Imagine That: Peace On Earth

The Grand Council of Extra-Large Brains was in session. A very important member, called the Presiding Brain, stood up and addressed the other ninety-nine members.

"Gentlemen and otherwise," he said, tucking his hands into his pockets importantly, "We have met here today to discuss ways and means of bringing peace to our war-torn, disease-ravaged, hunger-battered, storm-ruined planet. Thanks to the Grand Council of Extra-large Brains we now have the technological ability to implement our decisions within five minutes of agreement on them. The world is at our disposal. Please make your decisions in an orderly manner!"

The delegate from Britain stood up.

"I would like to offer our country's best idea."

"You may proceed," said the Presiding Brain, sitting down.

"Before I make my country's submission, I would like to explain, briefly, how it came about." (He cleared his throat) "It started when we realized that many people have a clear idea of what they want to do when they grow up. Some children want to be teachers, or farmers, or ballet dancers, right from an early age. Our Brains studied this for a while and discovered that there is a small area of the brain that determines what a person will want to be. From there it was a short step to building a device that can beam a signal into a brain and cause that person to want to do a certain thing.

"We have stationed transmitters in space which can be programmed to beam a message into every brain on earth. All we need to know is what kind of things we want every person on earth to want to do."

The delegate from Britain sat down and the Presiding Brain stood up.

"There will be ten minutes discussion, then we will all cast our votes."

All the Brains began to talk rapidly between themselves. They were all so intelligent they didn't need to talk for hours and hours, as mere Normal Brains did. Some of them became quite heated. The delegates from Iran and American shouted at each other intelligently of course. The Chinese delegate refused to speak to the Korean delegate, which the Korean decided was a very intelligent decision. The Japanese delegate banged her fist on the desk and said something which nobody understood, which was odd because everyone in the room was multi-lingual.

When the ten minutes were up, the Presiding Brain