I will use my magical powers for good – although this must be achieved by stealth, or else I fear I will be removed by the black helicopters and transported to some kind of secure scientific location in which I will be expected to live out the rest of my life. Of course, creating food and water can help out some of the poor and needy in the immediate vicinity, although for more long-term assistance they will need money in their pockets and better career choices – well, alchemical skills can turn lead into gold so no problem with the first part but, for the second, it may be necessary to do some beguiling of leading political elites to cause them to change their policies. Polymorph self and speak other languages will be necessary to gain access to those who make the decisions. Additionally, clairaudience and clairvoyance will be used to ensure that those decisions are being conducted in the appropriate way and in due time.

It seems hardly feasible to cure all the sick people of the world but some pains can be removed. Removing curses might help a small number of people with mental health problems but more intensive magical research will be required to tackle the major issues involved. It is unfortunate that so much effort has been devoted to finding ways in which magic can be used to hurt and kill people and destroy objects and so little to improve the lot of humanity. Perhaps the gods have been involved in this because they fear the loss of their baleful influence if humanity is able to escape from its servitude and live freely and with plenty.

As for global warming, well, transmuting enormous quantities of greenhouse gases into less dangerous substances will be an exhausting and probably impossible task. Cleaning up dangerous pollutants from even one large coal plant of the many thousands in China is also likely to be beyond the scope of a single mage. It would probably be more effective to try to concentrate efforts on mind control of those powerful enough to influence how the dangerous substances get into the atmosphere in the first place. More work needs to be done in this regard, too.

A final area of research for today will be to consider whether magical spells can be used to target specific viruses. If they could be destroyed selectively, then perhaps people could recover from HIV infection. But the magical technology necessary to identify different types of virus and only attack those identified as undesirable remains unproven. Pity that we cannot use tiny fireballs on them.

Back next Wednesday.