Ask YC: What would you attempt if you knew you couldn’t fail?

* Sneak onto the space shuttle and go into space. Optionally jumping out the door at any time (going up, in orbit or one the way down).

* Kidnap myself and demand a ridiculously high ransom from the state.

* Restart the Free Love movement.

* Put my name is as Democratic candidate, sweep the rest of the election and 100% of the super delegates, and then become the most unexpected and powerful man in the world by winning the general election

* The most epic, cross-country, high speed police chase ever.

* My favorite parts of GTA, in real life. This includes pilot lessons after breaking into an airport by jumping a 15 foot fence with a BMX bicycle I stole from a gangster on the sidewalk down the block.

* Flip a quarter heads up, repeatedly, on national TV under scientific scrutiny. Sound boring? Wait until I do it 1000 times in a row, all heads up. The astronomical odds would make me more likely to be a demigod than just a really "lucky" guy. Not enough? Flip it 10,000 more times. If you do the near-impossible enough times, people will think you are the third coming. And then life gets fun. :)

I would try to deliberately fail on purpose just to see what happened. Could be dangerous though.

Sleep with supermodels, starting with Jessica Alba.

I'd make everybody happy, without compromising the long-term prospects of the human race. And then I'd do something even more awesome, but I'd have to begin somewhere.

Envisioning what things will be like 10,000 years from now.

I think the possibility of failure is a great motivator, so I wonder if I would have the motivation to attempt to succeed if I knew I wouldn't fail.

The most interesting things I've ever done started with questions that began "I wonder if..."

I've changed my mind. After reading some of these answers. I remember reading (some possibly apocryphal) stories about Tibetan monks able to run for days on end and sit on mountaintops in freezing weather without getting cold.

I would attempt to learn how to unlock the true power of the mind and teach others to do so (to eliminate fear and the self-talk stuff that stops us)

http://www.presscluboftibet.org/china-tibet-17/lung-gom-pa.h...

I'd attempt (and succeed, apparently) at creating pervasive and reliable life-extension technology.

Either that or some kind of upload technology. Charles Stross' "Vile Offspring," here I come!

Strong AI, obviously.

Start a profitable business and be successful in mentoring others how to start their profitable business (not network marketing by any means)

The lottery.

What does the word "fail" mean?

ToE.

Which makes this a very funny question: you could also attempt to calculate the instantaneous position of an electron within an atom. And not fail. And when you don't fail, you failed.

Solve the halting problem. One minor detriment: because it would effectively create an infinite solution in a finite space, the resulting impact on space-time would probably be cataclysmic.

Become ruler of the world?

Ground me somewhere on this one.

Fly?

Some kind of space propulsion company like John Carmack

And also autonomous control of some other things.

Cure hunger. Challenging problem where you would need the wind at your back.

Sex

I would set 1 = 2, and the universe would implode!

Dive the blue hole in Dahab

Begin a career as a trader.

Faster-than-light travel.

take on world poverty.

time travel!

Persuade parents to act much more rationally, invent enough life extension and backup-and-restore-of-people for immortality, win the war on terror (with a single heartfelt speech), make dirt cheap self-replicating, easily programmable nano-bots that understand English.