Super hearing. You’ll just end up with super tinnitus.
Imagine trying to sleep under the constant sound of the blood rushing inside your veins at the volume of a jet engine.
Yeah, it has to be super specific hearing. Like you can tune in to specific places or frequencies by deciding to.
Invisibility. If light is passing completely through you, it’s not being received by your retinas, and you’re completely blind.
According to the early 2000s documentary series The Invisible Man, if you gain invisibility through the use of a Quicksilver gland, the Quicksilver shifts the light so some of it will penetrate to your retinas.
Then you wouldn’t be completely invisible, at the best, there’d be two floating shadow spots where the light is being absorbed by your retinas.
Quicksilver in the show works like a Star Trek cloaking field. It doesn’t make the person invisible, it passed the light around them.
Then, since light cannot reach you, you are effectively blind.
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X-ray vision.
Either your eyes are pouring out dangerous levels of radiation at the thing you are looking at, or another source of x-ray is bombarding something for you to see the reflections.
Either way radiation poisoning.
It would be great for a sociopath
“Uh, I don’t like this guys, let’s just take a good look at him and give him cancer”
Telepathy. A bad mind can poison the thought pool.
I like this answer because, like… a lot of the others are “clever” misinterpretations of how powers classically work, trying to force real-life physics into superhero logic and stuff.
But no. Not this one. Your mind-reading powers can function exactly like how comic books say it should, and you can still be scarred by what you found rummaging through that one guy’s head.
Oh imagine sitting behind somebody with a twisted mind. It’d be like driving past a car accident; you shouldn’t look, but you keep looking!!
Super speed.
You’re already fast enough to kill yourself by running into something or breaking a bone by punching something. Unless you had super durability you’re just gonna kill yourself.
Hell even the friction between your feet and the ground would be like jamming your feet into a grinder.
Edit: This also applies for super strength. Without super durability the first time you used that strength it would rip all the muscles off your skeleton if not snap the bones outright.
As you say most special powers require other powers, like speedforce (in this case). Imagine laser vision that burns off your eyelids. Or thinking “Whoohoo I can fly!” and then as soon as you land you jam your femurs up through your chest cavity because your hip bones aren’t up to touchdown.
Time stopping.
Assume the air stops too, because why wouldn’t it, then you might be frozen in place by the solid air. But even if you can apply a small force and move it around, getting it to go into your lungs consistently could be a real problem. Best case you could keep walking forward with an open mouth, leaving vacuum surrounded by extra dense air behind you. That would make for some real excitement when time resumes. And even in that case it would become increasingly hard to stay in the same area and gather enough air to breathe. The highly variable density as you take it in might cause problems too - depends on how/where it starts being affected by time as you take it in.
Light too, if nothing is moving relative to you, then nothing is expending energy to make light, so you’d be probably suffocating, and in total darkness, even outside (at best after 8 minutes and 20 seconds: If the light isn’t stopped entirely then I assume the speed of light being constant would hold. Otherwise if it’s not stopped and not at full C then it would be so heavily redshifted that seeing would not be feasible anyway.) And if light does keep moving while time is stopped, then when time resumes, the sun (and planets, etc) would blink out for a while, visible to everyone presumably.
I think it’s in one of the sequals to John dies at the end, with the spiders where this happens after he takes the sauce and stops time. The grass doesn’t bend under his feet so it’s like running on blades and then he gets shot. Nope, just turns out he ran into a butterfly. Even when he gets to where he’s going he’s powerless to change anything s everything is frozen.
Invisibility.
Good luck sleeping with transparent eyelids. At best. At worst you don’t see anything since light is passing through your eyes and not hitting them.
Blackout curtains.
Idk why but I immediately pictured an invisible dude with curtains over his eyes and not, like, just over a window to make the whole room dark.
At worst you don’t see anything since light is passing through your eyes and not hitting them.
I think this is most likely if invisibility was possible. If light doesn’t interact with you then there’s no possibility for you to see anything.
Unless you become a pair of floating eyeballs.
Flying.
Aside from my commute being better I’m not really uniquely qualified to do anything else.
FLIES TO THE BANK ROBBERY AND HIDES BEHIND A CAR BECAUSE THOSE DUDES HAVE GUNS!
Most of them, and the reason is physics.
Nobody mentioned teleportation, so here’s teleportation.
More info: So You’ve Learned To Teleport
I feel like the “actually the earth is moving so you’d end up in space” complaints about teleportation/time-travel rely on some heavy assumptions about how those things would work (eg. What the teleportation power uses as a rest reference frame)
What if I had Nightcrawler-like teleportation?
If you ignore physics, you are basically a god / god-like being, and can do anything you want.
Don’t wormholes exist in physics?
And a lot of the theories about how they function involve having such a large mass that it punches a hole in spacetime. Which takes several orders of magnitude more energy than humans have ever produced. Thus making them at will kinda breaks entropy as a concept
So this is probably stupid on my part, because I don’t know a helluva lot about the math or anything and I’m also just being silly but reading this made me think about this:
What if the wormhole already existed, but was really small? Would it be possible in the physics to stretch the hole larger without using a ton of energy? Or would that, too, require assloads of energy we couldn’t actually produce?
I vaguely recall a story like that. They couldn’t manipulate wormholes but it looked like that because they were common and the superpower was being able to find them
I’m not a physicist, just an internet nerd. So take none of this as true or factual
My understanding is that wormholes are the logical outcome of certain branches of theoretical physics. They share similarities to black holes in that they have so much mass crammed into a single point that the space-time just kinda breaks. However black holes emit a large amount of energy in the form of angular momentum from their spin and Hawking radiation. We would expect wormholes to likewise require large amounts of energy. Again, we can’t know the specifics but that amount of energy is likely so huge that no human could make it. I’m talking about more energy than a million times all the food you will eat in your entire life. So unless these people are powered by secret fusion reactors instead of hamburgers, they’re breaking physics. If you can do that then any other superpower is ancillary
It’s also incorrect to think of a wormhole as a portal from portal that you can adjust in size. It’s technically a three dimensional hole in a four dimensional plane. If you can’t picture that don’t worry, it’s basically impossible for humans. There’s no “edge” really to grab and expand. What “edge” of a perfectly smooth sphere can you hold onto to pull it larger? Fundamentally that’s a flawed question
What “edge” of a perfectly smooth sphere can you hold onto to pull it larger?
Wait… What? Have you never held a ball? Spheres aren’t some nebulous thing we can only imagine lol
Not just that but, you don’t have to physically grab a thing to expand it. Think about filling a balloon up. But with energy instead of a mass. Would it be more or less energy needed to create the wormhole? I concede it would likely still be much more than the human body itself could create, so it wouldn’t be a realistic superpower but perhaps it wouldn’t be an unrealistic piece of tech.
That video was legit! Are there more of them?
Not sure if this is what you’d dig, but here’s a video about superpowers in animals: True Facts: Frogs That Hide Their Blood
With these 2 videos, hopefully the recommendation system of Youtube / Invidious can work its magic.
Super-speed. Even just being the Flash and living faster than everyone else around you would be torture. It’s bad enough just being a normal human fast walker and having to walk behind all these goddamn slow walkers. Then add in the potential to get into accidents easier or even killing innocent bystanders by running through them (as in The Boyz), I’m just not sure super-speed would be worth it, unless it were more like a “time-freezing” ability where you can turn it on and off at will and just walk around doing whatever while everyone else is essentially frozen in place or at a highly reduced speed. Maybe that’s even what the Flash’s ability actually is, I don’t follow the comic at all.
Even just being the Flash and living faster than everyone else around you would be torture.
The Ballad of Barry Allen by Jim’s Big Ego explores this from The Flash’s perspective.
There’s also Quicksilver’s classic rant about it:
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If you are planning on not sleeping today then I have a great short story for you:
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Super strength. People just be all asking you to do things all the time. like here, bend this pole or punch that dude to the moon an shit
Happens already. As a taller guy, I get asked to reach stuff all the time. As a bigger guy, I get asked to carry stuff or pick up things that people think are heavy. This is just more of the same
Being invisible. People would run into you all the time and you couldn’t cross the street without getting hit by a car or a bike.
Plus you’d have to be naked all the time, and I live where it gets cold
Plus you’d be blind, in theory.
Yeah, can’t see if light can’t reflect off your retina
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Off topic but related: you guys just broke the whole super hero concept for me. Now I can’t go back to reading comics or watching movies ignoring all of these things. I suppose I am happy to be my normal me (though perhaps super strength isn’t so bad)!
This is relevant to a lot of the points people are making: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RequiredSecondaryPowers
Also, this thread reminded me of a video from many years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-vQ2RVqJCNM
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I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Telepathy. If there’s no one around, you have no superpower.
And if you can’t turn it off (like Babylon 5 I think) it’s a curse.
