66
submitted 9 months ago by x4740N@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

For example: being able to turn anything into food but anything can include living things such as humans

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] ExtraMedicated@lemmy.world 45 points 9 months ago

Turning living things into food is technically what most animals do every day just to live.

[-] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 18 points 9 months ago

All living things are already food

[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 7 points 9 months ago

Including humans!

[-] kescusay@lemmy.world 34 points 9 months ago

Super speed. So... Let's say you can move at light speed, and let's just hand-wave away the problems like turning everything in front of you into an exploding ball of superhot plasma or shattering the Earth's crust with every step. We'll just take as a given that you can actually use this power.

Would you want to?

Let's be clear... This isn't teleportation, this is being able to move at super speed. That means you still experience all the motion between point A and point B. That could go one of two ways:

  • Your mind can also operate at super speed. Great! You're running across the United States? You get to experience every single footstep. You get to experience the subjective time it takes to walk or run ~3000 miles - five to seven months. Depending on how much control over your subjective experience of time you have, maybe you can make it feel like you're going at the speed of a car on a highway or something, but you're still looking at a week or so of subjective time. Hope you like time alone, because you're going to have millions of years of it, from your perspective, if you use your power a lot. But that's still better than the alternative...
  • Your mind operates at normal speed. You are now the most dangerous thing on the planet. Every time you use your super speed, the landscape blurs around you and you have no idea where you are, how far you've gone, or how many people you've exploded into red mists without even realizing they're there along the way. You could easily plow through a line of buses filled with orphans and puppies, and never even notice the trail of carnage behind you, because they were in New Jersey, and you stopped in San Diego.

That's why the comics always gloss over what it's like to have super speed. The dark side of it is that for it to be anything but terrifyingly destructive to the entire planet, you have to have control. And in order for you to have control, you have to be capable of seeing where you're going and reacting to obstacles. That means sped up perceptions, and thus the subjective hell of experiencing every single step you take at super speed.

[-] davidgro@lemmy.world 23 points 9 months ago

I would guess that you have seen the first episode of "The Boys"?

Anyway, option 1 is very clearly superior, even if incredibly boring, because it includes not becoming tired or hungry during the trip. You kinda would get to zone out for months at a time, like a super long scenic vacation.

[-] loobkoob@kbin.social 12 points 9 months ago

Option 1 also isn't necessarily as bad as they make it seem. If you suddenly gained super speed and your perception of time altered over night then, yes, you're suddenly going be spending a lot more time in your own head relative to before and it's going to take some adjustment as best, a lot of therapy at worst. But if you're born like that, surely it'd just be normal for you and you wouldn't necessarily know anything different?

The other option that wasn't mentioned is that you can "turn on" your powers and the world feels like it goes into slow motion around you, and then you turn them off again afterwards and it's all back to normal.

[-] ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

Your second point is how most comic speedsters operate. They can raise and lower their reaction speed at will.

In fact the only speedster I know of that can't change reaction speed at will is Red Rush from Invincible. He's permanently stuck at high speed so to him a simple conversation feels like hours.

[-] Khrux@ttrpg.network 9 points 9 months ago

I've seen an explanation somewhere that I likes which is super speed and super reflexes are like tensing two different muscles.

You can make your body move at 10x speed to run across town (even 2-3 speed makes you faster than the fastest humans and 5* is like a car going quickly), then you use your reflexes 3 times faster to make that superspeed feel like only 3 times your natural speed. You can also seperate them in other ways like buying yourself time in an exam by speeding up your thinking without actually increasing your muscle movement.

Your mental and physical speed being like tensing muscles also means you can have them kick in like a withdrawal reflex. As the air pressure changes before an explosion or bullet hits you, you involuntarily crank your limit to 50x speed (or whatever is required) to dodge.

It also has the obvious weakness of being exhaustable. It's worth mentioning that 10x speed is absolutely enough to do most superhuman abilities, and 3x speed makes you basically better than most humans, not just at running but also dodging and punching, and it's absolutely up to the storyteller to decide if such a low speed multiplier exhausts said speedster or if they can maintain that indefinitely like the muscles we use to stand.

[-] Deceptichum@kbin.social 6 points 9 months ago

Don’t Invincible and the Boys have a speedster for both those two outcomes?

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] hperrin@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

Also even if you are protected from the repercussions of moving at super speed, anything you move isn’t. If you carry your friend across the street, your friend is now pulverized and probably burnt to a crisp. If you move your water bottle, congrats on delivering a pressure vessel of steam to wherever you just went. Acceleration that fast and impacts at that speed would destroy basically everything you touch while moving at super speed.

[-] Godric@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)
[-] kescusay@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Holy crap, that's perfect!

[-] ramble81@lemm.ee 2 points 9 months ago

If you have the power of super speed you can control when it’s active. Likewise you can adjust the speed your mind processes things to always ensure you’re 1:1 with your frame of reference.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] Khrux@ttrpg.network 28 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

A lot of people have read this question to mean the accurate scientific implications of everyday superpowers which isn't really in the spirit of superpowers. I'll try to say powers that feel generally altruistic or built for cute characters that have cruel implications.

Healing us the classic cute superpower, but if the user of the power chooses to overheal somebody they could probably cause basically mega cancer.

It's pretty easy to imagine the the implications of controlling animals, and it's a pretty good power to sit in the background as a utility power until the user decides to have every insect, rat and pigeon in the city bombard somebody.

The ability to share memories is hard to be used villainously but two fucked applications would be to beam somebody's traumatic experience I to somebody else's head (or an experience that happened to one person that could trigger someone else's PTSD), or if the user has trained themselves to be able to alter their memories to fictional events on demand, turning what is basically a truth finding superpower into an abuse of perceived honesty.

Finally the superpower of using Reddit and Lemmy your whole life and generating a very standard way if responding but having the cruel and unusual twist of always sounding like fucking ChatGPT.

[-] Fades@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The heal to cancer ratio is a perfect example, deepens the power itself too instead of being a superficial “you’re fixed now!” vibe

[-] Chetzemoka@startrek.website 5 points 9 months ago

The power of healing could be used to infinitely torture someone without killing them. Definitely has a dark side.

All power must be applied ethically

[-] Waldowal@lemmy.world 17 points 9 months ago

Your example reminded me of this classic: Jesus: Water into Wine

[-] davidgro@lemmy.world 16 points 9 months ago

Here is an entire novel (free online) written by a master at 'what else could a given superpower do or cause?'

It's an amazing read if you like the genre at all.
Just a warning, it gets very grimdark in a lot of places.

[-] HopeOfTheGunblade@kbin.social 4 points 9 months ago

Knew what it was before I clicked. Definitely second the recommendation, have read multiple times, and I'm almost through the sequel.

[-] ryathal@sh.itjust.works 16 points 9 months ago

Avatar covered water bending including blood. My hero academia does a really good job with covering pretty big disadvantages to powers.

[-] Bread@sh.itjust.works 4 points 9 months ago

Blood bending sure is a creepy one.

[-] tiredofsametab@kbin.social 11 points 9 months ago

X-ray vision is horrible for cancer rates (though one could argue that, since it doesn't work like normal x-ray in many comics, that it's some other magic with the name x-ray for convenience).

[-] ArbiterXero@lemmy.world 16 points 9 months ago

Well, I always figured that “x ray vision” was just eyes that were super sensitive to the natural background radiation everywhere, and not that they were actually transmitting x rays

[-] otter@lemmy.ca 9 points 9 months ago

I'm also not sure if transmitting x-rays would work

It's not like radar, you'd need to also be on the other side to collect the data after it passed through the object

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[-] x4740N@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

Pretty sure xray vision can just see the xray band of the electromagnetic spectrum

I think superman can probably see the entire or a larger range than humans and can consciously filter it

[-] SgtAStrawberry@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

They touched on that a little bit in Superman Redson, Lex tried to make a Superman clone and its x-ray vision did all the horrible things of an actual x-ray. It was a super short bit, but I found it neat.

[-] Toes@ani.social 7 points 9 months ago

The ability to time travel, allows you to change anything except yourself.

[-] 768@sh.itjust.works 3 points 9 months ago

Dark taught me that time travel will change something, but you won't know because the time machine and it's idea will be destroyed in its process.

[-] x4740N@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Technically you could if you made precise calculations to change your personal timeline

[-] Toes@ani.social 3 points 9 months ago

I think that line of reasoning will quickly become a ouroboros situation when you think about the details of cause, effect and desire.

I suppose the best outcome is the one where you've destroyed yourself and are replaced with a nearly identical person sans the reason you changed time and the butterfly effect of everything that stemmed from that.

At worst you've duplicated yourself and have a wonderful opportunity to observe yourself blissfully unaware of the reason you changed time.

But depending on which flavor of time travel used. I suspect the most likely outcome is you'll continue doing this again and again. Something always misaligning with your goals potentially unaware that anything has already happened. Never seemingly perfect or that time becomes this window of experience looping, endless eight style.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] Slatlun@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago

The emotional consequence of super speed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMe1qlyuMXQ

[-] Nemo@midwest.social 3 points 9 months ago

You don't need superpowers to turn humans into food...

[-] jopepa@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Well my dog will never learn not to jump on people bcs he’s super cute so most people encourage him when I’m working through it with him.

And he whispers to me to shoot Reagan, but correlation isn’t necessarily causation.

[-] NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Power corrupts people.

There's no reason to assume that this could be different with super powers.

load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
66 points (88.4% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26522 readers
1170 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS