Fun fact! There’s a theory that the reason humans can’t run faster than ~25 mph is because at that speed the injuries from an impact become much more life threatening. So everyone who was capable of running that fast would generally die by running into something or tripping
Neat theory, but I dont think I buy in. When we have tools and packs to keep us safe from predators, and any old human can run down a gazelle by just jogging after them for an hour til they collapse from heat exhaustion, where is the evolutionary pressure to be a super-sprinter?
Predators were a much bigger threat than you realize. Us being the dominant species has more to do with us being in groups. All it would take is one hunting trip gone wrong and your sprinting for your life.
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.
close to all of them if we take real physics into effect. Anything impractical can be made practical by just making its practicality part of the story.
Unless your power is to control fire, the power to create fire or engulf yourself in fire would be mostly useless. Finding or making fireproof (not fire resistant) clothing would be a pain and uncomfortable to wear all the time. Plus, a lot of things are flammable, so unless you plan to be a super villain you’re more of a menace shooting flames everywhere than you are a hero.
Mr. Impossible kept him alive in a vacuum to prevent Cody the human torch from bursting into flames… until he became evil and trapped him in an oxygen rich chamber to power his skyscraper.
Not sure why it has to be. Being a superpower, it already defies logic. Why is it necessarily painful? I don’t see why the brain can’t temporarily shut off pain receptors if it’s already doing something fantastical.
I’m reminded of the Animorphs books, where they describe the process as grotesque and the odd sensations they feel.
Any sort of super strength without added toughness and motor control. You’d break your own body let alone everything around you pretty fast. Same for juggernaut movement. Or high jump type flight.
Being able to turn into metal/sand/water/bats/lettuce or whatever without additional magic would destroy the structure and state of your brain immediately.
I think you guys are overthinking things too much. In a world in which some magical phenomenon can turn you into a lettuce, all of a sudden you draw the line at brain functions?
Maybe it works like caterpillar goop in the cocoon. It’s goop, and not exactly a caterpillar anymore, but experiments have shown that there’s at least some persistence of being, even after the former caterpillar-goop has become a butterfly. E.g. If you train a caterpillar to react to a specific stimuli with a negative response, the resultant butterfly will respond to the same stimuli in the same way that the caterpillar did.
I think this is the way they explained it away. But then other extremely strong supes can lift gigantic things as well. I’m actually OK with them not trying to explain it.
I think that’s why I love that series. Each quirk has a consequence to it. One-for-all can store and unleash energy, but unless you use that stored power to reinforce the opposite forces, your bones will disintegrate
I had always wanted my superpower to be flight obviously because flight is the shit. I went to my local theme park after the Batman ride opened. I can hear what you thinking Batman doesn’t fly. This particular coaster, they put you in laying down on your back, lock you in and then the bat wing flips you over. Every negative G turn, unless you’re gripping onto things with your hands, you just rag doll. Even if you could magically work out flight it would just be a constant painful workout trying to keep your limbs from looking stupid while you’re doing it.
Forever War delved into the problems with super strength. The power armor took a humongous amount of training to be used finely enough in everyday tasks and not break something or someone. A simple handshake between someone in power armor and someone without could result in crushed bones or a ripped off arm. A great show of skill in using the power armor was the main character sitting down in office and writing a letter with pen and paper while wearing the armor!
Another great example of how dangerous superstrength is when dealing with non-superstrength people was in anime Beastars where one big carnivore accidentally ripped off the arm of his smaller non-carnivore friend. In-lore was said to be a very common thing to the extent that limb reattachment is a common medical procedure.
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.
I remember one of the tidbits I picked up from a psychology textbook was that people who were worse at knowing if their partner was lying were in happier relationships. Turns out that white lies are important.
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 speed. Either you would need to also think and react at super speeds, which mean the world would be agonizingly slow, or you would have normal speed reaction in which case you would crash and die.
There is also the option of super reaction time on demand, but in any case non of this matters as super speed would make the air as “thick” as a concrete wall so you would also need to me super strong and super durable.
This might not be a problem, since you could regulate how fast you run, in which case you could run as fast as a car which wouldn’t necessarily require other super stats
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