“You ain’t never had a friend like me”

“Mister Aladdin, sir, have a wish or two or three.” The first time I heard that I was twenty two inches shorter, and one hundred pounds lighter. Words like entropy, stoichiometry, derivative, plugged flow reactor, and 1-phenylbutanone were not in my vocabulary. I thought an engineer was just a train guy, and I still believed in Santa Claus. Regardless, when I first saw that blue genie I gave serious thought to that question. In the fourteen and half years, my “wishes” have changed many times. For instance, when I was 15, I wanted the ability to become invisible. Some of the other “wishes” were the ability to fly, to walk on the ceiling, win a multiple-state championship, splashy splashy leading to chasey chasey, leading to ... and play basketball like Reggie Miller. If I found that magic lamp today, I would ask for these three wishes.

•The ability to control time.

•The ability to put my consciousness in another animate being’s consciousness and be able to control said being’s consciousness with my consciousness.

•The ability to control my consciousness’s knowledge of the implementation of the first two wishes, and review the implications of all three wishes.

In order for another person to understand this article, I must define consciousness. For the purpose of this article, a person’s consciousness is expressed in any voluntary action or thought said person performs. I am currently using my consciousness to write this article, and you are using your consciousness to read it. As you probably understand, I am not using my consciousness to digest the three pieces of cold pepperoni pizza I ate seven hours ago. What could I do with these three wishes? The question should be what I can’t do with these three wishes. The different possible implications of these wishes are on the magnitude of Avogadro’s number to the Avogadro’s number.

The first thing I would do with this power is relive my own life. To start, I would go back to the first day of my freshman year of high school. Then, I would have my current consciousness control the consciousness of myself, at that point in my life, except in one aspect. That is, I would remove the ability to use any of the knowledge I have gained since high school. I also wouldn’t want the knowledge that I was implementing any wishes in my consciousness. With these three wishes in place, I could relive many important years of my life. I wouldn’t be aware that I was reliving them, but I would relive them regardless.

This “second” lifetime would eventually end, and when it did I wouldn’t simply decompose. Instead, I would have the ability to review the choices I made in my two lifetimes. Doing this, I could determine which decisions greatly affected the course of one of my lifetimes. Naturally, this is a subject that I have been interested in. For instance, would my life really be that different if I didn’t talk to a certain person on a certain night, or if went to Purdue instead of Rose? Obviously, I could adjust the implications of these three wishes to have thousands and thousands of my own lifetimes. I hope that I would find that our decisions that we make on a daily basis affect the outcomes of our life. If this isn’t the case, the only thing we have to look forward to is becoming dust once again.

I could also use these wishes to answers some questions I have about other people. Two questions I have always wondered are, “What factors motivate other individuals?” and “How often does a person tell the truth?” I could use my wishes to change major events in the history and see how this affected life on this planet. If I get tired of answering all of these questions, I could simply find leisurely lifetimes to live.

The more I think about the possible implication of these wishes, the more I realize how completely absurd they are. We do not have multiple lifetimes to live, and there is not any way to change any decision that we have made in the past. Furthermore, we can not control the outcome of the future. There is only one person that you can control, and that is the man in the mirror. All that we can hope to control is what we do in the present. I just hope that I make the right decisions because I will not get a second chance. As a wise man from Liverpool once said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”