So this is a thing I think about occasionally.
Imagine that you had the ability to increase or decrease any single existing quantity/property/probability by 1% per day. These adjustments change the base state of the world on a day to day basis, so compounding is possible, but they can only be applied multiplicatively to quantities that are already "present," and they don't eliminate For example:
"Increase my chances of winning the lottery by 1%"
This wouldn't mean that you'd have a 1% chance to win. Rather, if one ticket is drawn out of 100 million tickets, your base chance of being chosen is .00001%. So increasing this by 1% would mean you'd have a .0000101% chance of winning. And then the same cation the following day would increase it to .000010201%. Increasing your chances of winning to 1% would take a long time.
"Make 1% of all the money in the world belong to me"
Wouldn't work, because you're not modifying an existing quantity. Whereas if you have $1000, then $1000 is the "quantity of money that you have" and you could increase that by 1% to have $1010 instead.
"Make me 1% more like superman"
...wouldn't work because you're (mostly) not modifying existing quantities. You might have personal qualities like "honesty" and "appreciation of justice" that a character like superman might also have, but these are not "single" properties and "amount that you are like superman" isn't really a measurable quality.
But you could do, for example:
"Increase the strength of all muscles in my body by 1%"
Which would compound very well. For example, if you could do 100 pound benchpress, the above would allow you to do 101 pounds. And then reapplying it the next day would allow you to do 102.01. After ten days of applying it, you'd end up with a 110.46 pound benchpress.
And you can modify quantities downward. For example:
"Reduce my age by 1%"
If you're 20 years old, this would make you 19.8 years old. 10.4 weeks younger in a day. Of course, compounding would be working against you in this case, as the next day you'd only 19.8 years old plus the day that had passed, so decreasing that by another 1% would only decrease yoru age by .198 years rather than .2 years. Still plenty effective, but it would also have the curious implication that you would never be able to use the above to become less than 100 days old, because you'd be aging at the rate of one day per day.Enough to keep pace with the above.
Which brings up another interesting point. The above reduces your age, but it doesn't eliminate the regular process of aging. So, consider somebody attempting to be altruistic:
"Reduce the number of harmful bacteria in the world by 1%"
This would work fine. But it wouldn't stop them from reproducing, and it's altogether likely that the temporarily reduced bacteria would simply replenish themselves, eliminating the effective benefit of the command. Where you could do something like:
"Decrease the total number of different species of harmful bacteria in the world by 1%"
Which, if there were 2000 different species of harmful bacteria, would result in the genocide of 20 of them. Though you wouldn't have any control over which 20.
So clearly some daily commands are more effective than others. And this power doesn't give you any special patience. So yes, while theoretically you could start with $10,000 in a bank account and use it every single day for 463 days to become a millionaire, but it's probably not realistic to think that someone would sit around with for 15 months diligently not benefiting from their superpower while the money accrues.
Whereas other uses more immediately see results. Using it to brute force getting rich might be difficult, but a single use every few years would keep you forever young, and the occasional carefully worded command to free 1% of all women enslaved by human traffickers, or eliminate 1% of genetic defects in the world could see tremendous effect.
How would you use this power?
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Topic: The 1 percent per day superpower (Read 24106 times)