What's a superpower most people think is awesome but actually wouldn't be and what's your reasoning?
What's a superpower most people think is awesome but actually wouldn't be and what's your reasoning?
You're viewing a single thread.
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.
You've never held a perfectly smooth sphere. The earth is a much smoother surface than a billiard ball. There's no edge conceptually, in the same way that vacuum is not missing air, it's nothing. It warps spacetime in a way that you can't discern an edge. Likewise there is no "inside" a wormhole. It's a hole in three dimensional space that leads to another point in three dimensional space. There's no "inside" because that implies a point that exists outside our universe which based off our current understanding of physics, is impossible
We literally don't have the language to describe these phenomenons because humans are three dimensional creatures. We can't imagine these concepts because it involves a reality we can't perceive. It's like asking someone to imagine a color they've never seen. We can't do it
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.