An old thought surfaced as I was commenting on the "super-telepathy" thread, one i've never written about. To wit: The super-powers that we, as human beings, have imagined for millennia that are preposterous but somehow seem plausible to the point that we don't even question them. These are super-powers with no basis in physiology or physics at all, and yet we all imagine them, usually as children.
For example, telepathy. It's, frankly, a ridiculous idea. There is no mechanism in the human body to broadcast or receive thoughts -- not even a hint of one. Nor is there is any such thing in other species, or in pre-history. There simply is no mechanism for it.
Nor is there a carrier medium for thoughts. Air? Water? The electromagnetic spectrum? What, exactly, would carry thoughts from one person to another? Fairies?
While some SF concepts have roots in actual science and may someday happen -- like FTL travel and even transporter technology (although unlikely) -- there is no basis for telepathy in science. Its origin is in the human imagination, and it's remarkable how throughout history cultures all over the world have imagined it, and almost expect it to happen someday.
Here are two more:
* Flight. This one, at least, has a basis in the animal kingdom: We look up and see birds, and want to do it ourselves.
So in dreams and fiction, we imagine ourselves flying. When we invent a superheroes, it isn't long before a raft of them are flying. Some have excuses -- Captain Marvel uses magic, Hawkman has a gravity device -- whereas many flying characters, like Superman, have no such excuse. They're flying because we expect them to.
Birds fly because they have hollow bones, wingspans that can successfully offset their weight, feathers and, of course, the wings that do (literally) the heavy lifting. They're adapted to be perfectly aerodynamic.
What's Superman's excuse? He has no mechanism for lift. He has no way to change direction or stop, and yet he does. He hovers, for heaven's sake, with no explanation whatsoever.
And yet, how old were each of us before we questioned it?
* Eye beams. Going back into pre-history, eyes have been important projectors or receivers of power (think Medusa). In current mythology we have Kryptonian heat vision, Martian heat vision, Cyclops' force beam, and on and on.
But there is no way this could work.
What organ is projecting force? Where is it located? If it's behind the retina, it would blind you the first time you used your eye beams. If in front, it would be visible.
"But," you say, "Superman is an alien. As a Kryptonian, he might have grown such an organ." If he did, why? That implies that Kryptonians evolved heat projectors behind their eyes that they never used and had no purpose under a red sun. That's not how evolution works, as we understand it.
There is simply no mechanism in man or other creatures, in the present or back to pre-history, where eyes could shoot things at other people. It is, frankly, preposterous.
And yet when presented with a character with such powers, we don't, ah, blink an eye. It takes a little while to wonder how Cyclops has any eyelids left, or why Newton's third law of motion doesn't apply to his or Superman's head when they fire their eye weapons.
It's just a thing that makes intuitive sense to us. We accept it without asking questions (at least as children). And yet, it's ridiculous.
What about it Legionnaires? Got any preposterous but mythologically sound powers to present?
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Well, Cyclops is supposed to be immune to his own power but that's a lot of power to be held back by just his eyelids!
I never got any scientific theory for growing or shrinking. White dwarf matter, Pym particles, strange vapors, strange meteors, strange radiation, none of it makes any sense. Where does the excess mass come from? Where does it go? Why doesn't it hurt? How do you breathe? How do you speak? How do you know when to stop? The questions are near endless.
I think we accept these powers not because they're especially plausible, but because they're the sort of things we'd like to be able to do so badly that we ignore how implausible they are. To fly, to know what someone else is really thinking, to be able to blast things just by looking at them - these are things that people fantasize about being able to do so much that we accept characters doing them without question.
When the Atom increases his weight just before he hits someone his momentum must increase simultaneously or he'd spontaneously slow since momentum=mass times velocity.
When he hits crooks he hits them with his tiny fist, but with his full weight behind it. Leaving aside why his tiny arm doesn't break, he should rip open the side of their faces or punch holes in their stomachs.
His technology would be great for constructing a spaceship. Instead, he fights crooks with it.
If Captain America's shield absorbs kinetic energy getting hit with it should be like getting hit by a Nerf ball and it shouldn't bounce off anything. For that matter, it shouldn't be possible to throw it since that's a form of giving something a push.
I have questioned for a long time how Storm had a mutation that allows her to control the weather. It doesn't make any sense to me.
Captain America's shield is usually described as a vibranium alloy. I assume the edges aren't vibranium and it is so constructed to do the things it does. It's within the realm of the possible (if implausible) to me.
Does anyone remember how Cap's shield was described before 1966, when vibranium was introduced? Was it unbreakable before then, and if so, how was it explained? I should know this, but don't remember.
As to shrinking, I always imagined that what Atom's belt and Pym particles did was to reduce the space between molecules. That explains the mass -- it doesn't need to go anywhere. But that would make Atom and Ant-Man immensely dense, and yes, they would maim or kill anyone they hit. And they couldn't frolic in anthills and float on the wind, because they'd be too heavy.
However, Atom at least had a size-and-weight-changing belt. How that works I can't puzzle out from the information given, and it seems an entirely different field of technology than how the shrinking part works. Ant-Man, similarly, figured out how to shrink and talk to ants and engineer a helmet to do so, even though he was, technically, only a biochemist. That's at least three different fields where Pym went a quantum jump farther than the experts in those fields. There must be a school in the Marvel U that teaches kids to be polymaths.
I agree, Baron, that these are things we badly want to do, so we imagine them to be possible.
And with eye-beams, there's tons of literature where the eyes are important, in romance and combat and so forth. We sometimes seem to be communicating with our eyes ("I want to have sex with you" "I am going to kill you and I'm looking right where I intend to strike").
But I'd also argue that "reading" people with our eyes involves a whole host of things besides our eyes, including understanding body language (probably intuitively), similar experiences, previous conversations, etc. When a guy makes eye contact with a girl, she might be saying "I find you attractive" or she might be projecting "get the hell away from me, weirdo." It takes more than just your eyes to determine which she means.
But we do try to tell other people with our looks what we mean, on occasion, which might give rise to a subconscious basis for both eye-beams and telepathy.
Hmm. I might be talking myself out of my own premise.
Captain Comics said:
Presumably it's the same school that Professor Roy Hinkley from Gilligan's Island went to, where you can get a doctorate in Whatever The Writer Needs You To Know.
Wandering Sensei: Moderator Man said:
That's a good question, Jeff. There's no mechanism for controlling the weather in any species, nor any science for how that would work.
That one might fall into The Baron's category of "We want to do it so badly we imagine it possible without worrying about the details." But we are comic book fans, so obviously we DO worry about the details.
So this also falls into a category I just made up, which is "super-powers which don't work the way the super-heroes think they do."
John Byrne famously hypothesized that ALL of Superman's powers work differently than he thinks they do, and it's a great theory. Byrne said all of SUperman's powers are basically telekinetic. He flies by TK. He lifts battleships because he thinks he's super-strong -- and so the TK lifts the battleship, and reinforces his delusion. He sets things on fire with his mind, not his heat vision.
But Superman doesn't know that. He imagines he has heat vision, so he telekinetically -- and subconsciously -- creates the effects of heat vision, like red rays coming out of his eyes. And similar with his other powers.
This has weaknesses, too. Superman imagines he doesn't have powers under a red sun, so he doesn't. It's psychosomatic. He thinks this because other Kryptonians don't have super-powers, and he thinks the red sun is the reason, and so he creates the reality. In Byrne world, Superman is probably the world's mightiest mutant, clearly different from his ancestors.
Byrne even used this theory in the field, so to speak, by having Gladiator's powers work that way. Gladiator is a Shi'Ar enforcer, a clear Superman swipe at that (his real name is Kallark). In an issue of Fantastic Four, Byrne had Mr. Fantastic figure out that Spartan's powers weren't physical, but were all mental -- and yet, Gladiator didn't seem to know this. So Richards and Co. defeated Gladiator by convincing him (mostly via Sue's invisible force field) that he had lost his powers. And since they were entirely derived from his belief in them, he in fact lost them.
Getting back to Storm, what creates weather? A jillion things, too many to manipulate individually without a host of super-powers. You'd have to manipulate electromagnetic energy, the solar wind, wave action, maybe tectonic plates, probably even gravity. And you'd have to do it with an energized super-push to make these things happen really fast, and where does the energy come from for that? And why does Storm's localized super-energetic storm (or whatever) not affect weather patterns worldwide, by reducing or increasing all those effects by stealing and/or adding energy to them? But her effects dissipate as quickly as they arrived.
So Storm's powers can't possibly be "controlling weather." I'm guessing TK again, but I'm open to suggestion!
Even more amazing, Hinkley's doctorate must have been in the field of coconut technology.
The Baron said:
I suppose the simplest answer is just that the laws of physics (and chemistry, and biology) are different in super-hero universes.
Well in Avengers #35, Cap's shield wasn't that indestructible! Of course, later it was explained away as an alternate shield, not his original one.
And weren't Superman's vision powers invisible to the naked eye?
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