7.1 KiB
[AskReddit] You have the obedience and loyalty of ALL squirrels. How do you proceed?
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 7
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Created: 2014-11-14T07:11:46
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u/E-o_o-3 [+14] (an hour later)
So let's say they're still as smart as normal squirrels - that is to say, they don't actually acquire ideals of loyalty and obeying natural language commands and other forms of abstract reasoning - instead, I'm controlling them by controlling what they desire. They carry out those desires using normal squirrel brain capacity. (Otherwise it is way too powerful).
Step 1: Fucking. Because we are gonna need a lot of fucking squirrels. Also, we're going to have different breeds of squirrels, specialized for different tasks. We certainly want smarter squirrels, but there are plenty of physical traits we might also select for. Ability to thrive on a cheaper diet would be nice as well.
Step 2: While that's happening, amass small fortune with a squirrel circus and selling tame pet squirrels who know entertaining tricks. Some of them are programmed to do convenient tasks. Rich people might want squirrels that will fetch the mail as soon as it arrives. Guide-squirrels help the blind and disabled, making up for low intelligence through being supernaturally motivated to do exactly what's most helpful. The possibilities expand endlessly if squirrels are smart enough to understand even a single command. Military applications are obvious, but I have a feeling we won't be needing that anymore.
I'm the only one with the ability, so the bottleneck here is mostly my time, energy, and skills. With my small fortune, I can now devote my life to coming up with ways to program the squirrel - working with experts to figure out what is needed. I could also fund the biological sciences to stretch the definition of "squirrel" as far as possible. It would be really nice to get those flying squirrels actually flying, for example. An aquatic one would be amazing. Even something small and simple, like opposable thumbs, could make a world of difference.
Step 3: Squirrels are now used for planting and pollinating crops, fertilizing and tilling the soil, removing weeds and insect pests in the third world, which lacks the infrastructure to do it with more efficient machines.If the breeding program works out, then enlarged squirrels can do probably tasks like grind grain or herd animals. Really fat squirrels themselves might be an excellent food source - easy to handle, foraging for themselves, since they don't mind being killed, arguably perfectly ethical forms of meat (except for the part where I modified their original preferences, I guess). Squirrels can also do some of the tasks in manufacturing which require to much dexterity for machines (or in impoverished areas with neither machines nor cash to trade) but are simple enough for squirrels. The ecosystem improves as squirrels pick up all the trash and are generally stewards of the environment in every possible way ecologists can dream up and explain to me (plant endangered plants?, feed themselves to endangered carnivores?, disturb bodies of water to prevent mosquito breeding? Kill invasive species?). There are many smaller uses as well- quick delivery of food, supplies, messages, increasing Google-Map's "street-view" coverage, monitoring shit...all doable without the squirrels, but often cheaper with.
Step 4: I'm insanely wealthy now and quite a few of the world's problems have been solved so let's have some fun. If we make little space suits. we can use the cheap, expendable, but dextrous squirrels to explore rough terrain on other planets. (How far do my squirrel powers go, and how fast does the power travel? There is a lot of communicative potential in that, but I've thus far been assuming I can only re-program nearby squirrels and then set them loose... we should probably get some neuroscientists and physicists researching the nature and limits supernatural squirrel power at some point!)
Step 5: Research the hell out of life extension, human cloning, and so on... because we don't know what happens to the squirrels after I die. Even without actually looking at the supernatural aspects of my power directly, neuroscience should have advanced quite a bit looking at how other regions of the brain respond to shifts in squirrel motivation and intentions, so maybe that will help.
TL:DR - you just gave me a factory of cheap little critters that can do any small simple task.
u/MoralRelativity [+3] (2 hours later)
You win.
Also - supplemental to step 3 - your squirrels clean up all the left over land mines in the world.
u/FeepingCreature [+1] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (6 days later)
It seems the most limiting factor is how many squirrels you can control/remotivate at once and how long it takes.
u/E-o_o-3 [+2] (6 days later)
i assumed
that they must be near you for you to control them
Once they are programmed, they stay that way until death
How long it takes is a function of how complex it is. The magic works with your psychic intuition to control what they want, but you have to actually observe them in action and tweak what you've done to their preferences to make sure they actually behave as desired. They're still squirrels - If you desire them to want to go to the moon, they'll just start jumping ineffectively and climbing trees when they see the moon. You'd actually have to make them create the individual parts of the ship and do the whole thing in steps small enough for a squirrel mind to understand. (Obviously, intellectual or creative work like making space ships is not the sort of thing this power is good at - but repetitive farming might be.). So the transfer is fairly instant, but getting them to work on tasks unsupervised takes takes time to optimize. It's like having a really powerful computer program housed in capable hardware that can be intuitively made to do a wide range of "complex" tasks like "recognize object, fetch" etc, but can't actually do your high level thinking for you and you have to test it out to make sure it does what you think it's going to do.
You can do identical magic to an indefinite number of squirrels at a time, but you're still limited by your own working memory.
So you could pack 10000 squirrels in a small space and tell them all "you now feel the urge to jump every 5 seconds", and then pack 10000 different squirrels and then tell theim "you now want to gather all objects that look like THIS and put them inside objects that look like THAT"... but you couldn't do that simultaneously, for the same reason you can't program two computers simultaneously, it's just too hard.
u/gabbalis [+0] (7 hours later)
I seem to recall a marvel hero with the power to talk to squirrils plus all the powers of a squirril. Im pretty sure shes the most powerful hero in the marvelverse having taken out every universe level threat imaginable... mostly as a joke though.
u/None [+2] (7 hours later)