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

  • kescusay@lemmy.world
    241·
    1 year 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
      13·
      1 year 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.

    • hperrin@lemmy.world
      51·
      1 year 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.

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
      2·
      1 year 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.

      • kescusay@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        Being 1:1 with your frame of reference is actually one of the problems.

        Say you’re Barry Allen and you’re running from Los Angeles to New York city. Given the nature of your powers, you arrive there basically instantly as far as anyone else is concerned.

        But for you? You experience every single footstep you took along the way. You arrive bored out of your mind and possibly going insane after running across the continental United States in, for you, months of being absolutely alone in a world of utterly still statues and an unmoving sun.

        • ramble81@lemm.ee
          1·
          1 year ago

          That’s why I said you can adjust it. But if you did it in a flash you wouldn’t be able to avoid obstacles in time and you’d be a fine red mist.

  • davidgro@lemmy.world
    12·
    1 year 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.

  • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
    10·
    1 year ago

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

  • jopepa@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 year 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.

  • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Telepathy. You would get their mental illnesses too. Imagine telepathic combatants on a battlefield and suddenly everyone has PTSD because one guy stepped in a trap.

  • mx_smith@lemmy.world
    11·
    1 year ago

    Check out the graphic novel series called Chew the characters all have obscure food super powers