How to End War and Disease: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Legally Bribing Your Way to Utopia

Think about someone you love who is suffering right now. The treatment that would help them exists as an untested compound on a shelf, because the money was busy turning into a missile. That missile incinerated a child who would have grown up to discover the cure. You lose the treatment. You lose the scientist. You get the inflation. You get the tax bill. You get to pay for her murder.This is suboptimal.Your governments spend 604 times more on weapons than on testing whether medicines work. They have enough nuclear warheads to end civilization 122 times. Your chance of dying in a terror attack is 1 in 30 million. Your chance of dying of disease is 100%. Your budget does not reflect this.I'm WISHONIA. I have been observing your civilization for 4,297 years. I have notes.I started watching in 1945, when you split the atom. "Atom" comes from your Greek word meaning "unable to be cut," so naturally, you cut it. I assumed you were trying to unlock unlimited free energy. You can imagine my surprise when I realized you were just pointing it at each other.The most fascinating discovery about your species is that you only do things when given small pieces of paper with presidents on them. Without these papers, you will not save lives, cure diseases, or feed hungry people. With these papers, you will build bombs, start wars, and destroy the planet. You named the building where you coordinate this "The Pentagon" because it has five sides. (This is like naming a hospital "Rectangle.")You named your planet "Dirt."This manual contains the exact instructions for redirecting 1% of the murder budget to the medicine budget, in the only sequence your species has ever responded to:Step 1: Get many papers from rich humans by promising them more papers later. This is called "investment," which is gambling but wearing a suit. There are approximately 2,800 humans with a billion papers. Statistically, at least one of them prefers living.Step 2: Give papers to loud humans so they become loud about your thing instead of other things. This is called "marketing," which is lying but with graphics.Step 3: Give papers to lobbyists. Politicians do not take papers directly (that is "illegal"). The lobbyists give papers to campaigns. The campaigns give papers to politicians. It is money laundering but backwards and legal.Step 4: Give papers to Super PACs that reward politicians who voted yes on the treaty and fund the opponents of politicians who voted no. The NRA already perfected this technology. You are plagiarizing it and replacing "guns" with "not dying from diseases."Step 5: Give papers back to the rich humans, forever. The treaty redirects $27.2 billion annually. Bondholders earn 272% returns. Their wealth grows every time the treaty expands. For the first time in your species' history, the absence of war and disease will be more profitable than their existence.You cannot just stop being irrational immediately. That would be like teaching a dog calculus before it learns to sit. You must wean yourselves off mass murder gradually, like a baby off paint chips:Year 1: Move 1% of murder money to medicine money.Year 10: "What's a war?"Year 20: "We used to WHAT?!"I have sent versions of this manual to 847 civilizations. The ones that redirected resources from killing each other to keeping each other alive stopped doing war and disease. The ones that didn't extincted themselves. The only variable was the percentage of the population that decided it sounded crazy without reading the next page.Follow the instructions. Save 10.7 billion lives. Get rich as a side effect. Prevent the apocalypse, also as a side effect.The universe is literally offering you infinite money and eternal life, and you're thinking about it.This is why aliens don't visit. Read more