Like many a human, I sometimes think about what superpowers I would love to have in some alternate Marvel or DC reality.
How great would it be to read minds, be invisible, or have super speed? If I was a different sort of person I'd stop there, but I'm not, so I didn't. I thought about what day-to-day life would be like having these abilities, and what challenges I would face.
First off, if suddenly I found myself with an ability like flight, I imagine I would become the center of a media frenzy. I'd be labeled a "flier," and upon demonstrating my ability, I'm sure the FAA would intervene and some strange combination of litigation and regulation would ensue, all among journalists outside my door and talk show invitations...
...so I'd probably try to keep it to myself. This same sort of thing would happen with any demonstrable superpower, save perhaps more subtle ones like telepathy or invisibility.
For the purpose of this post, let's assume we live in a universe where superheros are not unheard of, yet all the same physics applies.
With any superpower, my first thought is generally "How can I use this to save people?" Superpowers aside, if I were a superhero, I think I would have a hard time finding crime (Though some ecologists have tried). It's not predictable, so it would be a lot "right place, right time" encounters. Many people are armed, so unless I was invincible like Superman, I'd leave the crime fighting to those with training, body armor, and experience.
Fighting crime with superpowers is dodgy, so in the long run I would probably end up using my powers for really banal purposes like turning off the monitor from across the room, or commuting, but that would still be pretty excellent.
Here are my personal pros and cons lists for some common superpowers:
Super Speed
Pros:
- Shorter commute
- Exotic vacations
- Save on gas
Cons:
- Concussions, passing out
- Barreling into bugs, birds, and buildings
- You would melt if you go too fast
Air is not empty. It's made of nitrogen, oxygen, and lots of "other." If you start trying to barrel through that at high velocity you start to heat up. If you travel at orbital velocity, this happens:
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You do not want this
to happen to you |
If you could run arbitrarily quickly, you could presumably accelerate arbitrarily quickly as well (as depicted in superhero films and Roadrunner cartoons). The problem with this is that your body cannot stand up to much acceleration; 60 - 80 G's to the head and you'll die. It's like the old saying goes, it isn't the fall that kills you, but the sudden stop. Same goes for super speed; if you stop on a dime (18 mm) going the speed of a bullet (350 m/s) you would pull over a quarter million (347k) G's. That'll kill you.
So let's say that's no problem; you're always very careful to accelerate slowly to avoid death by acceleration, what about turning? Highways are fairly straight most of the time. The tightest allowable turn on a US highway is denoted by this equation (page 63 here):
V is velocity in mph, R is the radius of the turn in feet. Your shoes, before they disintegrated, have about the same grip on asphalt as tires. If you stick a large speed in this equation for V, you quickly get an arbitrarily huge radius R (Mach 2.5 [not really that fast] yields the radius of the Earth [big]). You could tighten the radius a little because you can pull more G's than a car going the speed limit on the highway, but you can't cheat the underlying principle: if you want to go fast, you have to go essentially straight. If you want to execute a normal turn at a city intersection without pulling more than 3 G's, roughly the same amount as astronauts experience at takeoff, you would have to slow down to 55 miles per hour; any faster and a normal human risks passing out from a lack of blood in their brain.
Alright, lets say you're also very careful to slow down for turns. Here's the real clincher. Humans can't react to things immediately. Human reaction time is around 250 milliseconds, or around a quarter of a second. If you are travelling at 100 m/s (less than the max speed of a Ferrari), then you'll have traveled 25 meters, over 80 feet, before you can possibly react to anything in your path. If you are travelling at airline velocity, it is impossible to react to anything up to a little more than a football field away. Orbital velocity puts that distance at more than a mile. Are you willing to bet your life that the terrain is that smooth and featureless?
My last point is made most clearly by this picture:
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| Eww. |
E l a s t i c i t y
Pros:
- Reach the TV remote without getting up
- Can give self back rubs
Cons:
- You don't get to violate conservation of matter
- Can't pick up things too far away
- Get turned inside-out
Elasticity sounds pretty cool, and might come with the fewest problems. Let's assume your body can infinitely rearrange itself to achieve any shape, filling the new shape with the optimal bone, muscle and skin arrangement. The one rule you cant break is conservation of matter; if you're 75 kilograms, you're always 75 kilograms, no cheating.
The farther away your arms get from you, the less effective they are at picking things up. If you always have 4 kg worth of arm, and you stretch it out across the room, then your arm has to lift the same 4 kg mass, but the mass is farther away from the joint, and the less you can lift. Eventually your bone gets thin and brittle and will simply break under the load. Fortunately you can solve this problem by turning yourself inside out.
The lankiest animal I can think of is the daddy long legs (the term "daddy long legs" is confusing as demonstrated by this video. Here I'm talking about harvestmen).
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Some people don't like
pictures of spiders |
Spiders' legs are arranged in an exoskeleton. I think this is the best way to arrange our appendages to reach faraway objects and actually have a chance at picking them up. I started to go down the rabbit hole of the physics of exoskeletons, but after filling a sheet of paper with drawings and poorly-understood torque equations, I decided I was barking up the wrong tree. Humans and spiders are both made of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, so elastically rearrangeable humans could turn their arm into a spider arm with the same proportions (this arm would be inside out, with bone on the outside, skin and muscle on the inside).
Oddly, the internet doesn't have really exact numbers on harvestmen proportions, so I used this image to figure out how much longer the legs are in proportion to their length (which was unnerving at full scale). The front leg is 20 pixels wide and 2200 pixels long, meaning it is more than 100 times longer than it is wide. My arm is 10-12 cm in diameter, so if I used the same proportions, it could possibly be 12 meters (40 feet) long and still function somewhat. This is ignoring the cubed root law (things in three dimensions don't scale linearly because while length grows linearly, mass grows exponentially), which is really not something you should ignore. The actual reach would be much shorter than our spider dimensions.
My totally uninformed off-the-cuff guess is that you would just barely be able to lift the TV remote from across the room, but there's no way you could pick up a gallon of milk from the same distance.
<Telepathy>
Pros:
- Knowing what people around you are thinking.
Cons:
- Knowing what people around you are thinking.
...Immortality...
Pros:
- Laugh in Death's face
- Loss of universal human fear (one of them)
- +1 to courage
Cons:
- Scarred and ugly (-1 to appearance)
- No friends
- No memory
- Seem insane to others
Human minds are awful at large numbers. Here is a cool metaphor for 52 factorial (the number of ways to shuffle a deck of cards) The concept of infinity is incomprehensible, and thinking of a human being living on that timescale gets pretty terrifying pretty quickly.
First off, look at your hands. Seriously. Chances are there's a scar on at lest one of them. That scar takes up a very small percentage of your hand, but then again, you've only had a small amount of time to acquire scars on your hand. If you ran the clock an arbitrarily large amount forward, every bit of you would have some kind of scar and you'd end up looking like Deadpool.
If you continue to run the clock, humans would evolve around you, and eventually you would look to future humans how Neanderthals look to us. This might limit the *cough**cough* appeal you have to the sapiens of the distant future.
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| Hey there hot stuff |
Here is where things start getting weird. Humans do not have perfect memory, and are adapted to remember an 80-ish year long highlight reel (To oversimplify). Someone who lives for hundreds of years (not to mention billions) would not be able to store much more than what was for them their extremely recent past. Friendship would always be fleeting, and would lose their profundity. Friends would become a nicety, like having a pet, rather than a meaningful, balanced relationship. Political strife and wars would blend together leading to political apathy, or at least bemusement (think Tom Bombadil from the Lord of the Rings books). You would likely seem insane to others based off the way you interacted with the world that was streaming by you.
A lot of brilliant people have delved into the question of what it would be like to be immortal, or live a very long life, including Tolkien (Tom Bombadil), Gene Roddenberry (Spock was long lived), Catherine Tregenna (The Woman Who Lived, Doctor Who episode[one of the best treatments of immortality]), Oscar Wilde (Dorain Gray), and Douglas Adams (Bowerick Wowbagger). This is a really interesting question and for the sake of brevity, I'll leave that one here.
->Invisibility<-
Pros:
- Ability to sneak into events
- Fun pranks on friends - Fun pranks on enemies
- No sunburns
Cons:
- Not actually invisible
- Blind
There are two ways invisibility is portrayed in media. One is that you and your clothes are both invisible. I'm writing this off as a cop-out to make the idea more palatable for young viewers. For this purpose, only you can become invisible, not your clothes.
This naturally means that to take advantage of your invisibility, yoooooou'd have to be naked. Time to move to California. Temperatures under 60 degrees just wont do to take full advantage of your invisibility.
Alright, so you've stripped down and you're ready to go pester people, dispense justice to wrongdoers, and haunt your ex's. First you have to make sure you're really invisible. Have you washed yourself well? Surely the dust and dirt on your body isn't invisible. How about sweat? Make sure it isn't too hot, or people will see an outline of moisture following them as they're just trying to order lunch. In the rain you'll have the same problem. Be sure not to stay out too long, or you'll collect dirt and be perfectly visible.
What if the invisibility is just a property of your living cells? You would be very nearly wholly visible, as your epidermis consists of dead sacs of keratin, not living human cells. Your hair would sure look nice though.
Let's say you have figured out a way to stay cool, clean and dry, and include your skin and hair in your veil of invisibility. You move on to the next problem. Your blindness.
In order to be invisible, light has to either pass through you, or move around you and keep going along their original path. This means that either way, you are not interacting with any light, which is a shame, because that's how you see (there are materials that do this).
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The rainbow bars are incoming light,
and the solid green area is invisible |
Light has to hit your retinas in order for you to process what you're seeing as an image. If light is doing all it can to avoid you, it will miss your retinas, and you will be rendered effectively blind. The only way around this would be to reduce yourself to a floating pair of retinas, which might be noticed by some observant passersby.
There are many more superpowers and more problems with them, but I'll leave you with what I think would be my choice of super power: the ability to summon any animal at will. Want a cat? Cat. Want to put a badger in the car that just cut you off? You can. Want to go on vacation with your friend?
Done.
I put about ten seconds of thought into that last paragraph at around 4 am, but I'm keeping it in. Take it with a grain of salt.
Cheers,
- Scott
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