I can see how it'd be controversial. It's a special case of the Three Wishes fable, whose moral is "be careful what you wish for, you just might get it". Every wish turns out to have unanticipated side effects. I use the Three Wishes as sort of a "SETI screen saver" for my brain--when it has nothing else to do, I set it to work trying to formulate wishes so watertight they actually produce the desired result. One lobe formulates wishes, the other picks them apart.

Like SETI, no luck so far.

Any wish can be picked apart and that's what makes this a fun party game. For example, your #1 choice, to have everyone speak a common language seems so elegant and compelling it ought to be a no-brainer. God cursed us with multiple tongues for our arrogance at trying to build the Tower of Babel, so logically you'd think a single language would remove the curse and all would be sweetness and light.

But then I remember that everybody here at the HabitableZone speaks a single language, but somehow we never achieve perfect communication, and sometimes we fail to communicate at all. Our communication doesn't seem to lead to peace and harmony, now does it? Part of the problem is that with a common language you learn that people disagree with you, and you can understand the insults, too. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Eliminating race sounds good, too. But then I think, the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our skins, but in our obsession with finding the differences between us. Identical twins and their families can tell them apart. The problem isn't race, race is an artificial and arbitrary concept. If Caucasions were the single race, next day we'd sort ourselves into blond, brunette, and redhead races.

One monolith monotheistic religion? How boring! I think pantheism is ever so much more fun. And less dangerous, since it has checks-and-balances built into it. In fact, now that I think about it, pantheism is much like representative democracy in that you can shop around for a sympathetic god, and monotheism much like dictatorship in which you have no choice and no appeal.

It seems like the only way to make those three wishes work--or any three wishes to improve humanity--would require that you eliminate all individuality. Because when you get right down to it, all of the strife and dissatisfaction in the world is based on individual differences.

But that's also the source of all our creativity and drive and philosophy and science and...well, just about everything that makes us human and keeps life interesting.

I don't think I'm nearly smart enough or wise enough to play this game. God's already tried it, and look how we turned out!