If a thousand people died every time you said "hello", would you still walk up to people and say "hello"?

This is a prompt that was used quite recently (last 1 or 2 years) on this sub, but I'm sure it's been asked about on other subs from Reddit too.<br><br>I think it's a great question for a worldbuilding exercise, and what I'd like to do with it is create a scenario out of it, and discuss it. Here's my take on it:<br><br>* Human population is the same as it is now<br>* Everyone is born with the ability to kill a random 1,000 people in the world outside of their control by saying "hello" out loud whenever they want, and the 1,000 people will in fact die.<br>* People aren't killed instantly, they just die one day. There's a lag, so let's say that people die from the 1,000 in most Asian countries a full day before people start dying in the Americas.<br>* As long as the person who said "hello" is alive, the death count only goes up. If they die, the death count freezes at whatever number it was at when they died.<br>* When a person says "hello", they're not aware of who's going to die. They don't learn anything about the 1,000 people that are going to die. They just know that 1,000 people will die.<br>* It only works with the English word "hello". Any other way of saying "hello" doesn't count. So if you say a friendly "hi", that's fine. "Hey", "hey there", "hello there", "what's good", all the synonyms for "hello" don't count and won't kill anyone.<br>* It only works with the literal word "hello". If you say it differently, it doesn't count. "Hulla loo" would not work. However, if you speak English and have an accent which changes how you pronounce "hello", it still works. So someone from England saying "hello" with an English accent still works, someone from Boston saying it still works, someone from New York saying it still works, etc... If you have a speech impediment, it still works, etc...<br>* If you have any mental disorder that prevents you from understanding that you're killing others when you say "hello", it still works. If you had no idea that it worked, it still works.<br>* It's been this way since the dawn of time. Humans have always had this power. There's no origin story for why it is this way, or who's responsible, or any of that.<br>* There's no way to circumvent this power. You can't say "hello" and have any way of preventing the deaths that follow. Even if you go back in time and say "hello" at some point in the past, even if that point in the past is before humans started saying "hello" as a word, it still works.<br>* If you say "hello" in writing, by typing it, by writing it down, by signing it, painting it, drawing it, however you communicate "hello", it doesn't count. It only works if you speak it out loud.<br>* People who are deaf and hard of hearing cannot kill anyone by saying "hello" because they cannot hear it. However, if someone who is deaf says "hello" out loud, it still works. It's a matter of whether the person saying "hello" can hear or not.<br><br>**Given these rules, what do you think the world would be like and how would people behave?**