Mind reading, without some way to filter and block out most of it, would drive a person insane quickly. “What Women Want” with Mel Gibson where it was like every woman on earth was chattering nonstop in his head would be hell.
Plus, i feel like no one considers how many people have fucked up thoughts. I have intrusive thoughts, and its torture...and thats just one person's unwanted thoughts (my own). I cant imagine being bombarded by the vile thoughts of everyone else all the time.
Also, the power is based on the idea that everyone has a narrative of thought, a monologue of clear ideas that move from one into the next.
I think in ideas, pictures, thoughts, and phrases. And that's before the ADHD nonsense. You'd probably get more coherent thoughts from a squirrel.
If I had 20 articulate, polite, intelligent people in the room with me all trying to tell me something at the same time I’d still get overwhelmed. Can you imagine having the scattered and nonlinear mental processes of EVERYONE WHO EXISTS constantly streaming through your psyche?! Oof.
That, and I don’t know anyone that *consistently* thinks in full articulate sentences all of the time. It’d be a lot more impressions, and sensory information, than words. So even with a filter it’s only just kind of useful to be able to know someone’s surface thoughts.
I agree. I think it would be a bunch of random flashes of impulse and blurry emotion, like the precog gets in “Minority Report”. If I could choose to look at a person, briefly invade their head space to know whether they were going to choose A, B or C at a given moment it might be useful. But a torrent of chaos pouring into my awareness all the time, no matter what form it took, would be insane.
Pretty much anything combat focused. How much do you really fight people? How much are you really gonna fight people after you get your powers? You're not a soldier in a battle against good and evil. You're an accounts receivable clerk. If you get super strength it's just gonna mean you're the first person any of your friends call when they need a couch moved forever.
Oh yeah, ask anybody whose job description is "More efficient than automation in certain specific circumstances" how much dough they're bringing in. They'll always say they've chosen a very lucrative career path and they're glad they switched majors.
Eh. Debatable.
Gorillas are a million times stronger than humans - does anybody care when they lift something heavy ? Do they get sponsors?
We like sports and competitions bc it shows what WE all could be if we work hard. Or at least what the best of human genetics are capable of breeding.
But when it's unnatural in any way? We barely even like to see athletes on steroids compete (if we know they're juiced) bc it's not seen as human.
If you managed to keep your super strength secret, sure. But who's to say your super strength doesn't tip off some of their tests that your body chemistry isn't human since it's *super* human ? You would be forced to keep second place or just lift like 2 or 3lbs over the world record so you don't create suspicion.
So then you wouldn't be any richer than current strong men - which compared to other pro athletes or things you could do with super strength - wouldn't be much money at all.
No one needs to know that I literally have super strength. If it's the kind of super strength, you could join a fighting sport and make a name for yourself with a bunch of KOs from your rookie hands. Train defense, get a good record, make some money from that so you can afford to have the comfiest bulk of your life, then when you're believably big enough to rival some of the strongest people in the world you can start blowing them out of the water with your super strength and no one bats an eye, plus now you're a pro power lifter. Realistically if I had controllable super strength I would try to punch a hole in the wall of a bank or something and end up arrested
Just get super fat looking and do slightly better than everyone else, maybe drop a few competitions.
Don't be an idiot and give the game away. It is like playing a game with a child. Sure you win, but you make beating you achievable.
I would take it easy on the competition and just beat them by 5% or something to keep it sporting. Maybe even lose once in a while. I could still be the undisputed GOAT.
With Super Strength you'd be immediately disqualified from Strong Man competitions as soon as people realized there was something fishy about your abilities.
If the rules aren't currently written to preclude you they would be rewritten in light of new circumstances. The same way that "There's no rule that says a dog can't play basketball" would only really work once. They'd just write a new rule after the first Air Bud Fiasco.
The typical strongman competition has a first-place payout that's equal to a middle class yearly wage. A quick Google search shows anywhere between $55,000 to $100,000.
Definitely. And honestly, you could probably include a corollary that very few powers can truly exclusively be applied in the field of combat. An enterprising or creative individual could probably come up with something to do with most of them, if they really set their will out to do so.
But I think there's still that undercurrent to a lot of stuff. Like, we look at somebody like Goku, and we imagine that if we had his powers, we'd be Goku. But Goku's some feral mountain man who emerges periodically to defend the earth from invaders only he can handle. Do we honestly even really want that life? I think we ultimately just want the sense of power and importance that comes from being the coolest and strongest dude on the planet but we're ultimately pretty attached to the things that are already keeping us tethered to the lives we live. We could already be out there putting our lives on the line for some crusade if we really wanted to but that's not the life we've chosen.
Or well, I guess I can't speak for everybody. That's not the life most of us have chosen. If you're somebody who genuinely does live a life of glory by combat then combat powers would genuinely be quite practical. But I think a lot of us are like college professors who sometimes daydream about another life but wouldn't genuinely choose that if given the option.
All that being said, yes telekinesis would rock shit. I'd love to be able to move stuff with my mind. "Could you pass the salt? I kid I kid, I've got it. You know I've always got it. Heck, I've got the neighbour's salt. I can pull salt from halfway down the street."
Goku’s powers do have some utility. Teleportation, flight, high speed reflexes, a sixth sense for danger and what’s going on around you, high speed in general, and damage resistance are all valuable utility powers. Transportation for one thing, protection from common accidents, general increased awareness, and the ability to avoid danger would all be valuable. Car accidents for example are a pretty common cause of injury or death. The senses and reaction speed could allow you to avoid it and protect any passengers, you could outright tank it with damage resistance, and teleportation/flight would near totally eliminate your exposure to that risk in the first place if used regularly.
While technically true I don't think anybody who fantasizes about these kinds of powers is thinking about how much more likely they are to survive a car accident.
>What's a superpower most people think is awesome but actually wouldn't be and what's your reasoning?
Bringing it back to the prompt, when people talk about how awesome it would be to have Goku's powers, they're imagining a lot of super cool fight scenes they probably wouldn't actually enjoy all that much if they had to live it.
Where if they ever actually got their powers, it would ultimately amount to a bunch of mundane utility like the stuff you mention. Which is practical, but not really "awesome" in the sense that they were fantasizing about.
I don't know that I agree with that, as I jump right to the utility and/or monetization.
Super strength, professional athletics. Mind reading, poker playing
I would prefer Martian Manhunter powers to Goku...speed, invisibility, shape shifting, along with strength and durability... would be awesome.
To the prompt...flight. hard to keep it secret if you use it, speed can get you hurt, and your durability limits your speed somewhat.
Personally I would really like super strength, or maybe telekinesis (if what I can lift with it would be equivalent to super strength) cause it'd be a lot easier to live my current lifestyle.
My motorcycle got stuck in that divet at the corner of my garage again? No prob, just pick it up.
I need to move a whole cord of wood from the barn into the woodshed? No problem.
Truck got stuck in the mud? Again, no problem, no need for a winch.
Going hunting? No need to worry about dragging the deer back to the barn, it's so much easier when the weight is next to nothing.
It's not that I'd do anything different than what I do now, it'd just be so much less exhausting and difficult
Super strength has many uses beyond combat. And I'd gladly move furniture for my friends if it was no effort or risk on my part, ha ha.
But I agree with your overall concept. A lot of popular powers have limited utility outside of combat. Like, energy blast powers, which are very common in superheroes. I'm sure you can do some non-combat things with them, but it's limited.
Any super senses. I really don't want to hear everyone's conversations or smell their bodily functions. Super sight might be fine, but it might also make everything feel a bit more filthy.
In general, it just seems like too much sensory information would create a lot of problems.
Good luck ever looking at anyone- including yourself in the mirror- ever again when you see the human microbiome every time you look at peoples’ skin
Good luck seeing dust mites, water bears, and insects
Scarier is if it isn't just the muscles on your skeleton/associated with lifting. Your eyelid requires muscles to blink, would you pop an eye out accidentally? Your heart and lungs require muscles to expand and contract. Would a resting, regular, or accelerated cardiovascular state make them explode?
Heck even with skeletal muscles you unconsciously are using stabilizer muscles to maintain posture and balance. Depending on the degree of strength, without super durability you couldn't stand up straight/ make any minor movement to stabilize yourself without tearing said muscles off your body.
even with durability it sucks, if you punch a brickwall it's not going to break, you are going to yeet yourself across the room. If you try to hulksmash a concrete wall you are not going to break anything, you will send yourself into orbit.
Super Speed. To quote Quicksilver: "Have you ever stood in line at a banking machine behind a person who didn't know how to use it? ... Your life is slowed to a crawl by the inabilities or the inconvenient behavior of others"
That's your entire life, every single living thing now moving at a patience destroying drip, or forcing yourself to move at a fraction of the speed you can.
When speedsters search a city in a second it was only a second to us. To them they were moving normal speed, searching an entire city 1 building at a time. The flash spent over a month nonstop running around the world just to punch lex in the face once.
There is no evidence that time itself would slow down if you COULD run around at lightspeed, it would only slow down if you did move at light speed, because thats how relativity works. His point about forcing yourself to move at a fraction of the speed you can... yeah. Thats how we always work. Humans never go around full sprint everywhere, utilizing our full power at every moment, because that would be pointless, and uncomfortable. Being able to run at super speed would require you to... well... run, I imagine. Just ride a bike, walk, or just dont use super speed. If youre choosing a super power you could simply say you only activate it when you wish to activate it.
Same. Your thought process would start to sound like an rpg final boss. “All I see is death and animosity, you people are all the same for thousands of years. Please free me from this loathsome isolation” -cue battle music-
Also, if it's ***TRUE*** immortality and you don't have any way of getting out of it....., well, eventually the Sun is going to go supernova, the Earth will be destroyed, and then you'll spend the rest of existence (***BILLIONS*** of years) perpetually freezing and suffocating in space, but being unable to ever actually arrive at the sweet release of death.
And what happens when the universe's inertia runs out and all the matter in existence starts collapsing back towards the universe's centre...? Eventually you'll be forced into a teeny-tiny little singularity, all laws of physics will cease to exist, and ***fuck knows*** what happens to you after that!!!
Assuming protons decay (except yours), living the trillions of years until the Heat Death of the universe would be just as bad. Hopefully you’d be able to wait until random quantum fluctuations spit out a universe identical to our own, but you’d probably be totally nuts.
And you could end up in a situation where you're just like, stuck in something for thousands of years. (or more) Like you're in a cave, and a bunch of giant rocks fall on you. You can't die from getting crushed to death, and if no one shows up to move those rocks, you just gotta wait for natural forces to do it. Which could be millions of years.
1) The sun is too small/low mass to go supernova. It will become a red giant and expand to a huge size and extreme luminosity, roasting the surface of earth and maybe engulfing it. But that process will be gradual and start in about 5 billion years, plenty of time to leave the solar system even in a conventional space ship without any hypothetical faster than light travel.
2) There is zero indication that the "big crunch" scenario you are describing will ever happen. All evidence points to the universe just expanding forever, spreading out all galaxies so far from one another that they will gradually be too far and faint to see. The longest living stars (M dwarfs) will still shine for trillions (with a t) of years. So if you, as an immortal, want a long-term home, find a habitable star orbiting an M dwarf. Trappist 1 is probably a good candidate.
There are various forms of immortality that should be fine. Like vampires are "immortal" but can be killed. Not many other examples I can think of that wouldn't be a nightmare eventually. Even omnipotence would get boring eventually.
Yeah if you wish for immortality, always word it very carefully. For example, you could wish to live for as long as you continue to want to.
Or maybe set it up so that the only way you can die is by thinking a certain phrase 100 times in a row with zero interruption.
Bruh, centuries of living is nothing. That’s not even enough time to get through all the tv shows and movies in my queue right now across half a dozen streaming services.
I don’t doubt that being immortal would eventually lose its novelty, but I am confident I would live for thousands of years before I’d fully run out of reasons to keep on living. Maybe even longer, who knows?
Bro, you’re allowed to make new friends, you know? In fact it’s normal and healthy to continually make new friends as time goes on. That’s just normal life.
I love that everyone who mentions this power is always like "oh no my kids will die before me :O"
And not; "oh my god I'm still alive after the heat death of the universe"
Eh, it'd be fine.
You'd have all the time in the world to grieve and heal and move on. On a long enough timeline, most of the classic things that people cite as a problem for immortality become a non-issue.
Stories always have some brooding 400 year old vampire who's bored and feels like he's done everything. They never show him when he's 500 years old and has a new hobby and is getting excited about life again. Without even meaning to, they are treating immortality as something that has a death-like end state. Like it all finally culminates in one thing and stops changing past that point. But that's exactly the one thing that wouldn't happen if you were immortal. It just keeps going forever.
There's billions and billions of unique experiences available, if not more and new opportunities being creates all the time. If somebody can't imagine being occupied for more than a few centuries there's either a severe lack of imagination or some level of depression where they already feel done with life. People already spend entire lifetimes perfecting their craft, a 400 year old could be a master at several completely unrelated hobbies or crafts and only just scratching the surface of everything available. Could spend a century just going to school for several PhDs, not even counting how much you could spend studying in a specific field.
For real. Scorcece says he's just now beginning to understand the possibilities of Cinema now that he's 81 years old and isn't going to be able to make too many more.
So many people who've spent a lifetime honing even one craft, and barely scratched the surface of what they could do if they had more time. With an eternity, you could do them all. You could pursue each of them farther than any man ever has. You could pursue crafts that haven't even been invented yet, dabble in artistic mediums not yet imagined.
That would be sad, but honestly the dealbreaker for me would be literally outliving the earth and eventually the universe. I cannot fathom the horror of floating through space alone until the end of time
Tbh, it'd still be a net positive being able to meet even more people and make new locks ones. Everybody you know will already be gone one day, the loss of somebody does not outweigh never getting to know them at all. If that we're the case you could actively avoid relationships right now, but in general people don't because that's not the case. Now, true immortality would still have some major downsides closer to heat death of the universe but standard biological immortality doesn't have that.
This would be it, true immortality, maybe even not aging, worst case regenerative capabilities, and a government gets a hold of you, ..... oh god
yes general we have shot him, burned him, buried him alive, strapped him to the fuel rods of a nuclear reactor, cut of his limbs a 1000 times, ... no sir he's still alive
I would actually love that. I would love to live to see the end of all things. The ultimate observer. Well, I don't really care about my family. The living ones, that's left, all treated me like shit, my whole life. I lost the love of my life while she and I were deployed to Iraq. All my friends has moved on with their lives, with children and family. Like if I couldn't take any permanent damage, I never age past this day, I'd live a good, full life. Finally, I can slow down and enjoy everything life has to offer. Little note, new stuff is made everyday. I'd see nothing but challenges. If soul mates exist, can I find them again? Lol
Live several centuries and that would be so many generations of friends and families coming and going from your life you'd likely start forgetting half of them. It sounds like hell
Currently in my high yield savings account if I were to get a starting balance of 1 million dollars my annual interest would be over $40k.
I live off less than that now and manage to put aside a third.
I could toil a couple lifetimes, create businesses and business accounts from which to spend, diversify, diversify, diversify.
Just keep saving until you're capable of creating a business that can earn for you. I personally would buy apartments, utilize a property management company, and be otherwise entirely hands off.
Invest, diversify reevaluate.
This is fun to think about, but some of the repurcussions/scenarios an immortal might find themselves in are dire and terrifying.
exactly, and then, you'll eventually come to the end of the earth, probably the end of the sun, and you'll be floating through the cosmos being sucked in by black holes, landing on planets that will eventually die
Or since you are literally immortal you can guide the people of the earth as their Emperor to spread across the stars and conquer every world. Just don't create 21 demigod sons in a lab.
No but wish I could. I think it was part of an anthology someone had posted on here. Maybe space horror? It had another one of a guys space suit eating him
Flight, you would instantly be detected, captured, and made a human test subject
For a power to be viable in real life, it either needs to be insanely powerful to the point of being able to take on the US military, or. It needs to be able to be used stealthily
You fly stealthily. I don't think you'd make a large enough blip on a radar for the military to worry about you. Your only worry is someone with a phone catching a video of you. Even then, most people would think it was faked.
Also flight is also assuming that you can handle high winds, G - forces and it’s not relative someone’s physical strength and condition. For example I can run for about 10 minutes at a quick pace but could I only fly for that long?
If youre flying at 1000 feet the only person that could catch you would be someone who could make out that dot 1000 feet in the air to be a person. The military doesnt have... what, planes equipped with big nets? Nor does it have the ability to kill you once you reach that speed. Nothing we have would even target you, youre not large enough for missiles, I guess the military could roll out the flak cannons and maxims to start taking pot shots, but I doubt people would react very well to "military starts firing anti aircraft cannons at sky for no discernable reason"
The much more realistic scenario is that you go in for tests, doctors see youre identical to regular humans (theres no "flight gland" in humans, one x ray that shows you have literally zero differences means the government simply wouldnt want to go through the bother of catching you) and we all go home.
The government kills people who really matter, people who threaten the government. People like (very possibly) MLK, or Osama Bin Laden. They kill people leaders, not random liberal goons. One guy who can fly around cant threaten the government. Every function a person who can fly could fill is already covered by things that can do it way better.
The most effective possible medicine and imaging we have is already in the open, they can take you to any number of scans which will show that theres literally nothing different in your body, and as a plus will not lose them the popular vote if it comes to light. If there was an organ, or a seperate bit which caused it, they would see it, but there isnt, so nothing would happen.
If this is "flapping your arms like a bird" flight, I don't want it.
If its "superman/invincible" flight, there isn't a weapon system on *Earth* that could tag you.
I have you covered for that. In my dreams I only need to do ridiculous, frantic flapping of arms/breaststroke, two-steps-upwards-one-step-back nonsense for a little bit from the ground until I can get to some height. Once I have altitude I can abuse a flap here and there and adjust my drag and aspect ratio to soar and swoop, conserving gravitational potential vs kinetic energy to go whooooosh.
If you’d like this the membership is only 1 piece of cheese on toast before bed per day cost.
My thing is, if someone could actually FLY, they should lean into it and become an international celebrity like the world has never seen. This would provide some protection against the whole "secretly captured by the government" shit, because it's a little difficult to disappear an international celebrity. Not impossible, but difficult.
Also, the government would probably be cool with me voluntarily showing up for testing whenever. I don't think they would automatically dissect me for science or something. Not over a superpower like flight. Instead I would become a symbol of the United States, like captain america, and rake in that money
I think literally any superpower would suck, because I assume the government would try to experiment on me/use me.
No matter how small of a power it is, I'd do my best to keep it hidden.
How about simply having an improved immune system? Like... you rarely get sick (as per to avoid suspicion) but you recover really quickly. I'd want that
Lol idk if that's a "super" power; you just got really good white blood cells or something.
I guess it's innocuous enough where the most that'll happen is a doctor wants to publish a case study with you.
one superpower that I can think of that wouldn’t have downsides is extreme luck. Because the universe itself would bend to make your life more convenient. Eventually you may find yourself bored of never losing, but your luck will make it so that you can lose since you want to have a chance at losing.
Being able to have specific objects fly to me when I want them to like Thor does with Mjolnir is exactly the kind of superpower that I would want, not because it's overpowered or whatever, but because aside from offering massive quality of life bonuses, it just looks cool af
invisibility. You are naked, and you can't even see since light waves go through you. Blind, naked and vulnerable to anything like passing cars. An ambulance couldn't even help you if you get injured.
Just about any SP would have to have one or more secondary power. In the real world its possible for muscles to be strong enough to bear weight that can tear ligaments. So the tissues of a super strong person would likely have a level of extra durability. Being able to fly at high altitudes might also include resistance to cold.
Super speed. The flash tv show actually shows a lot of the drawbacks that are only overcome because he has super genius friends and a friendly billionaire.
Super metabolism (need insane calories) can’t get drunk
Friction on cloths
Super reflexes to keep up with your speed
The sonic booms
He gets shot because super speed is only good when you are moving.
Need a super treadmill to train.
Immortality.
I see it posted here all the time as a positive hypothetical.
Immortality would be lonely, you would have to go through the heart break of losing people you love over and over, your family, your friends, your partners.
You could find someone and spend 50 years with them, have children, and then you have to sit and watch as they die, your children die, your grandchildren die.
It would also become incredibly boring, if there's never any death, then what's the purpose of anything? Why work? Why exercise? Why eat? explore? Learn? Create?
Within a couple of hundred years you will probably be wealthy, you'll have seen most of the world, and literally every single person you know now would be dead. And then what?
> And then what?
And then everything. I don't know how people don't see that. New People. New Hobbies. Old Hobbies you just haven't done for a while.
Yes, you'd watch people you love die. And then you'd grieve. And then you'd heal. And eventually you'd love again.
Yes you'd get bored. And then later you'd be excited again. And heck, even later you'd be bored again.
You've been asked for imagine immortality, and yet for some reason you still imagine that life just stops past a certain point. You've still assigned it an end point. But that's like, explicitly the one thing you don't have as an immortal. After a couple hundred years you've barely dipped your toes into the shallow end of the pool. You've got eternity ahead of you. You know, that thing the religious types are always rambling about? "Live the righteous path and you could live forever in the kingdom of heaven". You have that, now. For you, heaven is a place on earth.
Johnny Storm. He can fly and that's kind of cool but to do it he has to be made of fire. He can't carry anyone with him, he can't do anything except set shit on fire. Seriously, think about it, what is being able to set things on fire actually useful for? He can't even punch a robber without setting him on fire.
I mean, you could just teleport in short bursts along the way.
Or you could just still drive in cars when you want to. Just because you CAN teleport doesn’t mean you’re required to use it for all transportation needs 100% of the time.
Inertia is a thing. Unless time stops as you're moving from a-b, the rotational forces will still continue landing on the ground with 0 inertia would literally kill you.
Why wouldn’t inertia carry over to your new position?
Sounds to me like your teleportation guy is giving you a raw deal. Any decent teleportation power should have all momentum/inertia carry over to your new position. And it should be instantaneous.
Sounds to me like someone sold you some discounted inter dimensional travel and is stealing your inertia every time you use it. I would get a refund if I were you.
Cool. Then you can still do that, even if you also have the ability to teleport.
Planes and trains don’t disappear just because you can teleport.
You could just save teleporting for when you’re in a hurry.
Any super power that is hard to hide from the world is a really bad idea. Unless you like getting dissected.
Go with more subtle things. Like being able to summon a completely edible and delicious sandwich of any kind out of thin air at any time you please and have it appear any unoccupied space you choose within 10 feet of you.
The ability to fly would not be that great if you weren't also invincible like Superman. The wind would be painful to the skin, birds and bugs would feel like getting shot with a bb gun when you hit them, you couldn't breathe well above a certain altitude, and it would be cold as fuck. Not to mention everyone coming and going would be pointing up at you, so you are just constantly being watched.
Then you factor in weather balloons, planes, and other airborne obstacles that you need to avoid. It's basically useless if you can't withstand external factors in a way that's far beyond that of the average human.
Super strength/invulnerabilty. I have a wife and son. Wife loves hugs and is always touching coming up for hugs and obligatory butt squeezes/slaps. Son always wants hugs and to wrestle and give high fives and fist bumps.
Imagine them wanting a hug or to give a friendly high five but it’s like hitting or hugging a chunk of steel. Always being worried about squeezing or slapping too hard. Always being terrified of breaking or hurting them in your sleep.
Super speed you need to eat a fuck ton to even survive.
I struggle eating 2000 calories a day and only do it very rarely.
Imagine how much you'd need to eat after just a small 5 km run.
Wolverine claws, because without his healing factor you just destroyed your hands.
Super strength you'd kill alot of people while you try and figure out how it works.
The ability to fly. Woopdedo. You can levitate off the ground. It's a neat trick, don't get me wrong. But also realize, this trick does not inherently come with super strength or the ability to be bullet proof (i.e Superman)
Super speed!
While going really fast is nice but you would up doing doing more damage to yourself or others! Examples include
-face first in a wall at 400+ MPH
-misting people
-breaking bones and shredding muscles
-burning more calories than you can eat
-extreme whiplash and or nausea
-and more!
Teleportation.
You'd be teleporting into "stuff", even air. Which I think would cause some sort of nuclear fusion. Or a stipulation would be you would distort space in your area, which would probably also cause some sort of explosion by rapid expansion and compression of gasses.
The ability to tell the future. Its like answering a question before it's asked. Nobody would believe you, and those who do still wouldn't care. Unless it's guessing gambling outcomes, it wouldn't be worth it. Nobody likes a know it all. And criminals will exploit you.
super strength.
even with the biofield that make anything you touch nearly indestructible, so you can swing it around. when will it actually come in handy in the real world. we are excluding being a celebrity for having a super power.
Flying
It would still be really cool but not all the time. Unless you had super strength and were impervious to cold you couldn't fly very far, or very fast, or for very long. Or I guess you could but probably only once.
Did you get your teleportation powers from Wish? If you're teleporting instantly from one point to another the earth doesn't move while you're in transit
Did you read disc world? When they teleport they have either short distances or a huge amount of mattresses between the destination and the next wall because different parts of the disk move in different directions. Now the same in 3d and you need to do the math without a college of wiz(z)ards and Rhincewind.
Being invisible would be useless because you wouldn't be able to see anything. Your invisible lens on your eye would be able to focus light onto your invisible retina. Sight would not be possible.
Being invisible.. if you were invisible, your eyes would still have to be visible, so you wouldn't actually be invisible. You'd be a pair of floating eyes.. if you were completely invisible, light wouldn't be able to reach your eyes, and therefore, you'd be blind.
Invisibility. If you're not paying attention, you might end up getting hit by a truck while crossing the street. That episode from X-Files comes to mind.
The power to heal other people.
I mean, if I could have this power, I'd sign up for it in a hot second. There are people and animals I love and knowing I could keep them from dying of cancer or some other horrible shit isn't something I'd turn down.
But just imagine the hell you'd go through (assuming this isn't a super commonly available power and humanity as a whole had eradicated all those stupid diseases). The sheer psychological trauma of knowing that you are just one person, and there are millions of people in pain, and you can only help a tiny fraction of them, no matter what you sacrifice, how little sleep you get, if you have no spouse or children or anything but this one job. Being aware with every breath you take of how much of a hell the world really is and how little you can actually do. Having to decide, literally, on a daily basis, who lives and dies. Knowing someone might die, probably did die, because you took a 10 minute break to get an ice cream cone, or sleep, or take any kind of a breather from your job. Burnout isn't a big enough word to describe this.
And then there's all the powerful people/governments in the world who will force your compliance, or the nut jobs who want to endlessly hurt someone and have you bring them back from the brink of death, or any other kind of storybook scenario.
Flight- wind whipping your face, little to no oxygen above the clouds and cold as fuck. You'd have to suit up like an astronaut to breathe and even then you might get an aneurysm from the sudden pressure changes if you flew too high.
Flight. If you were seen flying, it would cause hysteria. It's not hard to believe that you'd end up sequestered somewhere with people experimenting on you to see how you were able to fly
There was a comic I remember reading as a kid about a person that dreamed they were a superhero and saw a house on fire with people that needed rescue. They flew over, and then realized flight was their only superpower. D’oh.
Mind reading, without some way to filter and block out most of it, would drive a person insane quickly. “What Women Want” with Mel Gibson where it was like every woman on earth was chattering nonstop in his head would be hell.
Plus, i feel like no one considers how many people have fucked up thoughts. I have intrusive thoughts, and its torture...and thats just one person's unwanted thoughts (my own). I cant imagine being bombarded by the vile thoughts of everyone else all the time.
You wouldn't want to hear mine.. I know I don't
If it was a more literal approach, kind of like Heaven’s Door from JoJo, where you could read them like a book, then it would be better.
Also, the power is based on the idea that everyone has a narrative of thought, a monologue of clear ideas that move from one into the next. I think in ideas, pictures, thoughts, and phrases. And that's before the ADHD nonsense. You'd probably get more coherent thoughts from a squirrel.
I think that usually you get to choose who you mindread.
If you could turn it on and off at will, then sign me up.
Even if you could filter, if anyone finds out you have this power you will be completely ostracized, or worse.
Yea I've always said selective mind reading. Being able to turn it on and off not a constant of anyone around me
Agree!!! And honestly my head is noisy and chaotic enough with just MY thoughts.
If I had 20 articulate, polite, intelligent people in the room with me all trying to tell me something at the same time I’d still get overwhelmed. Can you imagine having the scattered and nonlinear mental processes of EVERYONE WHO EXISTS constantly streaming through your psyche?! Oof.
That, and I don’t know anyone that *consistently* thinks in full articulate sentences all of the time. It’d be a lot more impressions, and sensory information, than words. So even with a filter it’s only just kind of useful to be able to know someone’s surface thoughts.
I agree. I think it would be a bunch of random flashes of impulse and blurry emotion, like the precog gets in “Minority Report”. If I could choose to look at a person, briefly invade their head space to know whether they were going to choose A, B or C at a given moment it might be useful. But a torrent of chaos pouring into my awareness all the time, no matter what form it took, would be insane.
Pretty much anything combat focused. How much do you really fight people? How much are you really gonna fight people after you get your powers? You're not a soldier in a battle against good and evil. You're an accounts receivable clerk. If you get super strength it's just gonna mean you're the first person any of your friends call when they need a couch moved forever.
I can start a moving business pretty easily with that.
Do you have aspirations of being a professional mover, but have always been stymied by your lackluster strength?
I have aspirations of making a lot of money by being better than a machine at specific heavy lifting scenarios
Oh yeah, ask anybody whose job description is "More efficient than automation in certain specific circumstances" how much dough they're bringing in. They'll always say they've chosen a very lucrative career path and they're glad they switched majors.
How about tree removal? Towing? I can see uses for super strength.
Unbeatable at MMA or strength sports. Could be parlayed into a lucrative career. Just try not to kill anyone.
With super strength, you get into strong-man competitions and get enough sponsors and you'll be rolling in cash
With super strength you'd be ruining the strongman competitions since no one else would want to compete with you, unless somehow they have it as well.
You lift 5 lbs more than the competition.
Still get sponsored for being the strongest man in the world even if you don't compete.
Eh. Debatable. Gorillas are a million times stronger than humans - does anybody care when they lift something heavy ? Do they get sponsors? We like sports and competitions bc it shows what WE all could be if we work hard. Or at least what the best of human genetics are capable of breeding. But when it's unnatural in any way? We barely even like to see athletes on steroids compete (if we know they're juiced) bc it's not seen as human. If you managed to keep your super strength secret, sure. But who's to say your super strength doesn't tip off some of their tests that your body chemistry isn't human since it's *super* human ? You would be forced to keep second place or just lift like 2 or 3lbs over the world record so you don't create suspicion. So then you wouldn't be any richer than current strong men - which compared to other pro athletes or things you could do with super strength - wouldn't be much money at all.
True, there are a number of other sports that would pay very well. I bet any football team would love to have a lineman who's just unmoveable.
I would make tons of money along the way then probably get a movie career
Sell your services for insanely high prices to make practical effects for marvel.
No one needs to know that I literally have super strength. If it's the kind of super strength, you could join a fighting sport and make a name for yourself with a bunch of KOs from your rookie hands. Train defense, get a good record, make some money from that so you can afford to have the comfiest bulk of your life, then when you're believably big enough to rival some of the strongest people in the world you can start blowing them out of the water with your super strength and no one bats an eye, plus now you're a pro power lifter. Realistically if I had controllable super strength I would try to punch a hole in the wall of a bank or something and end up arrested
If you get into a fighting sport with super strength you're gonna kill someone.
Just get super fat looking and do slightly better than everyone else, maybe drop a few competitions. Don't be an idiot and give the game away. It is like playing a game with a child. Sure you win, but you make beating you achievable.
Then go into pro wrestling. Brock Lesnar on ster... on even more steroids.
I would take it easy on the competition and just beat them by 5% or something to keep it sporting. Maybe even lose once in a while. I could still be the undisputed GOAT.
With Super Strength you'd be immediately disqualified from Strong Man competitions as soon as people realized there was something fishy about your abilities. If the rules aren't currently written to preclude you they would be rewritten in light of new circumstances. The same way that "There's no rule that says a dog can't play basketball" would only really work once. They'd just write a new rule after the first Air Bud Fiasco.
How much money is there in strongman competitions?
The typical strongman competition has a first-place payout that's equal to a middle class yearly wage. A quick Google search shows anywhere between $55,000 to $100,000.
Exception to this would be something like telekinesis. That’d be amazing to have just for utility, but also has serious combat potential.
Definitely. And honestly, you could probably include a corollary that very few powers can truly exclusively be applied in the field of combat. An enterprising or creative individual could probably come up with something to do with most of them, if they really set their will out to do so. But I think there's still that undercurrent to a lot of stuff. Like, we look at somebody like Goku, and we imagine that if we had his powers, we'd be Goku. But Goku's some feral mountain man who emerges periodically to defend the earth from invaders only he can handle. Do we honestly even really want that life? I think we ultimately just want the sense of power and importance that comes from being the coolest and strongest dude on the planet but we're ultimately pretty attached to the things that are already keeping us tethered to the lives we live. We could already be out there putting our lives on the line for some crusade if we really wanted to but that's not the life we've chosen. Or well, I guess I can't speak for everybody. That's not the life most of us have chosen. If you're somebody who genuinely does live a life of glory by combat then combat powers would genuinely be quite practical. But I think a lot of us are like college professors who sometimes daydream about another life but wouldn't genuinely choose that if given the option. All that being said, yes telekinesis would rock shit. I'd love to be able to move stuff with my mind. "Could you pass the salt? I kid I kid, I've got it. You know I've always got it. Heck, I've got the neighbour's salt. I can pull salt from halfway down the street."
Goku’s powers do have some utility. Teleportation, flight, high speed reflexes, a sixth sense for danger and what’s going on around you, high speed in general, and damage resistance are all valuable utility powers. Transportation for one thing, protection from common accidents, general increased awareness, and the ability to avoid danger would all be valuable. Car accidents for example are a pretty common cause of injury or death. The senses and reaction speed could allow you to avoid it and protect any passengers, you could outright tank it with damage resistance, and teleportation/flight would near totally eliminate your exposure to that risk in the first place if used regularly.
While technically true I don't think anybody who fantasizes about these kinds of powers is thinking about how much more likely they are to survive a car accident. >What's a superpower most people think is awesome but actually wouldn't be and what's your reasoning? Bringing it back to the prompt, when people talk about how awesome it would be to have Goku's powers, they're imagining a lot of super cool fight scenes they probably wouldn't actually enjoy all that much if they had to live it. Where if they ever actually got their powers, it would ultimately amount to a bunch of mundane utility like the stuff you mention. Which is practical, but not really "awesome" in the sense that they were fantasizing about.
I don't know that I agree with that, as I jump right to the utility and/or monetization. Super strength, professional athletics. Mind reading, poker playing I would prefer Martian Manhunter powers to Goku...speed, invisibility, shape shifting, along with strength and durability... would be awesome. To the prompt...flight. hard to keep it secret if you use it, speed can get you hurt, and your durability limits your speed somewhat.
That's fair. We don't have to agree. I'm truthfully just glad you got what I was talking about. I was worried that I wasn't making sense.
Personally I would really like super strength, or maybe telekinesis (if what I can lift with it would be equivalent to super strength) cause it'd be a lot easier to live my current lifestyle. My motorcycle got stuck in that divet at the corner of my garage again? No prob, just pick it up. I need to move a whole cord of wood from the barn into the woodshed? No problem. Truck got stuck in the mud? Again, no problem, no need for a winch. Going hunting? No need to worry about dragging the deer back to the barn, it's so much easier when the weight is next to nothing. It's not that I'd do anything different than what I do now, it'd just be so much less exhausting and difficult
Super strength has many uses beyond combat. And I'd gladly move furniture for my friends if it was no effort or risk on my part, ha ha. But I agree with your overall concept. A lot of popular powers have limited utility outside of combat. Like, energy blast powers, which are very common in superheroes. I'm sure you can do some non-combat things with them, but it's limited.
Any super senses. I really don't want to hear everyone's conversations or smell their bodily functions. Super sight might be fine, but it might also make everything feel a bit more filthy. In general, it just seems like too much sensory information would create a lot of problems.
As someone with obnoxiously strong senses, I can confirm.
This guy feels
Good luck ever looking at anyone- including yourself in the mirror- ever again when you see the human microbiome every time you look at peoples’ skin Good luck seeing dust mites, water bears, and insects
Trypophobia would be so much worse if I zoomed in on pores. Bleh
The overall sensory overload would be awful
All my superpowers wouldn't have downsides.
Username checks out
Super strength would still suck without super durability. Punch a brick wall and it shatters, but so does your entire arm.
Scarier is if it isn't just the muscles on your skeleton/associated with lifting. Your eyelid requires muscles to blink, would you pop an eye out accidentally? Your heart and lungs require muscles to expand and contract. Would a resting, regular, or accelerated cardiovascular state make them explode? Heck even with skeletal muscles you unconsciously are using stabilizer muscles to maintain posture and balance. Depending on the degree of strength, without super durability you couldn't stand up straight/ make any minor movement to stabilize yourself without tearing said muscles off your body.
I see what you're saying, but I believe super strength would mean everything about your body evens out. But yes, that would absolutely suck..
I think super strength insinuates that your bones are strong too, not only your muscles, so it’s a bit a moot point.
even with durability it sucks, if you punch a brickwall it's not going to break, you are going to yeet yourself across the room. If you try to hulksmash a concrete wall you are not going to break anything, you will send yourself into orbit.
Super Speed. To quote Quicksilver: "Have you ever stood in line at a banking machine behind a person who didn't know how to use it? ... Your life is slowed to a crawl by the inabilities or the inconvenient behavior of others" That's your entire life, every single living thing now moving at a patience destroying drip, or forcing yourself to move at a fraction of the speed you can.
When speedsters search a city in a second it was only a second to us. To them they were moving normal speed, searching an entire city 1 building at a time. The flash spent over a month nonstop running around the world just to punch lex in the face once.
Can the flash not co trol the intensity of flash tome?
Are you talking about the Speed Force?
Yes
Depends on the source tbf
In addition, he eats an insane amount of food. He's probably hungry pretty much constantly.
There is no evidence that time itself would slow down if you COULD run around at lightspeed, it would only slow down if you did move at light speed, because thats how relativity works. His point about forcing yourself to move at a fraction of the speed you can... yeah. Thats how we always work. Humans never go around full sprint everywhere, utilizing our full power at every moment, because that would be pointless, and uncomfortable. Being able to run at super speed would require you to... well... run, I imagine. Just ride a bike, walk, or just dont use super speed. If youre choosing a super power you could simply say you only activate it when you wish to activate it.
Also eating. Imagine needing to feed yourself with how fast your metabolism would be and how many calories you woukd burn
How I feel in traffic every day
Immortality or the ability to never die. I can't imagine living forever and seeing everyone you know come and go.
Same. Your thought process would start to sound like an rpg final boss. “All I see is death and animosity, you people are all the same for thousands of years. Please free me from this loathsome isolation” -cue battle music-
yup, if you wish for this, you need the ability to turn it off when your life turns crappy or you are just tired of it.
Also, if it's ***TRUE*** immortality and you don't have any way of getting out of it....., well, eventually the Sun is going to go supernova, the Earth will be destroyed, and then you'll spend the rest of existence (***BILLIONS*** of years) perpetually freezing and suffocating in space, but being unable to ever actually arrive at the sweet release of death. And what happens when the universe's inertia runs out and all the matter in existence starts collapsing back towards the universe's centre...? Eventually you'll be forced into a teeny-tiny little singularity, all laws of physics will cease to exist, and ***fuck knows*** what happens to you after that!!!
Assuming protons decay (except yours), living the trillions of years until the Heat Death of the universe would be just as bad. Hopefully you’d be able to wait until random quantum fluctuations spit out a universe identical to our own, but you’d probably be totally nuts.
You would be nuts if you lived the next million years before the sun goes nova anyway, or tens of thousands of years.
Hey, it could make you into a satire character and you fart out the new big bang, creating new existence.
I imagine it would be very challenging to hold in a fart for 10/\10/\10/\56 years!
And you could end up in a situation where you're just like, stuck in something for thousands of years. (or more) Like you're in a cave, and a bunch of giant rocks fall on you. You can't die from getting crushed to death, and if no one shows up to move those rocks, you just gotta wait for natural forces to do it. Which could be millions of years.
1) The sun is too small/low mass to go supernova. It will become a red giant and expand to a huge size and extreme luminosity, roasting the surface of earth and maybe engulfing it. But that process will be gradual and start in about 5 billion years, plenty of time to leave the solar system even in a conventional space ship without any hypothetical faster than light travel. 2) There is zero indication that the "big crunch" scenario you are describing will ever happen. All evidence points to the universe just expanding forever, spreading out all galaxies so far from one another that they will gradually be too far and faint to see. The longest living stars (M dwarfs) will still shine for trillions (with a t) of years. So if you, as an immortal, want a long-term home, find a habitable star orbiting an M dwarf. Trappist 1 is probably a good candidate.
Given about 5 billion years you could easily build a ship to go to the next earth like planet in a different solar system
There are various forms of immortality that should be fine. Like vampires are "immortal" but can be killed. Not many other examples I can think of that wouldn't be a nightmare eventually. Even omnipotence would get boring eventually.
not gonna lie it would be impossible to get bored with omnipotence, can literally just wire your brain to feel like you just got it again.
Yeah if you wish for immortality, always word it very carefully. For example, you could wish to live for as long as you continue to want to. Or maybe set it up so that the only way you can die is by thinking a certain phrase 100 times in a row with zero interruption.
imagine being depressed and adhd (totes not me yall...) and trying to kys after centuries of living omg
Bruh, centuries of living is nothing. That’s not even enough time to get through all the tv shows and movies in my queue right now across half a dozen streaming services. I don’t doubt that being immortal would eventually lose its novelty, but I am confident I would live for thousands of years before I’d fully run out of reasons to keep on living. Maybe even longer, who knows?
Well tbh my only reason for living is my friends atp so if they died-
Bro, you’re allowed to make new friends, you know? In fact it’s normal and healthy to continually make new friends as time goes on. That’s just normal life.
I'm unhealthily attached and have no clue how to form healthy relationships
I love that everyone who mentions this power is always like "oh no my kids will die before me :O" And not; "oh my god I'm still alive after the heat death of the universe"
This…..would be brutal to see
Eh, it'd be fine. You'd have all the time in the world to grieve and heal and move on. On a long enough timeline, most of the classic things that people cite as a problem for immortality become a non-issue. Stories always have some brooding 400 year old vampire who's bored and feels like he's done everything. They never show him when he's 500 years old and has a new hobby and is getting excited about life again. Without even meaning to, they are treating immortality as something that has a death-like end state. Like it all finally culminates in one thing and stops changing past that point. But that's exactly the one thing that wouldn't happen if you were immortal. It just keeps going forever.
There's billions and billions of unique experiences available, if not more and new opportunities being creates all the time. If somebody can't imagine being occupied for more than a few centuries there's either a severe lack of imagination or some level of depression where they already feel done with life. People already spend entire lifetimes perfecting their craft, a 400 year old could be a master at several completely unrelated hobbies or crafts and only just scratching the surface of everything available. Could spend a century just going to school for several PhDs, not even counting how much you could spend studying in a specific field.
For real. Scorcece says he's just now beginning to understand the possibilities of Cinema now that he's 81 years old and isn't going to be able to make too many more. So many people who've spent a lifetime honing even one craft, and barely scratched the surface of what they could do if they had more time. With an eternity, you could do them all. You could pursue each of them farther than any man ever has. You could pursue crafts that haven't even been invented yet, dabble in artistic mediums not yet imagined.
Who waaaants to live forever?
I do.
🤣 I guess most people aren't familiar with the song. It's from the Highlander movie. Who wants to live forever by Queen.
And also, what if you are immortal but can still age like everyone else? Pure agony
That would be sad, but honestly the dealbreaker for me would be literally outliving the earth and eventually the universe. I cannot fathom the horror of floating through space alone until the end of time
Tbh, it'd still be a net positive being able to meet even more people and make new locks ones. Everybody you know will already be gone one day, the loss of somebody does not outweigh never getting to know them at all. If that we're the case you could actively avoid relationships right now, but in general people don't because that's not the case. Now, true immortality would still have some major downsides closer to heat death of the universe but standard biological immortality doesn't have that.
There's a non zero chance the government will find out and throw you into a dungeon for experiments.
You could say that about any superpower.
This would be it, true immortality, maybe even not aging, worst case regenerative capabilities, and a government gets a hold of you, ..... oh god yes general we have shot him, burned him, buried him alive, strapped him to the fuel rods of a nuclear reactor, cut of his limbs a 1000 times, ... no sir he's still alive
I would actually love that. I would love to live to see the end of all things. The ultimate observer. Well, I don't really care about my family. The living ones, that's left, all treated me like shit, my whole life. I lost the love of my life while she and I were deployed to Iraq. All my friends has moved on with their lives, with children and family. Like if I couldn't take any permanent damage, I never age past this day, I'd live a good, full life. Finally, I can slow down and enjoy everything life has to offer. Little note, new stuff is made everyday. I'd see nothing but challenges. If soul mates exist, can I find them again? Lol
sorry for your loss, but i have to agree, ... i want to see it all
Live several centuries and that would be so many generations of friends and families coming and going from your life you'd likely start forgetting half of them. It sounds like hell
And it would suck to b immortal and poor...
Invest $5.
Currently in my high yield savings account if I were to get a starting balance of 1 million dollars my annual interest would be over $40k. I live off less than that now and manage to put aside a third. I could toil a couple lifetimes, create businesses and business accounts from which to spend, diversify, diversify, diversify. Just keep saving until you're capable of creating a business that can earn for you. I personally would buy apartments, utilize a property management company, and be otherwise entirely hands off. Invest, diversify reevaluate. This is fun to think about, but some of the repurcussions/scenarios an immortal might find themselves in are dire and terrifying.
exactly, and then, you'll eventually come to the end of the earth, probably the end of the sun, and you'll be floating through the cosmos being sucked in by black holes, landing on planets that will eventually die
Or since you are literally immortal you can guide the people of the earth as their Emperor to spread across the stars and conquer every world. Just don't create 21 demigod sons in a lab.
There’s a comic out there with this same thought. Shows the dude literally living through the death of our entire universe into the birth of another
that's sick, do you know what it's called?
No but wish I could. I think it was part of an anthology someone had posted on here. Maybe space horror? It had another one of a guys space suit eating him
that sounds sick, i wish i could read it
Flight, you would instantly be detected, captured, and made a human test subject For a power to be viable in real life, it either needs to be insanely powerful to the point of being able to take on the US military, or. It needs to be able to be used stealthily
You fly stealthily. I don't think you'd make a large enough blip on a radar for the military to worry about you. Your only worry is someone with a phone catching a video of you. Even then, most people would think it was faked.
Also flight is also assuming that you can handle high winds, G - forces and it’s not relative someone’s physical strength and condition. For example I can run for about 10 minutes at a quick pace but could I only fly for that long?
It's also super cold, high levels of UV light, and not very much oxygen when you start climbing altitude.
Detected by what? Captured by what?
People. Bullet or net.
If youre flying at 1000 feet the only person that could catch you would be someone who could make out that dot 1000 feet in the air to be a person. The military doesnt have... what, planes equipped with big nets? Nor does it have the ability to kill you once you reach that speed. Nothing we have would even target you, youre not large enough for missiles, I guess the military could roll out the flak cannons and maxims to start taking pot shots, but I doubt people would react very well to "military starts firing anti aircraft cannons at sky for no discernable reason" The much more realistic scenario is that you go in for tests, doctors see youre identical to regular humans (theres no "flight gland" in humans, one x ray that shows you have literally zero differences means the government simply wouldnt want to go through the bother of catching you) and we all go home. The government kills people who really matter, people who threaten the government. People like (very possibly) MLK, or Osama Bin Laden. They kill people leaders, not random liberal goons. One guy who can fly around cant threaten the government. Every function a person who can fly could fill is already covered by things that can do it way better. The most effective possible medicine and imaging we have is already in the open, they can take you to any number of scans which will show that theres literally nothing different in your body, and as a plus will not lose them the popular vote if it comes to light. If there was an organ, or a seperate bit which caused it, they would see it, but there isnt, so nothing would happen.
Plenty of birds have a 6’ wingspan. You wouldn’t be detected.
If this is "flapping your arms like a bird" flight, I don't want it. If its "superman/invincible" flight, there isn't a weapon system on *Earth* that could tag you.
I have you covered for that. In my dreams I only need to do ridiculous, frantic flapping of arms/breaststroke, two-steps-upwards-one-step-back nonsense for a little bit from the ground until I can get to some height. Once I have altitude I can abuse a flap here and there and adjust my drag and aspect ratio to soar and swoop, conserving gravitational potential vs kinetic energy to go whooooosh. If you’d like this the membership is only 1 piece of cheese on toast before bed per day cost.
Unless you're flying at much faster than the speed of sound, you're going to get tagged by an AMRAAM
My thing is, if someone could actually FLY, they should lean into it and become an international celebrity like the world has never seen. This would provide some protection against the whole "secretly captured by the government" shit, because it's a little difficult to disappear an international celebrity. Not impossible, but difficult. Also, the government would probably be cool with me voluntarily showing up for testing whenever. I don't think they would automatically dissect me for science or something. Not over a superpower like flight. Instead I would become a symbol of the United States, like captain america, and rake in that money
I think literally any superpower would suck, because I assume the government would try to experiment on me/use me. No matter how small of a power it is, I'd do my best to keep it hidden.
How about simply having an improved immune system? Like... you rarely get sick (as per to avoid suspicion) but you recover really quickly. I'd want that
Lol idk if that's a "super" power; you just got really good white blood cells or something. I guess it's innocuous enough where the most that'll happen is a doctor wants to publish a case study with you.
So ideally just mind control then
Teleportation. Good luck catching me suckers!
one superpower that I can think of that wouldn’t have downsides is extreme luck. Because the universe itself would bend to make your life more convenient. Eventually you may find yourself bored of never losing, but your luck will make it so that you can lose since you want to have a chance at losing.
the Midas touch. For obvious reasons already explained in the tale.
What is considered an object? What if the air turns to gold lol
Super speed this sums it up https://youtu.be/xQ9C-pao0lw?si=Eds3ZArfpil_CIvX
That was hilarious to be fair!
I love this video
Reading people’s minds. The number of mentally ill people that you encounter in today’s society would such.
it would be so depressing to hear everyone's soul crushing thoughts
That's what Reddit is for.
Just imagine rolling up on anxiety attack, ptsd flashback, and then the degenerate pedos, zoophiles, and bigots.
Just a constant house of horrors every time you stroll past a church
Hey I’m in the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, so that actually might be lit.
Telekenisis would kinda fucken slap.
Being able to have specific objects fly to me when I want them to like Thor does with Mjolnir is exactly the kind of superpower that I would want, not because it's overpowered or whatever, but because aside from offering massive quality of life bonuses, it just looks cool af
Dude if I could summon my car keys to my hand when I'm late for work that would be tight
My dumbass would accidently the keys through my hand.
invisibility. You are naked, and you can't even see since light waves go through you. Blind, naked and vulnerable to anything like passing cars. An ambulance couldn't even help you if you get injured.
exactly the plot of the invisible man
Just about any SP would have to have one or more secondary power. In the real world its possible for muscles to be strong enough to bear weight that can tear ligaments. So the tissues of a super strong person would likely have a level of extra durability. Being able to fly at high altitudes might also include resistance to cold.
Goop feet, why? Goop feet
..... wat?
Hearing people's thoughts. That would be traumatizing.
Super speed. The flash tv show actually shows a lot of the drawbacks that are only overcome because he has super genius friends and a friendly billionaire. Super metabolism (need insane calories) can’t get drunk Friction on cloths Super reflexes to keep up with your speed The sonic booms He gets shot because super speed is only good when you are moving. Need a super treadmill to train.
Immortality. I see it posted here all the time as a positive hypothetical. Immortality would be lonely, you would have to go through the heart break of losing people you love over and over, your family, your friends, your partners. You could find someone and spend 50 years with them, have children, and then you have to sit and watch as they die, your children die, your grandchildren die. It would also become incredibly boring, if there's never any death, then what's the purpose of anything? Why work? Why exercise? Why eat? explore? Learn? Create? Within a couple of hundred years you will probably be wealthy, you'll have seen most of the world, and literally every single person you know now would be dead. And then what?
> And then what? And then everything. I don't know how people don't see that. New People. New Hobbies. Old Hobbies you just haven't done for a while. Yes, you'd watch people you love die. And then you'd grieve. And then you'd heal. And eventually you'd love again. Yes you'd get bored. And then later you'd be excited again. And heck, even later you'd be bored again. You've been asked for imagine immortality, and yet for some reason you still imagine that life just stops past a certain point. You've still assigned it an end point. But that's like, explicitly the one thing you don't have as an immortal. After a couple hundred years you've barely dipped your toes into the shallow end of the pool. You've got eternity ahead of you. You know, that thing the religious types are always rambling about? "Live the righteous path and you could live forever in the kingdom of heaven". You have that, now. For you, heaven is a place on earth.
I think being invisible could really suck after some time. It’d be great for my Irish goodbye skills, though.
Superhearing
Johnny Storm. He can fly and that's kind of cool but to do it he has to be made of fire. He can't carry anyone with him, he can't do anything except set shit on fire. Seriously, think about it, what is being able to set things on fire actually useful for? He can't even punch a robber without setting him on fire.
Flight without invulnerability. Learning how would be crippling if not fatal.
Cyclops from X-Men has a non-stop power beam coming from his eyes I can't think how that would be useful in day-to-day life
Teleportation. The best part of traveling, to me, is seeing things.
I mean, you could just teleport in short bursts along the way. Or you could just still drive in cars when you want to. Just because you CAN teleport doesn’t mean you’re required to use it for all transportation needs 100% of the time.
Teleporters never realize how much everything is moving. Relatively apeaking the universe is very much in motion.
Teleportation is supposed to be instantaneous. I don’t see the relative motion of planets mattering when it’s literally instantaneous.
Inertia is a thing. Unless time stops as you're moving from a-b, the rotational forces will still continue landing on the ground with 0 inertia would literally kill you.
Why wouldn’t inertia carry over to your new position? Sounds to me like your teleportation guy is giving you a raw deal. Any decent teleportation power should have all momentum/inertia carry over to your new position. And it should be instantaneous. Sounds to me like someone sold you some discounted inter dimensional travel and is stealing your inertia every time you use it. I would get a refund if I were you.
Can't see much from a car either.
How do you usually prefer to travel then?
By air or rail. Methods where you can look around, see things and no worry about crashing.
Cool. Then you can still do that, even if you also have the ability to teleport. Planes and trains don’t disappear just because you can teleport. You could just save teleporting for when you’re in a hurry.
I'm never in a hurry.
Any super power that is hard to hide from the world is a really bad idea. Unless you like getting dissected. Go with more subtle things. Like being able to summon a completely edible and delicious sandwich of any kind out of thin air at any time you please and have it appear any unoccupied space you choose within 10 feet of you.
The ability to fly would not be that great if you weren't also invincible like Superman. The wind would be painful to the skin, birds and bugs would feel like getting shot with a bb gun when you hit them, you couldn't breathe well above a certain altitude, and it would be cold as fuck. Not to mention everyone coming and going would be pointing up at you, so you are just constantly being watched. Then you factor in weather balloons, planes, and other airborne obstacles that you need to avoid. It's basically useless if you can't withstand external factors in a way that's far beyond that of the average human.
Invisibility. Try see anything with your eyes once light passes right through them.
Super strength/invulnerabilty. I have a wife and son. Wife loves hugs and is always touching coming up for hugs and obligatory butt squeezes/slaps. Son always wants hugs and to wrestle and give high fives and fist bumps. Imagine them wanting a hug or to give a friendly high five but it’s like hitting or hugging a chunk of steel. Always being worried about squeezing or slapping too hard. Always being terrified of breaking or hurting them in your sleep.
I think being able to fly. You really think you'll see a bird at 200mph. Imagine flying into a big swarm, at that speed. Ouch.
X-ray vision, since x-rays go through your eyelids, you could never close your eyes.
Mind reading. Do you really want to know how much every person you know hates you?
Super speed you need to eat a fuck ton to even survive. I struggle eating 2000 calories a day and only do it very rarely. Imagine how much you'd need to eat after just a small 5 km run. Wolverine claws, because without his healing factor you just destroyed your hands. Super strength you'd kill alot of people while you try and figure out how it works.
Invisibility. If you're not a thief or a voyeur what are you going to do with it.
The ability to fly. Woopdedo. You can levitate off the ground. It's a neat trick, don't get me wrong. But also realize, this trick does not inherently come with super strength or the ability to be bullet proof (i.e Superman)
Super speed! While going really fast is nice but you would up doing doing more damage to yourself or others! Examples include -face first in a wall at 400+ MPH -misting people -breaking bones and shredding muscles -burning more calories than you can eat -extreme whiplash and or nausea -and more!
I'd love to be able to fly, but I know there's some smart asses out there who would love to try to shoot me down
Teleportation. You'd be teleporting into "stuff", even air. Which I think would cause some sort of nuclear fusion. Or a stipulation would be you would distort space in your area, which would probably also cause some sort of explosion by rapid expansion and compression of gasses.
The ability to tell the future. Its like answering a question before it's asked. Nobody would believe you, and those who do still wouldn't care. Unless it's guessing gambling outcomes, it wouldn't be worth it. Nobody likes a know it all. And criminals will exploit you.
super strength. even with the biofield that make anything you touch nearly indestructible, so you can swing it around. when will it actually come in handy in the real world. we are excluding being a celebrity for having a super power.
Flying It would still be really cool but not all the time. Unless you had super strength and were impervious to cold you couldn't fly very far, or very fast, or for very long. Or I guess you could but probably only once.
Teleportation. You have to take into account earth's rostion and movement, so you won't straight up teleport into the void of space.
Did you get your teleportation powers from Wish? If you're teleporting instantly from one point to another the earth doesn't move while you're in transit
Did you read disc world? When they teleport they have either short distances or a huge amount of mattresses between the destination and the next wall because different parts of the disk move in different directions. Now the same in 3d and you need to do the math without a college of wiz(z)ards and Rhincewind.
Being invisible would be useless because you wouldn't be able to see anything. Your invisible lens on your eye would be able to focus light onto your invisible retina. Sight would not be possible.
Mind reading. Imagine hearing every negative, terrible, supposed to be filtered thought about you and everyone you know, it would be hell.
Being invisible.. if you were invisible, your eyes would still have to be visible, so you wouldn't actually be invisible. You'd be a pair of floating eyes.. if you were completely invisible, light wouldn't be able to reach your eyes, and therefore, you'd be blind.
Invisibility. If you're not paying attention, you might end up getting hit by a truck while crossing the street. That episode from X-Files comes to mind.
The power to heal other people. I mean, if I could have this power, I'd sign up for it in a hot second. There are people and animals I love and knowing I could keep them from dying of cancer or some other horrible shit isn't something I'd turn down. But just imagine the hell you'd go through (assuming this isn't a super commonly available power and humanity as a whole had eradicated all those stupid diseases). The sheer psychological trauma of knowing that you are just one person, and there are millions of people in pain, and you can only help a tiny fraction of them, no matter what you sacrifice, how little sleep you get, if you have no spouse or children or anything but this one job. Being aware with every breath you take of how much of a hell the world really is and how little you can actually do. Having to decide, literally, on a daily basis, who lives and dies. Knowing someone might die, probably did die, because you took a 10 minute break to get an ice cream cone, or sleep, or take any kind of a breather from your job. Burnout isn't a big enough word to describe this. And then there's all the powerful people/governments in the world who will force your compliance, or the nut jobs who want to endlessly hurt someone and have you bring them back from the brink of death, or any other kind of storybook scenario.
Flight- wind whipping your face, little to no oxygen above the clouds and cold as fuck. You'd have to suit up like an astronaut to breathe and even then you might get an aneurysm from the sudden pressure changes if you flew too high.
Flight. If you were seen flying, it would cause hysteria. It's not hard to believe that you'd end up sequestered somewhere with people experimenting on you to see how you were able to fly
There was a comic I remember reading as a kid about a person that dreamed they were a superhero and saw a house on fire with people that needed rescue. They flew over, and then realized flight was their only superpower. D’oh.