"What are we going to do tonight, Brain?"
"The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try
to take over the world!"
-The Brain, and Pinky in "Pinky and
the Brain"
How would you like to take over the world? Oh come on; all the
kids are doing it. You know you want to. It's easy: just
try one of these prearranged methods.
About these entries:
Title: a convenient thing
to call it
|
Description: a more
detailed description of the method
|
Price: the monetary price
of pulling off this scheme
|
Success %: The probability
(in my opinion) of succeeding once
you have the necessary equipment
|
Damage: How badly the
world will be damaged by your takeover. What's the point of
taking over the world if you also blow it up?
|
Failure Consequences: What
happens to you if you try to
pull this off but fail?
|
Success Consequences: What
sort of life will you have once you've taken over?
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Title: Military
Conquest
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Description: Use your
enormous private military forces to attack and defeat every national
military and police force in the world.
|
Price: At least
trillions of dollars to get the military hardware and hire soldiers.
|
Success %: 50%
(depends on the size of military you build, of course)
|
Damage: Heavy.
Having to attack and take control of every city in every country in the
world will cause untold havoc. On the other hand, most of the
people (assuming they're smart enough to get out of your way) will
survive.
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Failure Consequences:
Defeat at the hands of your enemies, followed by a full-scale
interrogation and either lifelong imprisonment or execution (depending
on how vicious you were).
|
Success Consequences: You
take control of a rather beaten and bruised (and therefore thoroughly
cowed and easy to control) planet. Enjoy!
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Title: Get a Monopoly on
Everything
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Description: Get into
business and corporation so powerful that you can effectively control
the global economy. Use this power to take effective control over
all that remains.
|
Price: You don't spend
money, you make money!
|
Success %: 0.01%
(Nobody's done it yet, and they sure have tried!)
|
Damage: Minimal.
There could be quite a bit of collateral damage if you're a really
unscrupulous businessman/woman, and monopolies are never the best
solution, but you will have taken over the world!
|
Failure Consequences: You
merely become incredibly wealthy. Darn.
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Success Consequences: You
become CEO of Earth, Inc. You control the world by dictating
where every dollar, peso, and yen flows. In some ways, this is
more effective and less work than political control!
|
Title: Be Elected
Emperor-for-Life
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Description: Use your
political prowess and ability to get people to agree with you to
convince the entire world to unite behind you as a political
leader. Use the power of your position to secure your hold over
the world for as long as you live.
|
Price: Billions of dollars
to buy the advertising time you'll need, but if you do it right that
money will come from your corporate sponsors.
|
Success %: 0.1% (Folks
have tried before.)
|
Damage: None. This
is one of the ultimate options: take over peacefully, without a shot
being fired.
|
Failure Consequences: You
lose the election and retire back to anonymity in the
countryside. It could be worse.
|
Success Consequences: Take
control of a completely undamaged planet. The trouble is, as a
politician you will have to keep at least some of the people happy or
risk losing your position. If you're feeling especially evil, you
could turn it into a Military Conquest at this point, using your world
government forces to defeat all others.
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Title: Threaten to Blow Up
the World
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Description: Threaten the
leaders of the world nations with some enormously destructive
thing. This could be a nuclear weapon in a strategic location (or
better yet, lots of them), a deadly virus, a computer malfunction, or
whatever your evil scientists have come up with lately. Give them
the ultimatum: Hand over the world or see it destroyed.
The trouble is that you'll either have to get an escape plan for
yourself (hellooo moonbase!) or convince these leaders that you're
crazy enough to destroy the world while you're still on it.
Price: Billions, at least (Even if you don't actually build a
world-blower-upper, you'll have to make the threat convincing, and that
won't be cheap.)
|
Price: Billions, at least
(Even if you don't actually build a world-blower-upper, you'll have to
make the threat convincing, and that won't be cheap.)
|
Success %: Getting lots of
money: 50%, Taking over the world: 1%
|
Damage: Probably none,
unless you accidentally sit on the red button on your remote control or
something.
|
Failure Consequences:
Either (a) they kill you, or (b) you accidentally _do_ blow up the
world. Either way, you're in it pretty deap.
|
Success Consequences: If
you get your money (and decide not to rule the world) you might be able
to buy an island and live comfortably, but don't bet on it.
You've just made every single country in the world _really_ mad at you,
and that isn't going to go away soon. If you do try to rule the
world, you'll have to make your threat a permanent thing just to
maintain control.
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Title: Travel back in Time
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Description: Travel back
in time, do _something_ to give you control of the world, and then come
back to the present and rule. The trouble, of course, is that
_something_. You could give your younger self a list of stock
market prices with which to make billions, or some modern technology
that nobody back then could defeat.
|
Price: What are time
machines going for on eBay?
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Success %: 20%
|
Damage: Zero to Total
(depends on your method, of course)
|
Failure Consequences: Oh,
the list does go on. You might kill your father and cease to
exist. Your time machine might break the fabric of the universe
(oops, did I do that?). The world-takeover part might not work
(after all, giving yourself those stock market prices might _change_
those prices, making them useless), however the only consequence of
this one is that you come back to where you started. The time
cops might arrest you and do something horrible. You could find
out that by altering the timeline, you've only split off an alternate
future and the new you isn't the old you. (And yo've put an
alternate "you" in charge.)
|
Success Consequences: That
depends on your methods. Generally, a successful time-travel
takeover has the same success scenario as the underlying method you use
(military, business, etc.)
|
Title: Mind Control
|
Description: Use your
telepathic powers and/or a psionic multiplication device to allow you
to control the minds of either the most important people in the world,
or _all_ of the people (depending on how powerful your telepathy
is).
|
Price: One mind-control
device, please. And supersize it.
|
Success %: 20% (if you
control some people) 99% (if you control everybody)
|
Damage: If you try to just
take control of all the leaders of the world, then the underlings will
eventually start and uprising against you, and they will probably be
able to kill you somehow (destruction is just so easy).
|
Failure Consequences: You
could be killed by an uprising of those too unimportant to
control. The other possibility is that you make a mistake.
If you are controling _everybody_, then you have to make all of the
decisions. If you screw up a decision badly enough, then you (and
maybe everybody) will end up dead.
|
Success Consequences: You
rule the world! Of course, having turned everybody else into
automatons, you'll have to do all of the thinking from here on
out. That part could get old.
|
Title: Release the
Not-Me-Fever Disease
|
Description: Genetically
engineer and release a disease that kills everybody except yourself
(and maybe those you've selected). Since everybody you don't like
is dead, you're in charge.
An alternative method is to also engineer a temporary vaccine which
people have to continually keep getting doses of from you. This
allows you to reward the loyal with continued life, and let the
disloyal die off.
|
Price: Millions of dollars
(to run a small genetic engineering ranch, and to hire doctor Mephesto).
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Success %: 90%
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Damage: Almost
total. (The damage is the whole method.)
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Failure Consequences:
Either you screw the disease up, and it doesn't kill anybody, or you
make it too powerful and it kills _everybody_, including you. In
the second case, your mistake will have killed off the entire human
species. Good job, doofus. If you're lucky, they'll just
find a cure for the disease and try you as a war criminal.
|
Success Consequences: You
kill _almost_ the entire human species. You have to be pretty
evil to want this. Using the alternative method, you control a
drastically reduced human population with an iron fist. Rebellion
is pretty much unheard of.
|
Title: Start your own
Religion
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Description: Start any
self-perpetuating organization with you in charge that will, in turn,
take over the world. This could be anything from a speech club to
a birdwatching society, but a religion is the tried and true way of
going about it. Some new religions have done what amounted to
taking over the known world (known at time, of course).
|
Price: Probably very
little, you might even make money off of it.
|
Success %: 5%
|
Damage: Almost none before
the Jihad phase starts (to kill off infidels who won't join), similar
to military conquest after that.
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Failure Consequences: You
end up as the leader of some piddly little cult, or just give up
entirely.
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Success Consequences: You
are a god! (Or at least that's what your followers think.)
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Title: Robotic Mayhem
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Description: Build an army
of robots, loyal to you, who can then take over the world for
you. If you're devious about it, you could sell the robots and
design them to pretend to be loyal to the buyer until the day you set
as robot takeover day (like the movie version of I, Robot).
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Price: Billions if you
build them yourself, or you make money if you sell them.
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Success %: 25%
|
Damage: Enormous damage as
the human underground fights against your robot armies. (think
Terminator)
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Failure Consequences: The
military manages to kill off your robots and you're tried/prosecuted as
a war criminal.
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Success Consequences: You
control the robots who control the world. You could keep the
remaining humans as pets, if you're feeling kind.
|
Title: Betray Earth to
Evil Aliens
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Description: Contact some
evil aliens (probably with radio telescopes, but maybe something new)
and offer to help them take over the Earth in exchange for being made a
kind of planetary governor after they take over. The trouble is
that evil aliens would be pretty likely to betray by just killing you
after they take over.
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Price: Millions to
Billions to build radio telescopes and run an operation kind of like
SETI (hmm... maybe that's what they're up to)
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Success %: 10% (that's
after you contact them, of course)
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Damage: Military Conquest
damage (Heavy), plus the damage of the fact that Earth is no longer an
independent planet.
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Failure Consequences: You
merely run a search for extraterrestrial signals. No real damage,
just an arguable waste of money.
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Success Consequences:
You're the de-facto ruler of Earth, but you're not really the top
dog. It's still probably an improvement for you, though.
|
Title: Write the Ultimate
Computer Viru
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Description: Write a
computer virus so powerful that it takes over all the computers of the
world and puts you in charge of them. You can then deny computer
functions (such as food, water, etc.) to those who don't obey
you. For this to work, you'd probably have to wait until
computers are put in charge of more of the necessary functions than
they are at present.
|
Price: Free, but you have
to be a genius virus writer.
|
Success %: 1%, as people
will probably just work around broken computers.
|
Damage: Anywhere from zero
damage to destroying every computer worldwide.
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Failure Consequences: Your
virus is written but never becomes widespread: no consequences.
You write it and get caught: civil or criminal penalties.
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Success Consequences: You
gain a tenuous control over the people of the world. The trouble
is that people will always be trying to get around your computer
systems.
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Title: Hypertechnology
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Description: You get
control of a set of technologies that put you so far in advance of
everybody else that you are effectively far stronger militarily than
the whole world. This is distinct from Military Conquest in that
instead of simply running a big military organization, you're
controlling all of the machines yourself. The other distinction
is that the conquest itself need not be military. If you control
sufficiently advanced technology, you could easily conquer in financial
or even political ways. (In Marooned in Realtime, it is mentioned
that Wili Wachendon had this degree of technology, though he chose not
to do it.)
One way to do this would be to travel back/forward in time, getting the
tech at the future end and using it at the past end.
|
Price: That's a good
question, as you, by definition, can't buy this stuff.
|
Success %: 90% (once you
have the technology)
|
Damage: Little to None
(With sufficiently advanced technology, it's easier, for example, to
keep the
missiles from being launched than to let them impact.)
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Failure Consequences:
You're merely a high-tech marvel and major player on the world scene.
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Success Consequences: You
control the entire population of the Earth, but that is less than the
complexity (and value) of your private posessions. Now why was it
that you bothered?
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Write your own! If you've got a way to take over the world that I
haven't included, or if you know of an aspect of one of the ways above
that I ignored, tell me! Just mail me at srehnadmin@gmail.com.
Title:?
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Description:?
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Price:?
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Success %:?
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Damage:?
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Failure Consequences:?
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Success Consequences:?
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