What Earth-like world would maximize the amount of good a single person could achieve?
I don’t actually believe the following answer, but as we’re talking about fiction, and some people might actually think it would work, why not.
A world in which a catastrophe has reduced the population to a group of a few breeding pairs, or just one—plus yourself, who have managed to survive the catastrophe and preserve your access to the technology of the vanquished civilisation. You use your overwhelming power to take charge of the remaining tribe and direct their development, confident that you can do better than the blind chances of history. You crack some sort of good-enough immortality for yourself, so that you can perpetuate your absolute rule indefinitely, and make humans live they way the clearly ought to. Since you are, for practical purposes, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, failure would be a contradiction in terms.
This one sounds like a lot of work to do—I don’t think I mentioned that you have the power to do this as often as you like (and have time for!) and this would tie you to just a single world forever instead of doing as much good as possible across many worlds. I’d also like to not assume any access to omnipotence, immortality, or other such things: you can specify a world to travel to by describing and then travel to it. But once you’re there you’re just like anyone else, save for the knowledge that this world matched your description and any knowledge you brought from Earth. So you might know the location of a particularly rich vein of minerals, for example, or an underground reservoir of water that, when released in some manner, could alter global climate significantly by disturbing an El Nino-like process. Or releasing a bacteria into the ocean which spreads and alters atmospheric composition over the next ten millenia (you’re a long-term thinker and don’t mind it if the benefits you bestow don’t take effect until long after you’re dead). Or altering the flow of a river to bring previously-unknown fertilizers to the largest pockets of human civilization.
I’ve been considering mostly geo-engineering style solutions since that seems to be your main comparative advantage given your knowledge of the world and few of the big things that could really really alter the long-term course of the world. And it fits with the idea of picking an implausible world out of the vast space of possibilities—you get to in effect choose that the planet was ‘designed’ to have an easily-triggerable chain reaction. Other options probably exist, like introducing the right technology in the right place, but they haven’t been as obvious to me.
I don’t actually believe the following answer, but as we’re talking about fiction, and some people might actually think it would work, why not.
A world in which a catastrophe has reduced the population to a group of a few breeding pairs, or just one—plus yourself, who have managed to survive the catastrophe and preserve your access to the technology of the vanquished civilisation. You use your overwhelming power to take charge of the remaining tribe and direct their development, confident that you can do better than the blind chances of history. You crack some sort of good-enough immortality for yourself, so that you can perpetuate your absolute rule indefinitely, and make humans live they way the clearly ought to. Since you are, for practical purposes, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, failure would be a contradiction in terms.
This one sounds like a lot of work to do—I don’t think I mentioned that you have the power to do this as often as you like (and have time for!) and this would tie you to just a single world forever instead of doing as much good as possible across many worlds. I’d also like to not assume any access to omnipotence, immortality, or other such things: you can specify a world to travel to by describing and then travel to it. But once you’re there you’re just like anyone else, save for the knowledge that this world matched your description and any knowledge you brought from Earth. So you might know the location of a particularly rich vein of minerals, for example, or an underground reservoir of water that, when released in some manner, could alter global climate significantly by disturbing an El Nino-like process. Or releasing a bacteria into the ocean which spreads and alters atmospheric composition over the next ten millenia (you’re a long-term thinker and don’t mind it if the benefits you bestow don’t take effect until long after you’re dead). Or altering the flow of a river to bring previously-unknown fertilizers to the largest pockets of human civilization.
I’ve been considering mostly geo-engineering style solutions since that seems to be your main comparative advantage given your knowledge of the world and few of the big things that could really really alter the long-term course of the world. And it fits with the idea of picking an implausible world out of the vast space of possibilities—you get to in effect choose that the planet was ‘designed’ to have an easily-triggerable chain reaction. Other options probably exist, like introducing the right technology in the right place, but they haven’t been as obvious to me.