Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Life, Gaming, and the Gospel: Genesis

When I say the word Genesis, what does that call to your mind?  It has the potential to be the first book in the Bible, or perhaps a failed attempt by Sega to keep up with Nintendo and Sony.


In my case, it summons images of creating worlds, of new life, of incredible power.


In other words, it sounds to me like the spell, Genesis, from Dungeons and Dragons.


Genesis is a ninth level spell, which translates into being about the same amount of power as calling down meteors, totally reprogramming someone's mind, summoning a controllable black hole, or changing reality.  (You could say that that's what all D&D spells do, is change reality, but that's beside the point.)  Basically, Genesis gives you the power to create your own miniature universe, 180 feet in radius.  Inside that sphere, you can do whatever you want. 

Should you so choose, you could fill that 360 foot sphere with pure gold, and single-handedly solve a good chunk of the national debt.  (If we crunch the numbers, let's see what we get. The volume of a sphere with Radius of 180 feet= (4/3)Pi(180*180*180)=24429024.47 cubic feet of gold.  Google informs me that a one-foot cube of gold would weigh 1206 pounds.  So, that mass of gold would weigh... 29461403516.02 pounds.  Since gold prices are usually done by ounces, we need to multiply by 16 to get 471,382,456,256.36 ounces of gold.  Assuming that the market were not to crash because of the amount of gold, and taking the price of gold today at about $1700 dollars per ounce, we have a staggering $801,350,175,635,812 dollars worth of gold, enough to dig the US out of its ~$10 trillion dollars of debt, and perhaps buy the country on the side.  Even were the gold to sell for just a dollar per ounce, you'd still be able to pay for the country's debt and still be fantastically rich.)

You could make it so that for every six seconds that passes in this world, eight hours pass in your mini-universe. (Helpful when you need to cram for tests, or perhaps a bit of vacation.) 

You could make it so that those annoying telemarketers would never find you again.  Of course, you'd also make it impossible for us missionaries to teach you the gospel, so let's not do that.

This single spell would make the smart user thereof invincible.  Nothing could defeat him.  Anything he needed, he could create in his mini-universe, and then use.

Think of that next time you're trying to outthink God.  He has his own universe.  Best of all, he's willing to share it with us because he loves us and wants us to be happy.

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