated with hiding your poaching from the authorities. It wouldn’t be hard at all to completely tank the market.
Eh, that’s not hard at all to deal with, just space out the samples enough. And the value of plutonium (both monetary and practical) is enough that I wouldn’t even need to make much. I’m not saying that that’s specifically what I’d go for, mind you, just that it’s something to consider.
You’re definitely right that two Earths in contact would get very messy, very quickly, though. Back of the envelope, it’d take maybe a half hour before the whole works was one big molten ball. So let’s not go with that one.
Ooh, I did just think of one tempting possibility: Is a scientific instrument a valid object? Like, one that takes up an entire, very long building? You could get much better science out of the LIGO gravitational wave detectors if there were more of them, with the same design, scattered all over the world (right now, there are two of them, plus a few less-capable but still useful detectors of other designs). And even after I’ve scattered a few dozen of them across all the continents, I could make more just for the scrap value, which would be enough to set me up for life (a lot of steel and aluminum, plus things like the massive sapphire mirrors). And unlike the plutonium, I probably would be able to arrange a visit to one of the originals.
This would require some time to set up, though: I’d need to book my travel to Washington or Louisiana, and then a few weeks of near-constant travel to set up the copies, since I have to make one every day. And even if I’m poofing all of the hardware into existence, some arrangements would need to be made to make the land available, and it’d take some time to find personnel to run them.
I think I would choose 1,000 gallons of fresh, clear, water. Plenty of places would pay me well to come spend a week or so filling up their reservoirs. And spending time near reservoirs is generally very nice scenery. Plus, I could do so much good in the world.
I could also buy land super cheaply and make myself a great farm out of it.
But also, if I wanted to visit some friends back home, 1,000 gallons is easily absorbed by the storm sewers, or a local creek, so no problem with taking a few days off anywhere I might happen to be.
I just hope I don’t accidentally create in my sleep.
I think due to natural radioactivity we have all touched antimatter, so I will say a kilogram of pure antimatter to sell. It is the most valuable resource on Earth and what could go wrong?
My first thought, not especially super-well-considered, is to dupe the most efficient solar panel currently devised–or maybe the most efficient battery, or maybe some combination of the two (like, a solar field). My very incomplete understanding is that batteries and panels both require certain rare minerals, whose extraction results in environmental and human rights abuses. Being able to manufacture them without mining rare earth minerals might remove a bottleneck for widescale renewable energy, and would also not make me a military target in the way that manufacturing uranium would.
Have you ever heard of Helium-3 (3He)? One kilogram of it, in a suitable container, at the flick of a finger? Over and over again? I think that would not be bad.
A concern on some of the large volume (buildings as an example) is the “if you don’t use it every 24 hours” you lose it. Granted, depending on what you’re making, you may be fine to lose the ability after you’ve done the basic improvements, and consumables (especially reasonably disposable ones like @TruCelt’s water, although, 1k gallons a day is probably okay a few times, every single day might become a problem after a while) are probably better than most. But finding a sweet spot is probably harder than we all think.
