Hypothetical Question: If you became God, what would you do?

[C40]

I like asking my friends questions like these and sometimes they result in very interesting ideas and conversations. I see you folks post a lot of interesting options just within the realm of things like politics, so I'm curious what ideas you would consider if you had full on God control. What would you do in the first week or so? What strategies would you pursue?

DETAILS:
Let's say God comes to you. He reveals that there really is a god and that it's him. But he's bored/unmotivated or whatever and needs a break. He's selected you to take over as God for some vague but long amount of time - probably 100-1000 years. He says you should do whatever you want and he's not going to get pissed at you or anything. As the new God, you have all the powers described in religions like Christianity (Creating whatever you want, killing everyone, making likenesses, controlling physics and weather and so on, communicating with people. You can see and control things down to any level of detail - but, let's say, if you wanted to control a huge amount of individual things - for example, what every person thinks, it would take a huge amount of work for you. Simpler macro scale things like a "This is God,....." message to everyone would be much easier for you)

[Toska2]

Watch the sunrise and sunset.

Have a "this is Jesus" event every 150 years.

Allow jellyfish to die. (Their seemingly infinite life creeps me out. )

Have lunch with the devil.

Abolish the notion of purgatory.

Prevent the platypus from ever happening. (Assuming I can move through time and/or do such a thing)

[BRUTE]

fentanyl

[bryan]

Brute force solve anything I want via infinite universe copies changing one variable in each and observing the differences. Use this as my base of knowledge at Mt. Olympus (I assume all gods have done the same; hell maybe I just need to read the "Intro to Omnipotence" and "Intro to Omniscience" textbooks in the deity library). I wonder what is different about the simulated universes I can control and the one I am living in now with the other gods?

[Toska2]

Oh yeah, give myself a free pass into heaven afterwards.

[Riggerjack]

Retire.

It's what the last God did, and he was omniscient, so it was probably a good move.

[OTCW]

Abolish the worship of deities.

[George the original one]

Redesign human anatomy so nasal passages don't drain down the throat or backup into the ears.

[jennypenny]

No one would go to bed hungry.

Every child would have a good home.

The only diseases humans got would be lifestyle diseases.

Humans would go vegan until animal and fish populations were restored (although eating poachers would be ok).

Urban blight would be eradicated.

Personal fortunes would be capped at $100 million. (gotta give everything above that away before the tax man takes it on 4/15)

Society would be designed for introverts as well as extroverts.

Attractiveness would be inversely correlated with intelligence.

Everyone would have a green thumb and feel compelled to garden.

Liverpool would always win.

[vexed87]

Nukes get un-invented.

Politicians and leaders fight their own wars.

[7Wannabe5]

"I am going to set the timer for 10 years. First, clean up your own mess. Look around, make sure you took care of everything. Then, help somebody else who is still cleaning, or ask me if I have another assignment for you. If everything is put away where it belongs, and everybody is sitting criss-cross applesauce hands-in-the-basket, when the timer goes off we will have a party!"

[sky]

Reboot the matrix server

[Riggerjack]

"Attractiveness would be inversely correlated with intelligence."

Because you want to breed out intelligence?

[Dragline]

Liverpool would always win.

Sounds more like Dante's Inferno.

I'd be tempted to monkey with evolved traits that don't seem to have much of a modern purpose. But I'd worry about unintended consequences.

Like what if we dialed back our tendency to mimic each other such that we did not care what other people have? What if we got rid of zero-empathy people (I don't mean kill them, just not allow any more to be born.) What if we made people less violent -- more like bonobos instead of chimpanzees?

But after doing whatever I did, I'd definitely do that "Day of Rest" thing. Maybe more like a week or a month.

[Chad]

If I'm wrong, then my first act would be to find the old god/gods and lay down a good beating for all the evil he/she/they/it let or encouraged to happen. Then I would erase the idea of god from everyone's memory and remove all materials suggesting a god, but allow everyone to keep all the few positive ideas of religion as philosophical thought. After that, I would remove myself and any chance of another god from existing in this universe.

[Freedom_2018]

For those of you wanting to play god:

http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html

[fiby41]

There's a movie based on this premise called Bruce Almighty.

[vezkor]

First, I would decouple the windpipe from the foodpipe for most mammals. Back when they were gills, it was fine, but seriously choking should not even be possible. This is just bad design (and a wink wink nudge nudge towards fellow students of evolution). The new oriface would probably be on the sides of the neck... sorry scarf-wearers.

Second, I would snap my fingers and all water on earth would act as contraceptive to humans UNLESS first boiled for 15 minutes, then frozen for 15 minutes, then returned to regular temperature. Must be consumed within 48 hours of this procedure or the temporary sterilization effect of water would return. There would never again be an accidental birth if everyone was naturally impotent and had to go through effort (any effort, really. The boiling and freezing is arbitrary) to achieve a fertile state. Having a natural fertile state is great when competing for survival against many other species... once your species has "won", though, and you're dealing with overpopulation it isn't so good.

Thirdly, I would introduce dozens of sentient intelligent species (of varying design) on planets in neighboring solar systems and imbue all species with the knowledge and resources to achieve efficient FTL travel between systems. I would make FTL travel fast enough to get between neighboring systems in minutes, and neighboring galaxies in days. Tunneling through space-time via wormholes would be the method.

Finally, the final action I take before banishing myself and all future "gods" from existence is to set the laws of the universe so that entropy acts in cycles. The end result would be something akin to Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" http://multivax.com/last_question.html if you want a good read.

[chenda]

Apologise.

[JamesR]

If I became God, there's not a whole lot to do. Take Earth for example, what species should I favour? How is anything fixable without hurting something else? It's somewhat of a zero-sum game planet/ecosystem wide. Should I still care about human problems? Every 'fix' would have a price, and maybe humans would absolutely not agree with the price of the fix, so why should I make that decision for them? That would probably be worse.

I'd probably go explore the rest of universe, check out other alien planets, see what advanced civilizations look like, etc.