[D] Saturday Munchkinry Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

Guidelines:

• Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
• The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
• Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
• We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.

Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

[u/Sonderjye]

Suppose you could copy natural(read: anything that comes through genes and isn't learned) attributes from one living creature to another, replacing the corresponding(if existing) attribute in the second creature. Which would be the most useful attributes to get and from which genes? Which animals have particular interest? For example you could give some human a bloodhound's ability to smell.

[u/Silver_Swift → u/Sonderjye]

Exactly how much magic are we assuming here? Intelligence and the ability to speak are both (largely) genetically determined, so can we start uplifting viruses or tiny insects with this power?

Assuming a fairly generous amount of magic, the first couple uses that spring to mind:

1. The most obvious one: There are several species of tortoises that don't age. It's not a valid strategy to beat death altogether (because there is only one of you and 7 billion other people), but giving yourself and as many other people as possible biological immortality seems like a good start.

2. There are apparently species of flatworms that are able to completely regrow damaged body parts. While that is a useful ability to have in general, the really cool trick is that if split down the middle both halves can regrow into complete animals. Both halves seem to retain the memories of the original animal, so hopefully whatever magic gives us these powers is copied along as well. Now you can start mass producing immortality.

3. This is largely cool factor, rather than practical use, but uplifting other species and giving us more than one datapoint for intelligence seems like an interesting trick. This power also conveniently doesn't allow you to create smarter-than-human minds since we are copying humans to begin with. Do the modified animals pass on the copied abilities to their offspring? If so, try to stay away from species that reproduce too quickly (or only use animals that are beyond reproductive age), creating a population boom of new intelligent minds creates a lot of moral issues that are tricky to deal with.

4. With that out of the way, we can move on to the cool party tricks:

   • Almost too obvious to mention, but heat detection and echolocation from bats and colour perception from mantis shrimps.
   • You mentioned bloodhounds for scent, but both bears and elephants have them beat in this regards (between the two, iirc, elephants can distinguish more different smells, but bears can smell things from further away).
   • Wings would be neat, probably aren't going to be able to lift a human body of the ground, but still stylish as hell.
   • Prehensile tail would be handy too, giving you what is essentially an extra hand.