Ask Lemmy

A lot of them assuming you don't get the required secondary powers.

Super speed, if your perceptions aren't heightened it rapidly becomes impractical, if they are things are going to get painfully boring real quick. Even thinking at double speed means you are going to be waiting for the world to catch up a lot. Never mind what even relatively low G-forces can do to someone.

Super-hearing. Imagine if you really could hear conversations a block away, it can be hard enough discerning one conversation in a crowded room, imagine it being like that everywhere. All the rats and insects you will be hearing, the sound of people's clothes rubbing together. Even if normally loud things aren't deafening just focusing on one thing will be taxing.

If you don't get secondary powers then super strength is going to suck. The human body is already capable of injuring itself with its own strength. How many fastball pitchers get arm or shoulder injuries just from throwing something really fast, or power-lifters who have something break or burst. Modern sporting records are starting to push up against the structural limits of the human body.

Super strength is something I could see being problematic.

The movies always show the super strong hero picking up buses or trains with one hand, but in reality you have to lift such vehicles in specific places, or they will be damaged. Youtube is full of videos depicting cars falling from mechanic's lifts due to improper lift point placement, or just old fasioned rust. Imagine Mr. Incredible going to pick up a bus in a state where the roads are salted, and just breaking off a handful of the frame.

Any sort of super strength without added toughness and motor control. You'd break your own body let alone everything around you pretty fast. Same for juggernaut movement. Or high jump type flight.

Teleportation. Unless truly instantaneous, you need to account for the fact that the earth moves 18 miles per second relative to the sun.

Ability to stop time.

As soon as you stop time, everything will go pitch black. The photons which refract off everything will be absorbed by your eyes instantaneously.

Assuming you could still see, it would be freezing everywhere as the heat would dissipate the moment you touched it.

Assuming you could still see, and wouldn't freeze to death, if you were to unfreeze time, the human-shaped vacuum tube you created while walking from point A to B would collapse violently, killing you, and anyone else standing close to it.

This also assumes that with time stopped, you can push microscopic particles around. If not, then any movement at all will make every molecule around you act as radiation, and and dust will feel like tiny razor blades, ripping through your body.

Also, the ability to stop time doesn't guarantee the ability to start it again.

mind reading. it would make you super sad super fast, because you'd always know when you're being lied to.

Invisibility. It would also make you blind.

There was a TV show about a guy with super senses -hearing, smell, touch, vision. I grew up with brothers, learned to breathe defensively to not smell things, and remember thinking there is no way I would survive having a supernaturally sensitive sense of smell. There are just more bad smells than good in an average day.

I think also that hearing people's thoughts would drive anyone crazy.

What I would like to have is super jumping and landing, sort of like flying but just bouncing.

Super speed. Even if you ignore the air friction and possible "everything moves too damn slow for me" problems, it doesn't come with super endurance.

Imagine

How

Slowly

It

Seems

Like

Everyone

Is

Talking

To

The

Flash.

Immortality. If you go to the bottom of the ocean or space without protection your muscles won't get any more oxygen and you'll get rigor mortis and basically be stuck forever.

Laser eyes/heat vision where you can't see where to shoot.

Russia

Shape-shifting would almost certainly be agonizingly painful.

Super speed. You'd have to slow down or die of heatstroke from air friction.

Unless your power is to control fire, the power to create fire or engulf yourself in fire would be mostly useless. Finding or making fireproof (not fire resistant) clothing would be a pain and uncomfortable to wear all the time. Plus, a lot of things are flammable, so unless you plan to be a super villain you're more of a menace shooting flames everywhere than you are a hero.

Super speed. Either you would need to also think and react at super speeds, which mean the world would be agonizingly slow, or you would have normal speed reaction in which case you would crash and die.

There is also the option of super reaction time on demand, but in any case non of this matters as super speed would make the air as "thick" as a concrete wall so you would also need to me super strong and super durable.

x ray vision, pretty sure you need to expose things to x rays to see skeletons. You gonna walk around irradiating people with an x ray source?

Hearing everybody else's thoughts all the time, X-Men is probably the most popular example

Super speed. That doesn't necessarily mean you have super reaction time.

Laser cock.

Black hole manufacturing.

Superman's powers would be totally impractical in real life. I mean, destroying any building you're in with a fart you didn't catch in time doesn't sound very practical to me...

Invisibility, imagine trying to get a license