Conduct massive foreign wars dropping more bombs than were dropped in WWII. These “brute force” luxuries have slowly departed, as we have looked towards miniaturization of electronics for our “new stuff” titillation. Which things will slowly trickle out of your reality as oil gets more expensive? TaaL: One of the most common and enduring plots in your human mythology is the story of three magical wishes. There are many variations on it, including devils, souls, gold, love, and irony. Three magical wishes are granted by a superhuman entity of unknown or dubious motives, after a magic lamp, or other enchanted treasure, is discovered.
The central theme of these stories is generally about how those granted the wishes fail to think through the implications of their initial choices of wealth, beauty, fame, etc., and find themselves in a predicament from which they can only extricate themselves by a very careful wording of the third wish. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes not. In such stories, those who make selfish wishes generally fare
less well after the third wish than those making altruistic ones, and the “three wishes” are discovered to have been both blessing and curse. Indeed, such stories are generally about discovering wisdom, and what really matters in life, only at the eleventh hour, and are, of course, entirely fanciful while embedding a valuable message. Which is why it’s so odd, that’s exactly what happened to your species en route to the Anthropocene. You found a way to wring magic wishes out of the very rocks of the earth. You awakened energy slaves from their hundred-million-year sleep to invisibly walk the land doing your bidding. Your first wish was to dominate the earth, and you did. You displaced the other wildlife, captured all the fish in the sea worth having and many which weren’t, cut down the forests, killed or converted the “savages”, and planted your crops.
Your second wish was to all be as wealthy as kings and queens of old, with
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