After another successful mission for the great goddess Athena …
Ah, screw it. I don’t care about the setup today.
Choose the super-genius option, and you get the full Brainiac 5 package. Eidetic memory for both visual and auditory phenomena, lightning ultra-fast learning; and incredible creativity and inventiveness in whatever field you choose to apply yourself too. Now, please note that this does gift dos NOT instantly give you knowledge you don’t have; you still have to study. But you’ll be able to master calculus in a week, even if you never went beyond high school geometry; in another week, you’ll be able to become sufficiently fluent in Russian to read War & Peace with perfect comprehension in the original, even if you’ve never studied any language but English. And while you won’t necessarily be able to create comic-book style super-inventions, that’s because you’re bound by the laws of real-world physics; you’ll still be able to make great theoretical leaps in a given scientific discipline if you apply yourself, or compose symphonies,or paint masterpieces.
Choose the enhanced healing factor, and you’ll go the Wolverine route rather than Brainiac 5. Now, you don’t get claws or an adamantium skeleton, and you won’t be regenerating your entire body from a single cell,or live hundreds of years. But a sprained ankle or wrist will heal in an afternoon, a broken radius or femur in under a week, and so on. Your immune system is also supercharged, so that practically no disease-causing germ can get a foothold in you–you’ll laugh at both the common cold and Ebola. One downside of this (for some people) is that it will be almost impossible for you to get drunk; it’ll take drinking a case of beer in a sitting to give you a buzz, and if you get up to drain the lizard, the intoxication will wear off in the time it takes you to walk to the bathroom and back.
Super intelligence in a heartbeat. Super healing sounds nice, but with super intelligence you could serve the world by helping to innovate advances in medicine, energy, IT, basic science, etc.
Plus maybe you could find a way to create advanced healing technology if you were super intelligent.
Super intelligence is what I would pick. Of course, with my luck I would realize an instant after I got it that it was a dumb choice, and then I’d be stuck.
I’d definitely go the super-intelligence route. I’m a bit of a coward about pain, and you’d have to be willing to tolerate the hurting in order to get full benefit from super-healing. But Being able to master topics in a week sounds awesome. I’d go first for mastering some topic that can set my family up comfortably (some sort of finance thingy that I’d already know about if I were super-intelligent), and then I’d spend awhile making theoretical advances in fields that were variously Important To Humanity and balls-out fun.
silenus: grin! Most of us here are pretty smart, and most of us here have at least one minor thing wrong with our bodies. Also, some of us are getting up there in age…
But, still, I’d choose the intelligence boost. Most specifically, I’d apply it toward self-aware error-reduction. I’d like to make fewer mistakes! Sure, figuring out new stuff would be fun, but the simple ability to correlate the things I know – and wisely assess the things I don’t know – would bring a huge improvement in my life.
Just little things like remembering not to leave the keys behind when I lock the door…
(One caveat: I’m of the opinion that intelligence is correlated with mental illness, and I suspect that hyper-intelligence would bring about a big boost in neurotic thinking. So I’m going to presume that the benefits proposed in this hypothetical somehow avoid that trap.)
If I had bothered with the usual Athena setup, I’d have specified that the Queen of Olympus, realizing that both Brainy and Wolvie have significant drawbacks as a likely side-effects of their powers (mental instability for the former, a tendency towards berserker rages and amnesia for the latter), had directed Rhymer Enterprises to create the magical potion giving the boons to eliminate said drawbacks, with the result that neither power is quite up to the level of the originals’.
But I didn’t feel like typing all that crap earlier, so y’all can accept or ignore it at your whim.
Yeah, I’d probably go for the super-genius thing. The healing thing won’t make me immortal or anything, and I don’t live that hard a lifestyle that I get injured/sick enough that super healing would be that much of a benefit for me. Laying up a sprained ankle for a week every now and then isn’t that big of a deal in the great scheme of things.
However.
I would wonder if having super intelligence (and as described, it’s super-super intelligence, something that makes Einstein/Hawking et al seem like dunces in comparison) would make life a little bit lonely.
Think about it: Think of the dumbest person you ever met. The sort of person that makes you wonder how they manage the intellectual challenges of breathing. Would you really want to spend too much time around that person?
Now imagine that, in comparison to your new found intellect, that person represents the average intelligence. In your perspective, it would - even someone of above average intelligence would seem a bit boneheaded and simple to you, unable to even grasp more than the most basic concepts of, say, quantum mechanics or string theory. So say goodbye to all those intellectually stimulating conversations you’ve had in the past.
On the other hand, screw 'em - I’ll be too busy breaking the frontiers of science and inventing cool stuff to worry about mere people. If I want intelligent conversation, I’ll build a super-intelligent AI program.
As others have said, going the super-intelligence route opens the possibility of making critical medical advances that could benefit me as much in the long term as the super-healing generally would, and would also benefit lots of other people. In fact, medicine would be one of the first things I’d focus on, and one goal would be maximizing my productive lifespan. In addition to the obvious and admitted self-interest, the longer I live and work, the more I can improve things for everyone.
It is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a no-brainer.
As to social isolation…frankly, most of the people in my daily life don’t understand the bulk of what I say and do now. And even the super-intelligent, as defined here, have to learn from somewhere; there will still be people who have thought of things I haven’t. Someone doesn’t have to be as smart as you are to be fun to talk to.
We’re Americans here. It’s Judgment, not Judgement, limey.
Great Pallas never stripped down out of vanity. That was a slanderous cant put about by Etruscans. That was Hera, Aphrodite, and Artemis, and the lesser virgin was offering not wisdom but enhanced physical talents and a bigger dick.
Which is not to say that She did not arrange the whole thing as part of a complicated plan to rid the world of Troy and ultimately depose the Great Rapist.
I forgot the fourth thing. Must have coffee.
You might want to consider Angry Badger’s points.
Hey, I wonder if that was the fourth thing? Ah well, we’ll never know.
At the risk of angering Athena, I’d want to know more about this super healing. It sounds like cancer and heart disease aren’t really going to touch me. So what does? Outside of the sort of accident that causes so much damage so quickly that my super healing isn’t enough (such as impalement or decapitation), what am I able to die from?
I’m leaning toward super healing unless I am otherwise convinced it isn’t worthwhile.
Yeah, after I answered, I started wondering about this. If I’m not going to live for hundreds of years, why not? Is Athena planning on doing for me when I’m 100 or something?
