Three Wishes

In My Humble Opinion
1

If you could have three wishes, excluding only wishing for more wishes, what would you wish for?
I would wish for:
[ul]
[li]omnipotence (which, if granted, would negate the need for more wishes)[/li][li]omniscience (to have the wisdom to use the omnipotence)[/li][li] immortality[/li][/ul]

2

Good to see someone aiming high! Might as well be GOD, eh?

I would wish for:

A really good tuna salad sandwich
Some really good lemonade to go with it
4.2 million dollars

That should just about cover it.

3

I think we need basic Aladdin-style groundrules.

Rule 1: No wishing for anything that would effectively give you more wishes, e.g. more wishes themselves or Godlike omnipotence.

Rule 2: While your wish may require that the basic laws of the universe be suspended to execute the wish (e.g. the creation of matter to produce the suitcase full of money you wish for, or wishing for a guarantee that you will live a healthy life until age 90) your wish cannot permanently alter the basic laws of the universe themselves.

Rule 3: To make it interesting, your wish cannot alter in any way the basic free will of any other living creature, nor give you the power to rob them of that free will (although reading their minds to divine their intentions is okay.)

So I would wish for:

  1. Long and healthy lives for myself and all my loved ones. Hopefully that’s one wish.

  2. To immediately and legally come into the possession of one billion dollars in a manner that does not rob the money from anyone else.

  3. For the welfare of all human beings to substantially improve to the point where all nations are at peace and everyone enjoys a decent standard of living.

4

I think basic overused-literary device rules would demand
that this last wish be fulfilled by killing everyone on
Earth but you.

5

Oh goodie! I’ve been thinking about this for a while!

[ul]
[li]About 20 points higher IQ. I don’t need to be a rocket scientist, but a little smarter would be nice.[/li][li]Better will-power and determination. This would be to be able to write those essays before the days before they’re due, and (oh, I really need this) being able to stick to a diet and exercise plan. And that would also enable me to save up some money for unexpected expenses.[/li][li]Health and happiness to my loved ones.[/li][/ul]
You know, the sad part is, that sometimes I think that a genie will appear and actually grant me these wishes…

6

The best approach I’ve found to it is by John Crowley, from his novel Aegypt.

The main character in the novel is an historian, who spends his idle time formulating three wishes, which would bypass the traps built into the whole three-wishes mythology.

It goes something like this, IIRC…

  1. Lifelong health and happiness for myself and all my loved ones, not to be abrogated by the content of the next wishes.

  2. A reasonable, specific source of a liveable income, with a built-in explanation. Like the lottery with the annuity option.

But he gets stuck on number three. The obvious answer is love, but he concludes that a huge part of love is the knowledge that you are chosen, that someone beautiful has chosen you to be their lover. He likens it to the feeling of having a hawk drop out of the sky to land on your arm. Have I mentioned that Mr. Crowley is my favorite author?

He runs through a list of possibilities, and then comes to the realization that in the course of making the first two wishes, he has effectively devalued his own life. From the point where he made those wishes, he would never again know if anything he accomplished was his fault, his responsibility, his achievement, or if it was the wishes working for him.

So, he figured out what the third one should be.

  1. I want to forget I ever made these wishes.

And once you know this formula, you’re never again sure whether you might have already had three wishes to make. Did the genie pop out of the Aunt Jemima bottle this morning? Did that trout you caught on your fishing trip last fall make a deal for its life?

Have I mentioned John Crowley kicks ass?

7

That’s a problem I’d like to have.

8

#1) [Dr. Evil]
ONE HUNDRED BEELION DOLLARS!
[/Dr. Evil]

#2) The ability to render myself invisible.

#3) The ability to learn things instantly (to play the banjo, to speak Spanish, etc.).

9
  1. A long, healthy, happy life for myself and family.
  2. A comfortable, worry-free financial situation.
  3. The Red Sox to win the World Series just once before that long, healthy, happy life of mine ends.
10

My favorite cyberpunk author, Rudy Rucker, wrote several books with the Three Wishes theme, the best one is “Masters of Space and Time.” Alas it is out of print, and he said that due to a dispute with the publisher, he cannot get his copyrights back and the publisher promised the books will never ever be seen again. So since you will never see this book, I will give a spoiler.
In the book, the 3 protagonists discover a convoluted physics trick to become omnipotent long enough to grant one wish. Except that it will only work 3 times, and only once per person. The first two wishes are predictably disastrous. The third and final wish allows the other two people to undo their wish, and is one of the most wonderful, optimistic, faith-in-humanity pieces of writing I’ve ever seen:

I wish that everyone on earth gets one wish

Earth becomes a bizzare land of raining fish, chimera, big fast cars, and the whole gamut of human desires.

But alas, Rudy has aged and his latest novels are darker. In his most recent novel, Freeware, an alien species starts handing out “allah” machines that can grant almost any material wish. It is a disaster. Quite opposite from the earlier works’ faith in human nature.

11

Ha… there’s a Stanislav Lem SF story like that. On a distant planet, an advanced robot civilization builds a computerized machine to develop a way to perfect their world. They program it with the instructions to create a society of perfect order, in an aesthetically pleasing manner. It succeeds, and begins its plan. The machine rounds up everyone, crushes them into little discs, and arranges them in aesthetically pleasing patterns across the face of the planet.

12

  1. Enough money so I can do what I want, without having to work. If I choose to work, great, but to have a job that I could quit anytime I got the urge to travel somewhere, or do something new or whatever.

  2. To really see what it was like living in the year 1745, or in the time when the American west was settled. I know I have a very romantic view of it (it’s those darn historical romance novels) but I still think it’d be neat.

  3. A mind that works a bit faster sometimes. I know I’m smart, but I don’t always think well on my feet. I guess this would mean a bit more creativity. Not huge amounts, because I like my life, but a little bit.

13

1 explosive diaharrea

2 some good old ass polish

3 a papercut

14

[Homer Simpson]“And I don’t want any zombie tuna…I don’t want to turn into a tuna myself…and I don’t want any other weird stuff happening!”[/Homer Simpson]

15

Penn and Teller handled this pretty well. They say that your first wish should be for the genie to tell you whatever information you request in a completely honest, non-deceptive, useful way. Then you ask the genie what you should use your two remaining wishes for so that you receive the most positive possible outcome. This is not a wish itself, simply a request which must be granted by virtue of the first wish. You then ask for the two wishes that the genie tells you you should wish for, knowing that the outcomes will indeed be as positive as the genie promised, because you have forced him to be honest with you.

16

  1. I would wish for Jedi like powers (move shit, jump 30 feet). I think it would be cool to pick up cars with my mind.

  2. I think the downloadable Lucy Lui idea from Futurama was pretty cool. (Basically, you can download a copy of a celebrity into a “blank robot” so you can make out with it, etc).

  3. Open. It will probably be used to set everything back to normal.

17

  1. Limited immortality: I won’t age unless I want to, I won’t die of injury or disease unless I choose it, and I will heal quickly and perfectly. I don’t think I would want permanant, unrevokable immortality. But I’d like to be able to choose when I go, and not be forced to before I’m ready. This wish is aimed towards that goal.

  2. An endless supply of interesting, challenging, enjoyable and well-paying jobs. I don’t want free money - I enjoy working for my pay. And I enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes with doing real things. Plus I’m the kind of person who would probably get bored without a job in the very long term.

I tack on the “enjoyable and well-paying” part to guard against possible malice on the genie’s part. Say, being the person in charge of the Nazi’s concentration camps or similiar. I guess I should add “non-fatal, and if injurious, only slighty” to the list as well. (Although injuries - apart from the pain inflicted - aren’t a terrible worry because of the first wish.)
3. And for my last wish? I don’t know. The first two wishes pretty much ensure I’ll be healthy and have enough money to be comfortable (thought hopefully not fat and lazy) literally forever. It would then be up to me to decide what I was going to do with my life.

I could use this wish to wish for true love, or eternal happiness, but I think I can take care of those myself given immortality. Wishing for that kind of stuff also has the problem of feeling like everything in your life has been handed to you on a silver platter, and you never earned anything or worked for anything, which would likely drive me insane after several millenia.

I think I’d probably go for some kind of offhand silly thing for this wish, like a million bucks, a Ferrari, high intelligence, clarivoyance/precognition/telekenesis/the force, the ability to fly/teleport, super-strength or other superhero like powers, the ability to time-travel, shape-change, etc, etc, etc…

Since this wish is mostly just for fun, the possibilities are pretty much endless. A fun ability that occurs to me off the top of my head would be the ability to build any piece of technology you could imagine, whether it was real or imaginary. Want a light-saber? Build it! Want a Starfleet shuttle complete with warp engines? Build it! (It’ll take you a while, but what the heck - you’re immortal as long as you want to be.) Want an F15? Build it!

Another fun thing to wish for here would simply be “good luck.” This is a highly intangible benefit that might turn out to be a lot of fun in the real world, since luck by its nature is unpredictable and you’d never be quite sure what interesting or happy thing would happen to you next.

      -Ben
18

You can’t fool me! I saw that X-Files Episode. :slight_smile:

19

Two of these are my same wishes from when I was 12 years old:

  1. To be able to speak and understand every language in the world.

  2. To have a good singing voice.

My third used to be to have a Star Trek-style transporter,
but I’ve updated:

  1. That my children grow up with less anguish to the various parties than my parent’s children have done.
20

Does anyone remember that ABC Weekend Special where a kid wished for all the money in the world? It turned out not to be such a great deal when he realized that the granting of his wish undermined the worldwide economic system, though as I recall, somehow the predicament was fixed by the time the show was over.