Ability to stop time.
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.
Also, the ability to stop time doesn’t guarantee the ability to start it again.
That’s some Monkey’s Paw shit right here
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.
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.
The Sentinel. I watched that back in the 90s.
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.
I never thought of that but yikes.
If I remember the show correctly, after the first few episodes he could mostly control when the enhanced senses were in use.
I mean, dogs somehow manage
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.
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.
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.
Honestly the best super power IMO is the ability to open gateways in time and space
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
Seeing as position is relative, why not?
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Imagine
How
Slowly
It
Seems
Like
Everyone
Is
Talking
To
The
Flash.
Can you imagine what it’s like when they ask him to search the entire city for a bomb? To him he’s spending months or even years just walking around looking in every room, every trash can, under every car, etc.
They actually address this with the super speed character in I’m a Virgo. Flora’s superpower is that she’s always bored x_x
Same in Invincible. The speedster basically has ADD because everyone else is so slow in comparison
Russia
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.
Eventually Kars stopped thinking
Cuz that would be an irl situation. Lol
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.
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This happened in the movie the guardians
Super speed. Even if you ignore the air friction and possible “everything moves too damn slow for me” problems, it doesn’t come with super endurance.
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?
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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.
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.
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.
Or high jump type flight. Flashbacks to Morrowind. Poor Tarhiel.
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.
Disregard modernity. Embrace lettuce.
When you step the air under your feet turns solid so you have to go infinitely up
I find this amusingly humorous.
and not so much a superpower. More like a disability. Wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere and would have to resort to living in a wheelchair.
What if you sit down while in the air? Or do a backflip?
Super speed. You’d have to slow down or die of heatstroke from air friction.
unless u use the speed force
I want to know what he writer was smoking when he came up with the ‘speed force’ idea.
x ray vision, pretty sure you need to expose things to x rays to see skeletons. You gonna walk around irradiating people with an x ray source?
Eh I don’t think this is meant to say it’s actually x-rays. Wouldn’t that require a receiving end on the other side of the person?
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
It would be good if you’re a super villain
Hearing everybody else’s thoughts all the time, X-Men is probably the most popular example
EVERY superpower is a curse if you can’t turn it off.
Teleportation. Unless truly instantaneous, you need to account for the fact that the earth moves 18 miles per second relative to the sun.
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.
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.
Very nicely addressed in the Jumper novels by Steven Gould.
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.
Why would you teleport relative to the sun or the center of the milky way? Wouldn’t it be easier to teleport relative to the nearest surface?
The universe doesn’t care what you think is easier.
It moves, you moving from one point in the universe to another needs to take into account where all the moving parts are going.
Only instant teleportation, where nothing has had time to move, would work. But that would be akin to traveling back in time.
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.
Laser cock.
my first thought was laser eyes. i pop in to see the comments and this is a way better answer
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…
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.
The more you think about the “super” genre the dumber it gets. And that’s quite apart from it’s gross political subtexts…
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.
