There was a TV show about a guy with super senses -hearing, smell, touch, vision. I grew up with brothers, learned to breathe defensively to not smell things, and remember thinking there is no way I would survive having a supernaturally sensitive sense of smell. There are just more bad smells than good in an average day.
I think also that hearing people’s thoughts would drive anyone crazy.
What I would like to have is super jumping and landing, sort of like flying but just bouncing.
I mean, my dog thinks garbage and shit are the greatest smells possible and he’s the most trustworthy person I know, so I have to assume it all circles back on itself somehow.
That is it! I remember thinking what an awful boyfriend he would be. Like, it would just be so uncomfortable to think he was always thinking you stink because everything was dialed up to 2000%. Never wanting him to go down on you because any taste/smell would be so magnified. Perfumes would hurt him too. And he’d probably want you so quiet as well.
A lot of them assuming you don’t get the required secondary powers.
Super speed, if your perceptions aren’t heightened it rapidly becomes impractical, if they are things are going to get painfully boring real quick. Even thinking at double speed means you are going to be waiting for the world to catch up a lot. Never mind what even relatively low G-forces can do to someone.
Super-hearing. Imagine if you really could hear conversations a block away, it can be hard enough discerning one conversation in a crowded room, imagine it being like that everywhere. All the rats and insects you will be hearing, the sound of people’s clothes rubbing together. Even if normally loud things aren’t deafening just focusing on one thing will be taxing.
If you don’t get secondary powers then super strength is going to suck. The human body is already capable of injuring itself with its own strength. How many fastball pitchers get arm or shoulder injuries just from throwing something really fast, or power-lifters who have something break or burst. Modern sporting records are starting to push up against the structural limits of the human body.
Super-hearing. Imagine if you really could hear conversations a block away, it can be hard enough discerning one conversation in a crowded room, imagine it being like that everywhere. All the rats and insects you will be hearing, the sound of people’s clothes rubbing together. Even if normally loud things aren’t deafening just focusing on one thing will be taxing.
Super hearing would essentially be tinnitus with some variety in the inescapable noise.
Also it would be similar to the experience a lot of autistic people have with their sense of hearing. Feeling overwhelmed by the background noise of every nearby animal, bit of noisy clothing, conversation, and heavy machinery is par for the course for me.
I think the superhearing power is going to be different than you think. You can already hear your clothes rubbing against skin, the air conditioning blowing, etc. Your brain is pretty good at filtering those out. Now, the conversations will be more difficult, but think about your experiences at a party. Most of the time you can hear another group’s conversation if you listened and focused on them, but you can tune them out (most of the time, ignoring the cocktail party effect stuff for now). Unless you have focus issues already, it wouldn’t be a big deal. The issue would be the initial period where your brain has to learn what exactly to filter out. Right now, a rustle to my right would be a bad sign, and hearing a rat crawling through the wall would freak me out. After a few weeks though, I bet I’d have adjusted.
Yeah, I don’t mean my own clothes, (though I do quite often hear them). I mean everyone’s. I’ve also spent quite a bit of time living in a building where you could hear the rats moving about rather clearly (through a combination of a rat problem and some poor construction decisions.) Yes it goes from a ‘what was that?’ alert to a ‘oh it’s the rats’ but you still notice. It’s very different to continuous background noises like AC or traffic.
Loving one’s life as if always at a loud party is exactly the thing I’m seeing as the problem. Yes you can actively focus on something specific, but always having to do that is going to be unpleasant. Never mind all the stuff you are going to overhear that you don’t want to overhear.
Yeah, as someone with misophonia, I can’t imagine my hearing getting better than it is. Already I can’t tune stuff out, and it’s not just people talking. It’s ALL the lawn work in my neighborhood! It’s the bunny rustling leaves in my backyard from my bedroom. It’s the fan in the fridge that everyone else just blocks out. The gurgle of the fish tank. Lights make a high pitched noise, as do other electronics. That’s all before people. The amount of noises people make that others tune out is so much! Rubbing your fingers together. The spit in your mouth right before you speak. If I’m cuddling with you, the liquid squish your eyes make when you blink. The creaking and popping of your joints! Even just breathing is a loud constant. Most everyone else is filtering all this out, but it’s not something you can learn to time out. You either can or you can’t, and if you can’t you end up literally moving because your neighbor coughs too much and it wakes you up in the middle of the night.
Super speed would come with similar issues as super strength. You would get less than a block, and you’d just be a skeleton.
Not to mention, the concept of saving someone from being hit by a car, likely results in 1 or (more likely) both of you being turned into paste from the impact.
Superpowers really only work in comics and movies, in real life there’s just too many variables.
I think there is no situation where you gain super speed without extreme forces resistance, because if you exert the force to move at the speed of sound but aren’t resilient then your muscles, bones, and tendons will immediately shred themselves with that first step.
Seeing as the earth is constantly moving at 1600 km/h I feel like it would be incredibly difficult to actually open a portal on earth in the past or future
Super strength is something I could see being problematic.
The movies always show the super strong hero picking up buses or trains with one hand, but in reality you have to lift such vehicles in specific places, or they will be damaged. Youtube is full of videos depicting cars falling from mechanic’s lifts due to improper lift point placement, or just old fasioned rust. Imagine Mr. Incredible going to pick up a bus in a state where the roads are salted, and just breaking off a handful of the frame.
This is the kind of gritty reality I’d like to see in a movie. Stuff is constantly breaking when the hero tries to pick it up, he has to go through a montage of classes on structure and how to choose the best place to grab onto things.
Also leverage. Unless the super strength comes with stability, lifing a boulder from the edge would just make the hero’s feet slip out from under them. He has to lift one side straight up until he can fit underneath to balance the thing. Then he has to hope that the ground below can withstand all the weight of the boulder pressing on the soles of his feet.
Also, even if you were that strong, the calories you’d have to eat to pick up that shit and put out that much force would be insane. The Hulk would have to eat wheelbarrows of food after throwing cars around
I never thought about that but you’re correct. You can mess up your car really bad if you put the carjack anywhere else than the strong parts of the frame.
Haha I’ve thought of that. Maybe they can add that to a Deadpool movie or something with a super strong character ripping up a car finding the lift points.
I think in that case I’d just ask them to write it down and I’ll come read it and write a response when they’re done, then could go do something else in that time- I guess it’s like my life now… text me or what you said doesn’t exist… 😆😩
I think this is really the only thing there is, without assuming there isn’t “complete control” over it. You either sacrifice total invisibility to be a floating pair of eyes (or at least 1), or you’re blind but totally invisible. Making it truly impractical even if you have full control over the ability.
Great take on this in a D&D setting where a players character was able to roll incredibly high to notice an invisible person. The DM came up with this solution on the spot and made fantasy and logic weave together for a believable solution and an awesome situation:
If everything but your pupils were invisible, and your pupils were 90% invisible, it’d probably be fine. Most humans can comfortably see with 10% of the light.
It depends on what kind of “invisibility” you mean, if you’d be able to assume the temperature and texture of any material you’d be invisible but could still see. If you mean invisibility by breaking light you can’t really say, since we don’t yet know how we could use this to make a human body invisible, thereforce we don’t know the counter meassures yet
if you’d be able to assume the temperature and texture of any material you’d be invisible but could still see.
That’s not invisibility just camouflage.
Like, you can have the same texture as the wall you are standing in front of, but you’d still show up as a human-shaped piece of wall protruding out. Or if a bug was to crawl on the wall behind you, you’d block it’s view.
Assuming that the invisibility is based on a physical property. You could also be psychically invisible where you manipulate others minds so they don’t see you.
Superman’s powers would be totally impractical in real life. I mean, destroying any building you’re in with a fart you didn’t catch in time doesn’t sound very practical to me…
And if you clamp those steel cheeks you create the paradox between an immovable object vs an unstoppable force. Turns out super humans also get the super shits.
Larry Niven covered this in 1974’s, “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” which discusses the impracticality of Superman/Clark Kent having sex.
The problem is this. Electroencephalograms taken of men and women during sexual intercourse show that orgasm resembles “a kind of pleasurable epileptic attack.” One loses control over one’s muscles.
Superman has been known to leave his fingerprints in steel and in hardened concrete, accidentally. What would he do to the woman in his arms during what amounts to an epileptic fit?
Consider the driving urge between a man and a woman, the monomaniacal urge to achieve greater and greater penetration. Remember also that we are dealing with kryptonian muscles.
Superman would literally crush LL’s body in his arms, while simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout.
Sort of. You don’t really see things on x-rays, you see shadows created by denser material.
Projecting X-rays at your target wouldn’t be very useful, as they are usually absorbed rather than reflected back (I think). You’d be able to see if somehow the subject got between you and a significant source of x-rays
Immortality. If you go to the bottom of the ocean or space without protection your muscles won’t get any more oxygen and you’ll get rigor mortis and basically be stuck forever.
I mean, if you lived 987,643 years and counting then what are the chances you don’t end up somewhere absurd at some point or another? I think there is just a point where getting stuck is a statistical certainty.
As soon as you stop time, everything will go pitch black. The photons which refract off everything will be absorbed by your eyes instantaneously.
Assuming you could still see, it would be freezing everywhere as the heat would dissipate the moment you touched it.
Assuming you could still see, and wouldn’t freeze to death, if you were to unfreeze time, the human-shaped vacuum tube you created while walking from point A to B would collapse violently, killing you, and anyone else standing close to it.
This also assumes that with time stopped, you can push microscopic particles around. If not, then any movement at all will make every molecule around you act as radiation, and and dust will feel like tiny razor blades, ripping through your body.
Also, the ability to stop time doesn’t guarantee the ability to start it again.
Lack of light is something that does come up with the History Monks in Discworld. Although they only slow down time, so they can see things, just very dimly lit.
On top of that you need to account for the fact that the earth’s surface is moving at different speeds depending on latitude and elevation. Even if you can do the calculations to hit your mark, there is most likely to be some energy mismatch that needs to be accounted for.
And isn't the solar system moving at like 500000 miles an hour around the milkyway too?
Teleportation and timetravel both have this issue where you have to take a fuckload of moving parts we don't even completely understand yet, into account.
Time travel would have to imply teleportation as well. If teleportation is actually instant or ftl, it would also be at least some level of time travel as you would be able to move outside your causal envelope.
The Universe doesn’t give a damn about the Sun or the Milky Way, either, idiot. There is no defined central point for all coordinates. Everything is relative to something else or might as well be staying perfectly still for all intents and purposes.
Inertial systems are all equal in a certain relevant here sense, if there is no need for account for your movement relative to Sun, Galaxy, CMB, or anything else. Yes, in this sense, Sun also rotates around Earth.
This doesn’t make sense. The earth moves at very different speeds depending on what you compare it to. The only thing that makes sense is for the teleportation to be relative to the teleporter. Maybe it would still require taking into account rotation, instead of linear momentum. idk, still seems complicated.
But if it takes time, there’s a moment where you’re not there, and thus, the reference is lost.
Instant teleporting no problems though. I would even be okay with nightcrawler/Minecraft nether-like teleport where you travel through another locked in dimension.
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