I recently started a similar thread but with a little more restricted ground rules:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=637357&highlight=weakly+godlike
As described in that thread, basically I would be a benign and contactable but very much hands-off godlike entity only intervening directly in the event of an imminent existential threat to humanity.
Act one - remove drastic_quench and his/her ilk before they can they can put their own genocidal plans into effect… 
It’d be interesting if 2 people got this power at the same time. Would they become aware of each other? Try to destroy each other? It’d be like Voldemort vs. Voldemort!
Then resurrect Kim Jong-Il and go “In your FACE, Fat Boy!”
I support those with genocidal plans.
All evidence suggests that Earth is rare in its ability to sustain life. Any other similar planets are likely to be impossible distances away. So we better not screw up this one. Killing ourselves would be forgivable compared to the alternatives of taking down half the ecosystem with us. We have tried to reduce our carbon footprints but there’s only so much we can do when there’s just too darn many feet. Right now, about 2 people die every second and 5 babies are born to replace them.
Assuming that my powers were limited only to this planet, my first act as god would be to simultaneously reduce the birth rate and increase the death rate, each by a factor of 10, until the human population dropped below 300 million. The deaths would be random and I wouldn’t exempt myself. It would only take about 30 years to reach 300 million, then I’d have the rates level off so the birth rate equals the death rate.
If my powers extended to the whole universe, I’d make sure the planets which can sustain life are really really far apart and arrange the laws of physics so that it’s absolutely impossible to travel faster than a certain speed limit to prevent contamination from one habitable planet to the others. Oh wait, it looks like someone already did that. Good job, dude.
If my powers included the ability to create alternate dimensions, I’d speed up the population adjustment by making the rapture actually come true and send all the people who wish for it to a magical place called heaven where they have to wear white robes and play the harp all day. But I’d be merciful and allow them to kill themselves when they got sick of the place.
But one thing I’ve learned from stories like The Monkey’s Paw is that whatever you wish for it always turns out worse than if you’d never done anything at all, so maybe I’d just wish for my own powers to be taken away and never given to anyone else.
I think it wouldn’t go well for the rest of us… :eek:
For a somewhat similar scenario the short story ‘Understand’ by Ted Chiang is well worth a read.
For an entity with such powers as postulated there is absolutely no need to resort to such measures as killing off all or even a percentage of humanity in order to ‘protect the planet’. How about creating planets elsewhere in the universe (or multiverse) and make it easy and desirable for people to emigrate to them for example?
Unless you think humanity and humans are a problem in and of themselves and enjoy the whole genocide thing. In which case I think you’d go into the class of malign minor diety.
I’d cause ghosts to suddenly become real at random times, phasing back into inexistence the rest of the time. That should provide me with extremely amusing television.
Education, I would find a way to educate the entire effing planet, critical thinking, understanding of math/statistics/odds create a single language with no exceptions to any rules.
the reason for the education? give a man a fish and he will never stop bugging you for fish, give him the skills and mental capacity to figure it out and problems get solved.
and children will remain uninfluenced by their parents religious/political beliefs until 18 and old enough to make up their own minds.
give humans the ability to give “get it” (Dr. Drew) as in you can walk up to an addict and take their hand and they will understand how they look to others and what their life could be like if they cleaned up
To be fair, my genocide would be the friendliest one ever. All but 250 million would be painlessly blinked out of existence. Then I’d broadcast a message in the skies about how humans had become poor stewards of the earth, and warn them to keep their numbers in check and live environmentally conscious lives or - unlike that other god who supposedly brought a genocide to man - I WOULD do it again. Take care of your planet. Value the scientific method over your spirituality. And don’t you dare worship me. I’ll be busy fishing and canoeing the lakes and rivers as they replenish themselves.
Also, I’ll probably bring back some ice age charismatic megafauna like saber tooth tigers and aurochs just to make the wilds more dangerous again.
So my tenure as god would be marked by big acts, and then letting the chips fall where they may, ie, giving humanity huge challenges to overcome rather then handing them a new Eden.
Remember the password to the Truecrypt external hard drive where I backed up some of my files, or failing that resurrect the drive that crashed of which the ext. hdd was the back up.
You’re still killing several billion people, which is anything but ‘friendly’, its also completely unneccessary. If you don’t want to go for any large shows of power you could simply have everyone on the planet realise and understand what damage humanity is doing to the environment and the necessity to make plans for the future, if you weren’t concerned about free will you could compel humanity to make such plans. Personally I wouldn’t be happy about the latter option but it still beats killing on a scale which makes Hitler, Mao and Stalin look like rank amateurs.
Also I want to see how far humanity can progress and that means hopefully getting off this one planet and out into the stars, plans like yours would mean stasis and stagnation and the end of progress (which admittadly has many drawbacks as well as advantages).
But then I like humans and humanity, you apparently don’t.
I’d create a ringworld around the Sun, one thick enough to have natural self sustaining geology, command that no meteors or comets will strike it, and then without damaging anything flatten the Earth out and paste it onto the ringworld. Just to be nice I’ll also create a magic zone of zero-gravity above the atmosphere so our satellites don’t fall and to make leaving the surface easier. I’ll also create a few other concentrically arranged ringworlds besides ours of slightly larger or smaller size, titled at an angle relative to ours so they don’t block the sun. And I’ll make the outsides habitable too; kept warm by small artificial “suns”.
Sounds like a good way of driving humanity insane. I have this image of billions of people desperately trying to have children, then when it looks like humanity is going to perish (and that is exactly what it will look like), you’ll have people trying to kill themselves and just not dying from gunshot wounds or poison or high falls if that would raise the death rate above the mandated level. You’ll see a resurgence of religious zealotry, and once the minimum population is reached a major increase in war since it can’t actually increase the death rate. Nor does it protect the environment; once humanity is down to that 300 million population you’ve mandated, they could kill every other living thing on Earth and it wouldn’t kill them. Once they figure that out you’ll see a massive disregard for the environment.
I love how you’ve linked 5. Weapons to 3. Unwanted children.
Humiliate and neutralise all religious leaders, starting with the malevolent ones.
Initiate a few plagues, making it clear that they are meant as examples. Document the results on a divine Web site. Examples :
The Free-Market Plague: Take a well-known but small market-driven country and turn their government off entirely. This should settle the issue once and for all, with reasonable loss of life.
The Literal Scriptures Plague: Take a well-known but small, mostly Christian country and smite everyone who doesn’t follow the bible to the letter. For every victim, there will be a clear explanation on the Web site. After a few weeks, the resulting human-free zone can be recycled into a park.
The Pollution Plague: Take a small, industrial country (with a diversified agriculture), and close off its land, atmosphere and waterways, so that it has to live with its own waste.
The Alternative-Medicine Plague: Take a small, reasonably wealthy country and prevent anyone from practicing Western medicine beyond the level of, say, Europe in 1750. But allow all the “alternative medicine” approaches to be used.
Of course, it’s difficult for a god – the living proof of the supernatural – to make people believe in rational thought and science.
Oh, come on. Maybe I just *really *hate crowds.
So you’d go around banging hot chicks disguised as an animal?
I’d clone myself inifintely, I’d have telekenesis and telepathy and EVERY LAST TIME somebody tried to shoot some, hit someone, rape someone, or otherwise do violence to them, I’d appear out of thin air before they could do it and I would beat the living shit out of them, and then vanish. I’d also use my powers to cook nice meals for everyone on earth, and use the same powers to keep family sizes down.
Should be interesting! No war, no rape, no honor killings, no violence of any kind.
I’d probably just painlessly kill psychopaths who simply cannot not kill and/or torture people.
Oh, yeah, free rides to anywhere in the universe for whoever wants one.
First, I’d relieve everyone in the world of the delusion that there is a god.
Next, I’d sit back and enjoy the resulting peace and quiet.
Well, I’m not a fan of crowds either, but I think carpet-bombing them as a consequence is a little extreme.