Board 8 > You are on a mission from God

(+) Yeah! (+)

You wake up. You are immortal. You do not age. You cannot get hurt. You do not need to sustain yourself. God Himself comes down from heaven and tells you "You HAVE to kill every wasp", and then vanishes forever. You look outside and there are no more humans. Other animals, infrastructure and life still remain--it is the world abandoned by mankind. Except you.

You have to kill every wasp.

Perhaps, when the wasps are dead, God will return to the world and restore it to the state it was when you went to bed, sans the wasps. Perhaps he won't. It matters not; your task is clear.

How long would it take for you to kill every single wasp?

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How long until the heat death of the universe?

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Shonen_Bat posted...

How long until the heat death of the universe?

Earth will become uninhabitable in say a billion years but consider natural death a time limit. You want to accomplish it as quickly as possible. Beating the null is just the baseline. If you don't actually accomplish anything or even somehow keep them alive for longer than they would've without your intervention, you lose, in a sense.

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I guess as long as it takes me to work out how to completely destroy the planet

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So idk, I guess give me a couple of weeks

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So do certain facilities still exist without humans? Specifically the Internet or at least a Library?

I would start by researching their typical resources and start trying to remove those. Followed by introducing predators and environmental hazards to typical nesting locations. Then probably set a lot of forest fires to wipe out those hidden in jungles and whatnot.

I would have to move fast too, don't want them adapting

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Internet probably isn't going to last long given that power all across the globe will start to go down fairly quickly without humans. This is a nightmare task, I wouldn't even know where to begin tbh.

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BetrayedTangy posted...

So do certain facilities still exist without humans? Specifically the Internet or at least a Library?

I would start by researching their typical resources and start trying to remove those. Followed by introducing predators and environmental hazards to typical nesting locations. Then probably set a lot of forest fires to wipe out those hidden in jungles and whatnot.

I would have to move fast too, don't want them adapting

The Internet is there, sure. At least until the power dies across the entire planet as suddenly unmanned power plants fail and all of the consequences of nobody being around to run, maintain and fix things starts to take effect.

The scenario says that all infrastructure remains

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I don't think I could travel to every country wasps exist in without modern travel services, let alone exterminate every last one of them.

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Mobilezoid posted...

I don't think I could travel to every country wasps exist in without modern travel services, let alone exterminate every last one of them.

Planes (and well-sealed fuel containers) don't stop existing when people do

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Mobilezoid posted...

I don't think I could travel to every country wasps exist in without modern travel services, let alone exterminate every last one of them.

You can theoretically just swim, cause y'know, immortal
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So step one is taking a few years to self-teach myself how to maintain and fly an airplane?

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Mobilezoid posted...

So step one is taking a few years to self-teach myself how to maintain and fly an airplane?

A few years? It's easy to fly a plane. The hard part is landing... which you don't need to do well, cause y'know, immortal

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XIII_rocks posted...

So idk, I guess give me a couple of weeks

All the infrastructure still exists so you just need to find a way to launch all the nukes.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnguaxxXUbc

Can this be my theme song?

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I start an exhaustive task of breeding wasps for intelligence, slowly but surely guiding them along the way as they develop the right tools and logic necessary to become the next supreme beings on the planet. Then I wait until they either destroy themselves or Wasp God poofs them out of existence to task one immortal one to eliminate all x. If the former happens, mission accomplished! If the latter happens, I have a new friend for eternity.

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Maniac64 posted...

All the infrastructure still exists so you just need to find a way to launch all the nukes.

Yeah. Unless there's any living in a bunker or something. I assumed I'd need to like fuck with the core or get rid of the atmosphere or something

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SovietOmega posted...

I start an exhaustive task of breeding wasps for intelligence, slowly but surely guiding them along the way as they develop the right tools and logic necessary to become the next supreme beings on the planet. Then I wait until they either destroy themselves or Wasp God poofs them out of existence to task one immortal one to eliminate all x. If the former happens, mission accomplished! If the latter happens, I have a new friend for eternity.

I mean you probably are Wasp god at that point

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SovietOmega posted...

I start an exhaustive task of breeding wasps for intelligence, slowly but surely guiding them along the way as they develop the right tools and logic necessary to become the next supreme beings on the planet. Then I wait until they either destroy themselves or Wasp God poofs them out of existence to task one immortal one to eliminate all x. If the former happens, mission accomplished! If the latter happens, I have a new friend for eternity.

God is gone forever (until maybe you win). Congratulations on getting to this joke in only a couple of hours instead of a few days like the other group

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it seems impossible without severe terraforming. humanity is currently doing its best to kill all mosquitoes, and it can't do that.

it'd be a real race to see whether i'd be able to kill em before they evolved into something no longer recognizable as wasps

as a side note, apparently there are a ton of different types of wasps- there are solitary as well as collective varieties

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I wonder if enough nuclear weapons exist to eliminate all life on Earth, or least all non-microscopic life on land. It'd probably take a while to set up for that, but it also seems like the only viable method to kill all the wasps faster than they can make more wasps.
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banananor posted...

it seems impossible without severe terraforming. humanity is currently doing its best to kill all mosquitoes, and it can't do that.

That's because we want to kill only mosquitoes. In fact, we only want to kill certain types of mosquitoes. If we only cared about them being dead regardless of costs, they'd have died out entirely ages ago... alongside other things

banananor posted...

it'd be a real race to see whether i'd be able to kill em before they evolved into something no longer recognizable as wasps

that isn't how evolution works

metaIslug posted...

Why wasps? I thought mosquitos were the actual problem

because a wasp stung the friend of the creator of this thought experiment

Xeybozn posted...

I wonder if enough nuclear weapons exist to eliminate all life on Earth, or least all non-microscopic life on land. It'd probably take a while to set up for that, but it also seems like the only viable method to kill all the wasps faster than they can make more wasps.

not enough bombs to directly blast the whole land surface, and almost certainly not enough to irradiate it all to the point of total uninhabitability either

I'm not going to offer any ideas of my own ftr, since I've already spent two days debating this. I'll point out issues with methods as I see them, but I want a new crop of ideas to come out

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I'm not confident, especially with all the power grids dying, that I could solo do any of: 1) locate enough nuclear weapons; 2) infiltrate said locations; or 3) then proceed to correctly target and launch things (without electricity??).

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tyder21 posted...

I'm not confident, especially with all the power grids dying, that I could solo do any of: 1) locate enough nuclear weapons; 2) infiltrate said locations; or 3) then proceed to correctly target and launch things (without electricity??).

Who said you can't use electricity?

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This is basically impossible and I'll spend the rest of eternity alone. I don't know what I did to God to deserve this punishment, but okay.

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NFUN posted...

Who said you can't use electricity?

I don't see how the power will still be running by the time I successfully break into anywhere that has nuclear weapons to launch,

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tyder21 posted...

I don't see how the power will still be running by the time I successfully break into anywhere that has nuclear weapons to launch,

Good thing generators exist!

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tyder21 posted...

I don't see how the power will still be running by the time I successfully break into anywhere that has nuclear weapons to launch,

Just use a bike and a biiiiig battery. Move acres of solar panels to your desired location. Exploit backup generators from everywhere, hospitals are probably an easy target there. You've got time. All the time. Enough time for water to make a grand canyon. Nothing is blocked off from you with enough poking.

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The only way you could kill all the wasps is by eliminating all life on the planet and rendering it uninhabitable. Even then, you still might not succeed.

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Maybe you guys know how to wire-up all your generators and solar panels successfully to a nuclear launch facility. I certainly don't. I'm also assuming that these facilities are setup in ways where it would be impossible for a sole infiltrator to actually do anything even WITH power.

I'm just not feeling good about this plan.

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I would probably begin a however-long-it-takes effort to yeet the planet into the sun or otherwise completely wipe it from existence/render it unlivable since that's the only quasi-realistic way I see of accomplishing this task. Even then, though, with no humans around to maintain the functioning of the internet or any of the facilities I'd need to even begin acquiring the knowledge necessary for this work, I don't imagine I'd get very far.

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I am buddhist, thus reject the conditions

tyder21 posted...

Maybe you guys know how to wire-up all your generators and solar panels successfully to a nuclear launch facility. I certainly don't. I'm also assuming that these facilities are setup in ways where it would be impossible for a sole infiltrator to actually do anything even WITH power.

I'm just not feeling good about this plan.

Good thing you have time to get a ph.d in engineering and jury rig any system to make it think there are people (Simple articulating robots can be installed in any necessary terminal keyed to your commands, and you can do this because you are a master engineer).

Or take time to become a master thief and break into every secret government facility to learn all the needed secrets to facilitate this plan. Most places assume some level of human presence to deter thieves and don't generally have countermeasures against an infinte amount of C4 applied to the entrance of choice.

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Xiahou Shake posted...

I would probably begin a however-long-it-takes effort to yeet the planet into the sun or otherwise completely wipe it from existence/render it unlivable since that's the only quasi-realistic way I see of accomplishing this task. Even then, though, with no humans around to maintain the functioning of the internet or any of the facilities I'd need to even begin acquiring the knowledge necessary for this work, I don't imagine I'd get very far.

Absurdly more difficult than wiping life out on the planet

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NFUN posted...

that isn't how evolution works

how do you think i was saying evolution worked? i think maybe you're misinterpreting me!

it's very often that a descendant species replaces their ancestor species. there are penty of exceptions- like sharks, sturgeons, and sponges, but it's totally within the realm of possibility for wasps to be replaced

granted, they've already been around for a very fuckin long time, that's just a comment on how long it would take for me to build up nuclear technology on my own

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NFUN posted...

Absurdly more difficult than wiping life out on the planet

I mean maybe but at least I'd have a fun/interesting project to work on rather than this asshole God's boring idea of wandering the Earth committing wasp genocide.

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banananor posted...

how do you think i was saying evolution worked? i think maybe you're misinterpreting me!

it's very often that a descendant species replaces their ancestor species. there are penty of exceptions- like sharks, sturgeons, and sponges, but it's totally within the realm of possibility for wasps to be replaced

granted, they've already been around for a very fuckin long time, that's just a comment on how long it would take for me to build up nuclear technology on my own

I guess, but descendents of wasps would phylogenetically still be wasps

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Kill every WASP? That's a lot of people.

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After dwelling on this topic for a little longer I'm growing more convinced I would rather spend my new immortality turning cats into the dominant species on the planet.

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tyder21 posted...

Maybe you guys know how to wire-up all your generators and solar panels successfully to a nuclear launch facility. I certainly don't. I'm also assuming that these facilities are setup in ways where it would be impossible for a sole infiltrator to actually do anything even WITH power.

I'm just not feeling good about this plan.

Well you'd need to learn how first. Do some book learning. Patience. Etc etc.

Learn how to fly planes too ofc

I kind of want to see a movie made out of this concept

A dude has to literally destroy planet Earth and yet we're rooting for him

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I wonder if there's some sort of particularly destructive virus one could synthesise that specifically targets wasps

Then just spread it around the entire planet somehow

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I've got this. I head to NASA with a chain and take a space shuttle to the moon, with the chain still attached at the launch site. Then I tie the chain to the moon like in Sonic CD. I walk across the chain to return to Earth and hook up that end of the chain to a winch and drag the moon in for an impact event a la Majora's Mask.

Realistically my mind breaks from the isolation and despair and I lose all sense of self not too far in. I fail the objective.

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this whole set up and your question is how long it would take me? i dont fucking know dude a real long time

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xp1337 posted...

I've got this. I head to NASA with a chain and take a space shuttle to the moon, with the chain still attached at the launch site. Then I tie the chain to the moon like in Sonic CD. I walk across the chain to return to Earth and hook up that end of the chain to a winch and drag the moon in for an impact event a la Majora's Mask.

Realistically my mind breaks from the isolation and despair and I lose all sense of self not too far in. I fail the objective.

Can't get hurt. Reasonably that extends to mental health for this scenario

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XIII_rocks posted...

Well you'd need to learn how first. Do some book learning. Patience. Etc etc.

Learn how to fly planes too ofc

I kind of want to see a movie made out of this concept

A dude has to literally destroy planet Earth and yet we're rooting for him

https://qntm.org/geocide

difficult

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NFUN posted...

Can't get hurt. Reasonably that extends to mental health for this scenario

man this becomes more of an existential and psychological horror the more i hear

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NFUN posted...

https://qntm.org/geocide

difficult

Interesting

But I'll settle for destroying all life on the planet, which I imagine is a little easier than blowing up the entire planet

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