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Although even obvious 'ethical' wishes need to be thorougly though out: should we wish just for cure for all diseases or go for immortality (with obvious implication of either overpopulation or stopping having children); for universal cornucopia or for a fair way to earn one (does not having to work lead to decadence, whatever one wants to mean by that) etc?

Yeah, I think an important part of being a god (which is what the box basically allowed) is knowing when to let go. The atheist messiah at the centre of the book Good Omens says something like "I could have 'saved the whales', but on the whole it's better if people learn that if they kill a whale, they've got a dead whale". If through civil wars, corruption, squandering of natural resources, etc., people end up in poverty, and then a god with a box comes along and clears it up, nobody's learned anything, and even if the problem of poverty stays divinely solved (infinite pizzas), the mindset that caused it will go on to cause other problems. Curing disease sounds like a more benevolent thing to do, though I bet the overwhelming majority of humankind's deaths from disease are from curable ones, and anyway if I'm not allowed to directly cause death I can't kill bacteria and viruses (though I guess I could render them sterile). "Curing" mortality does not sound like a benevolent thing to do.

The one thing I thought about wishing for was a solution to something we can't already solve for ourselves: blueprints for a starship, as a hedge against the finite resources of the single planet we currently occupy. But perhaps until we've sorted ourselves out a bit more (and I'm not allowed to directly change opinions), it's not the action of a benevolent god to unleash us on the rest of the universe.

Peter