Poll of the Day > You get a super power, but that super power is actually realistic and logical

(+) Yeah! (+)

Super Strength - In order to get that much muscles, you will end up looking like an ugly fat piece of meat ass. Contrary to popular misconception portrayed in comics/manga, the stronger you get, the more fats you're going to inevitably get. All of the world's strongest men all have huge tummies for a reason... This means you'll look like the Blob from Marvel: https://bleedingcool.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Iron-Studios-The-Blob-002-900x900.jpg

Super Speed - You age incredibly fast everything you use your speed powers because time is relative and you're just manipulating your own dimension of time. So for example, if you run around at 1000x the speed of a normal person in 10 minutes, this means you just aged 7 days more in the real world within 10 minutes. Also everytime you wanna heal a wound using your super speed...well, dont be surprised if you suddenly get grey hair or even die of a stroke.

Time Travel - You can rewind time for everyone in the universe. But you lose your own memories too. Duh. LOL.

Telepathy - You can hear people's thoughts, but you cant select who you want to hear. You'll hear everyone's thoughts 24/7, all the time, for all the people around you within a 1 mile radius.

Invisibility - OK, so somehow you're invisible due to awesome skin cloaking powers, but how the hell can your non-skin parts be invisible too? So your whole body, except your eyes, mouth and hair is invisible. Yes, that includes the hair in between your legs and armpits. Have fun trying to stay invisible with floating hair.

Lover - You can make anyone, even random strangers, fall in love with you and have instant hookups with anyone. Except their love never dies but keeps on growing. Every person you affect turns to a horny psycophatic lover that's become obsessed with wanting your wiener, even if it means crossing boundaries and breaking ahem...laws.

Phasing - You fall through everything, including right through the Earth and out into outer space. Better wear an astronaut suit fast. Oh wait, you phase through that too.

Flight - You cant bend physic to fly. No, makes no sense. You can only fly with wings. So you get enormous cool-looking dragon wings that let you fly. But the wings have to extremely big to lift up a human body of fair ratio. And the wings are so big they can't close up fully. So have fun squeezing into rooms. Also you get tired easily from flapping those wings after a while and you cant fly that high since the upper atmosphere contains less oxygen

Teleportation - You can teleport anywhere you want, even to other planets (not sure why cos you'd die instantly from atmosphere but nvm). The only problem is you can't be sure on the exact geographical position of the place you'll be in. You could end up teleporting inside of a pillar or dirt ground or even end up in mid-air and fall to your death. It's a risk-it-all choice of using your power.

Time Travel - You can rewind time for everyone in the universe. But you lose your own memories too. Duh. LOL.

This ends the worlds if used. If you choose to rewind time and lose your memories, everything will proceed the same way again, leading into the same choice to rewind. The world will be trapped in a loop, repeating the same events endlessly.

Phasing - You fall through everything, including right through the Earth and out into outer space. Better wear an astronaut suit fast. Oh wait, you phase through that too.

That's not how the gravity would work. You'd end up in a back-and-forth motion, spending most of your time inside the Earth, only bobbing above surface at the apex of your trajectory.

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ZeldaMutant posted...

That's not how the gravity would work. You'd end up in a back-and-forth motion, spending most of your time inside the Earth, only bobbing above surface at the apex of your trajectory.

I was going to say something like that, but due to the fact that the earth itself is moving through space, I'm not actually sure how it would end up. Presumably, friction is not a thing in this case, so gravity will be the only force acting on you. Your initial velocity would be based on the Earth's motion, but because the earth is orbiting in a circle, its trajectory would pretty quickly diverge from yours. Despite that, though, Earth's gravity will continue to pull on you, and given that that is currently enough to keep people from flying off into space, it can be presumed that that would be true even when you can't touch anything.

As such, I'd expect the oscillation you describe, but you'd gradually stabilize to be just on the trailing edge (WRT the Earth's orbital motion) of the core, since on each oscillation to the leading side, the earth would have moved far enough to keep you from reaching your initial position. It's possible that the Earth's moving fast enough that the core's gravity would slingshot you out of orbit on the far side if you start on the leading edge, but I don't know for sure.

Of course, all of this is largely irrelevant, because you'd also phase through air instead of being able to breathe it. You'd lose consciousness within a minute or two and die a few minutes after that, so you wouldn't actually experience much of that.

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Lover

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ZeldaMutant posted...

This ends the worlds if used. If you choose to rewind time and lose your memories, everything will proceed the same way again, leading into the same choice to rewind. The world will be trapped in a loop, repeating the same events endlessly.

Funny thought...
how'd you know we aren't already repeating the whole timeline of the universe? :)

I immediately thought of that movie 'Jumper' when I saw the TT an choices...so that's the one I would pick

Super strength has no downsides for me

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Wutobliteration posted...

Super Strength - In order to get that much muscles, you will end up looking like an ugly fat piece of meat ass. Contrary to popular misconception portrayed in comics/manga, the stronger you get, the more fats you're going to inevitably get. All of the world's strongest men all have huge tummies for a reason... This means you'll look like the Blob from Marvel: https://bleedingcool.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Iron-Studios-The-Blob-002-900x900.jpg

This is all wrong or factually misunderstands the actual drawbacks with strength. Clearly you don't need much of a stomach to have massive physical strength, considering you have slender animals whose strength vastly outperforms human strength. In the case of strongmen gaining weight, it's just an easier way for them to do it naturally and not actually a superpower. If you wanted a good superpower drawback, you'd need to be more creative.

Wutobliteration posted...

Super Speed - You age incredibly fast everything you use your speed powers because time is relative and you're just manipulating your own dimension of time. So for example, if you run around at 1000x the speed of a normal person in 10 minutes, this means you just aged 7 days more in the real world within 10 minutes. Also everytime you wanna heal a wound using your super speed...well, dont be surprised if you suddenly get grey hair or even die of a stroke.

Also factually wrong. Time and space isn't distorted simply by things moving quickly (well, there's a potential caveat but it actually works the OPPOSITE of what you expect). If you were constantly on a train moving 180 miles per hour across the planet for 50 years, your age would be the same as somebody who wasn't on that train. You've pigeonholed super-speed in a way that's both unrealistic and illogical. The logical change would require physiological differences.

However, if aging was impacted, you would actually be aging SLOWER not faster:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/07/65014/how-does-time-dilation-affect-aging-during-high-speed-space-travel/

Wutobliteration posted...

Time Travel - You can rewind time for everyone in the universe. But you lose your own memories too. Duh. LOL.

Not based on any realism and clearly not even a power since you could argue that the effect is always in place.

Wutobliteration posted...

Telepathy - You can hear people's thoughts, but you cant select who you want to hear. You'll hear everyone's thoughts 24/7, all the time, for all the people around you within a 1 mile radius.

There's no real rationale for thing to suggest that it's a logical or realistic outcome, and the radius feels more unrealistic than realistic. If there was a radius, it would need to be relatively short.

Wutobliteration posted...

Invisibility - OK, so somehow you're invisible due to awesome skin cloaking powers, but how the hell can your non-skin parts be invisible too? So your whole body, except your eyes, mouth and hair is invisible. Yes, that includes the hair in between your legs and armpits. Have fun trying to stay invisible with floating hair.

Again, not a realistic interpretation in the last. If you wanted to pretend to give a shit about realism instead of shitposting, you'd look at the animal kingdom's version of camouflaging where animals can color-change and use other mechanics to conceal their bodies. But instead of looking at science, you've chosen to look at cartoons.

Wutobliteration posted...

Lover - You can make anyone, even random strangers, fall in love with you and have instant hookups with anyone. Except their love never dies but keeps on growing. Every person you affect turns to a horny psycophatic lover that's become obsessed with wanting your wiener, even if it means crossing boundaries and breaking ahem...laws.

Again, this doesn't seem to have much basis on reality, but instead relies on shitty pulp fiction. If you wanted realism, you'd look to the animal kingdom and the concept of pheromones, at which point the drawback would be that the direct effect could potentially wear off (although I'm not sure if repeated use alters the brain chemistry).

Wutobliteration posted...

Phasing - You fall through everything, including right through the Earth and out into outer space. Better wear an astronaut suit fast. Oh wait, you phase through that too.

If you didn't have mass, you wouldn't be impacted by gravity. Although popular fiction loves this trope, I'm not sure there's any science behind it.

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(continued from above)

Wutobliteration posted...

Flight - You cant bend physic to fly. No, makes no sense. You can only fly with wings. So you get enormous cool-looking dragon wings that let you fly. But the wings have to extremely big to lift up a human body of fair ratio. And the wings are so big they can't close up fully. So have fun squeezing into rooms. Also you get tired easily from flapping those wings after a while and you cant fly that high since the upper atmosphere contains less oxygen

You talk about things not making sense, but pretty much everything you've proposed doesn't make sense. And you certainly *could* have alternative explanations for flight not involving wings, which wouldn't work unless your body structure fundamentally changed as well.

Some options that would make more sense than wings might involve having the ability to produce and store within your body an absurdly lightweight gas or chemical.

Wutobliteration posted...

Teleportation - You can teleport anywhere you want, even to other planets (not sure why cos you'd die instantly from atmosphere but nvm). The only problem is you can't be sure on the exact geographical position of the place you'll be in. You could end up teleporting inside of a pillar or dirt ground or even end up in mid-air and fall to your death. It's a risk-it-all choice of using your power.

That would depend entirely on the form of teleportation. If you were bending time and space to link two locations where you'd see the exit point, none of those factors would apply. Unpredictable teleportation is generally a lazy limiting trope.

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Would gravity even affect you if you phase out? Your matter wouldn't be in the same dimension as the object exerting gravity.

Superspeed would probably be the best of these, but basically because you can just only use it if you absolutely have to. You still live the same relative time and it can confer plenty of advantages. You could probably leverage it to make a lot of money with minimal use and at least be rich.

I'm also not sure why having invisible skin is more realistic than having invisible eyeballs.

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Re: super speed, once you get to even small fractions of the speed of light, you're basically cooking yourself alive, so that wouldn't last long

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Most are not really that bad.

For super strength you would just be the strongest man in the world, yeah, you'd look like it, but some people dig that.

For super speed, that is actually not a bad trade off, especially since you could just use it a tiny bit to win races etc. Just increase your run speed by 1.5x and you'd win all the races and be rich etc. You could give up an hour of your life to quickly (so fast nobody can see you) look at other peoples hands in high stakes poker etc.....tons of ways to become super rich, and then you still have backup speed in case of emergencies (IE you would die if you didn't use it).

Time travel doesn't make sense sadly because how would you know to rewind time after you started and lost the memory of why you rewinded it, would you ever stop rewinding at that point? You HAVE to retain memories or at best you would have an endless loop of rewinding time, and at worst you would rewind all the way back to the start (again possibly every time). So logically everyone else would forget but you would have to remember.

The radius on telepathy would rock, but still, you could easily (very easily) become mega rich, buy an island, and only have select people come out. Also much like most noise you could probably learn to tune it out over time. You could also still have interactions with people online/over phones etc, just you would need to be selective about who comes onto your property (doesn't have to be an island, just at least 1 square mile of land).

Invisibility meanwhile is pretty easy to fix. Shave all your hair, close your eyes when you want to be totally invisible. As far as your mouth, just pull your lips in (kinda like what girls do after putting makup on) so it's just skin showing. BAM totally invisible. You can just open your eyes briefly to see where you need to go, and that would be all that shows.

No down side to lover if your selfish honestly, you could even have your past lovers kill themselves for you probably, or create a harem of slaves that will do anything to sleep with you. It's a messed up power but I'd say a good portion of humanity would take it in a second (both sexes).

Phasing would depend on alot of factors, especially if you can phase only part of your body (but it's still attached to the rest) letting you face your hand/arm through a safe for instance etc. You could phase part of your body at a time till the whole thing was through a door etc. If you have to phase your whole body, then you have to deal with if gravity would even affect you, velocity etc, but if you stay on the same trajectory/rotation etc of the early and are only affected by previous movement (ie you phase before jumping through a wall) then you would not sink into the earth etc. It would still be dangerous if your not careful, but would be useful in many situations.

Flight is messed up the way you make it, although it doesn't have to be. Your bone density could be reduces etc, and the wings could be small enough to fold back in etc, but yeah that flight power would mostly stuck.

Teleportation though is...fairly normal in many games etc. You basically can only teleport to places you know are empty (can see) or that you have set up in advance to be safe (create teleportation zones that only you can open, get in/out of, so there will never be anything inside. You could use this to travel quickly around the world, and make tons of money again. You could also use it for magic tricks etc, and to possibly eventually help space exploration by going out to space in a shuttle ship, creating a safe teleportation area, and then transporting tons of materials to make a space station (and later a base on the moon etc) for humanity. You would be a hero (and get lots of chicks cause chicks dig astronauts!!).

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Your super power just seem like shitty powers with curses not realistic.
I have always thought "reasonable" powers would be powers you could have without being overpowered or noticed by regular humanity.

My realistic power would be:

>Body Regeneration:
Your body is no different in the way it heals, though it can heal to a much greater extent then normal humans. You can heal any scars and other would heal 15-20% faster then normal. You can regenerate connective tissue so things like joint pain are never an issue in your life. Your metabolism works much better then others, so you can pig out and still maintain a healthy weight. You are immune to many common low tiers diseases (ex: stds lol). Hair loss is never an issue as new hairs grow regularly, so even at age 60 you will still look quite young and your skin is still taut.

Now thats a power that isnt sublime but within boundries of realism as some indivduals already get aspects of this from just having good genetics.

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speed. use it once or twice to steal money. millions would be worth a week or two
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Why would invisibility necessarily work that way in the first place? Why couldn't it cloak everything else along with your skin?

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Zeus posted...

(continued from above)

You talk about things not making sense, but pretty much everything you've proposed doesn't make sense. And you certainly *could* have alternative explanations for flight not involving wings, which wouldn't work unless your body structure fundamentally changed as well.

Some options that would make more sense than wings might involve having the ability to produce and store within your body an absurdly lightweight gas or chemical.

That would depend entirely on the form of teleportation. If you were bending time and space to link two locations where you'd see the exit point, none of those factors would apply. Unpredictable teleportation is generally a lazy limiting trope.

Dood, did people ever tell you you're fun at parties?

Lover easily. I don't care about the "downsides", it will just be nice having someone that actually loves me for once.

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GenericGuy posted...

Lover easily. I don't care about the "downsides", it will just be nice having someone that actually loves me for once.

Even if they just want you for the sex and are not genuinely into you?

lol... the amount of despo people choosing Lovers though.

Wutobliteration posted...

Even if they just want you for the sex and are not genuinely into you?

I'm an involuntary virgin in my mid-twenties. I'd much rather have that than be in the situation where literally no female wants me for anything romantic at all, as is currently the case.

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lover one is just straight up the plot to the tate donovan/sandra bullock love potion number 9 movie

if you didn't tell them your real name, or where you lived, how would they be able to stalk you?
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Wutobliteration posted...

Dood, did people ever tell you you're fun at parties?

I was thinking pretty much the same thing from his post lol

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Either strength or lover. In my line of work strength has its benefits provided I can still fit through doors. Then again maybe theyd permanently put me as yard officer which I'm down for.

Lover though. Id just be smart enough to not overuse it. Pick me 1 or 2 people that aint gonna be jealous of sharing. And id be good. If extreme jealousy comes with it i think i could stick to one person.

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Wutobliteration posted...

Lover - You can make anyone, even random strangers, fall in love with you and have instant hookups with anyone. Except their love never dies but keeps on growing. Every person you affect turns to a horny psycophatic lover that's become obsessed with wanting your wiener, even if it means crossing boundaries and breaking ahem...laws..

Dude. What the fuck.

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All you would need to do is shave everything for the invisibility.
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That time travel is fucking awesome

Fairly safe immortality baby

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The ability to tuck that little cardboard flap into the slot in the cereal box lid first time, every time.

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Revelation34 posted...

All you would need to do is shave everything for the invisibility.

And close your eyes, but you could get around that with one way see through glasses/shades. It would just show up as a grey area, still might be noticable but not as noticable as floating eyeballs lolz.

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Super Speed is broken if used properly. Even with all those downsides the sheer volume of possibilities, especially if you can alter it by just... tiny smidges. Like, imagine you being able to use it for five seconds at a time in a coin toss. You'd win every time. Or go to the roulette table and just... nudge the ball ever so slightly in second-quick bits. Nevermind if you actually did something like used it in a warzone.

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I've narrowed my choice down to 2 and need some answers to decide...

Wutobliteration posted...

Time Travel - You can rewind time for everyone in the universe. But you lose your own memories too. Duh. LOL.

If at some momentous occasion...let's use an example... Say it's near the launch of bitcoin and you decide based on the flip of a coin to invest heavily into it or not. You then proceed to see if the investment pays off and makes you rich or (if it tanks) that you avoided investing in it. If things go poorly, you revert time back, if it goes well you don't.
Even with no knowledge of how things turned out or how many times you've reset the universe, you'll eventually strike it rich by sheer luck. Unless the coin toss at that point becomes pre-determined / fixed or the success of bitcoin changes based on your coin toss to make sure you choose the same (correctly or not) as the first time? But I don't know why that would happen...
Just seems like you could still use the time travel to create the "best timeline" for yourself through specific decision points and brute forcing things until they turn out well.

Teleportation - You can teleport anywhere you want, even to other planets (not sure why cos you'd die instantly from atmosphere but nvm). The only problem is you can't be sure on the exact geographical position of the place you'll be in. You could end up teleporting inside of a pillar or dirt ground or even end up in mid-air and fall to your death. It's a risk-it-all choice of using your power.

What about short ranged "tactical teleportation"? Can you unerringly poof to a location within your own eyesight w/o risk (unless something moves into or happens to that spot in the fraction of a second you make the jump)? Because honestly that alone would be great, without ever risking the longer jumps.
Also, do you have full conscious-only control of your powers? Is there any risk at all of an involuntary teleport (in your sleep via subconsciousness, Bewitched-like sneeze/twich "brain fart", etc...)? If it's not strictly conscious control only, no way in hell do I want this.

streamofthesky posted...

Unless the coin toss at that point becomes pre-determined / fixed

All coin tosses are pre-determined/fixed as is everything else actually. You can learn to count the flips in your head and always tell how a coin will land (in your hand, not on the ground). With enough knowledge you can predict everything, so sadly that would not work.

As far as your teleportation question, yes, that is how it works with those rules, you can also set up places to teleport where nothing can get inside (making it safe to teleport to).

Super speed though has no downsides really, since you can move incredibly fast for very short periods of time still, and not really age much. If it takes you 10 minutes to walk into a bank, grab 100k and walk out if nobody was stopping you, you could do it in 1 second, nobody would see you (even with cameras) and you would only have aged 10 minutes more etc.

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wolfy42 posted...

All coin tosses are pre-determined/fixed as is everything else actually. You can learn to count the flips in your head and always tell how a coin will land (in your hand, not on the ground). With enough knowledge you can predict everything, so sadly that would not work.

Ok, some other form of decision making by random chance, then. Coin toss is just the most commonly thought of "RNG".
Basic concept still is, "reset the universe until I'm living in a great personal timeline" and get rich.

As far as your teleportation question, yes, that is how it works with those rules, you can also set up places to teleport where nothing can get inside (making it safe to teleport to).

I'd be worried if those "safe spaces" got tampered with unbeknownst to me, but cool idea.
Teleportation definitely seems like the coolest choice if used in limited forms like I said to keep it safe.

Super speed though has no downsides really, since you can move incredibly fast for very short periods of time still, and not really age much. If it takes you 10 minutes to walk into a bank, grab 100k and walk out if nobody was stopping you, you could do it in 1 second, nobody would see you (even with cameras) and you would only have aged 10 minutes more etc.

True, I just fear dying so ANYTHING that speeds up my own mortality makes me cautious. But it is true you can use in in a few second "bursts" and not impact your lifespan too much. In some ways, usage becomes similar to the tactical teleportation, but the latter has no aging at all so it still seems better overall. Maybe the speed is better for crime, I guess.

Speed could be used for tons of things tbh, not just crime. Gambling for instance means instant win for you (at least many forms of it), you could literally look at everyones cards AND shuffle the deck to have the cards you want be next (same for blackjack etc). You would have infinite money almost right away.

Teleportation would be fairly safe if you were careful, but you have to be imaginative to really make the most of it, and it would never be as useful as super speed, unless you were going to use it for the betterment of the world.

There are no random acts, some scientists think at the quark level etc things are random but yeah, nope, we just don't have the information yet to predict at that level. Everything is based on math and predictable, even decisions you make etc. Time travel though isn't neccesarily impossible because of this, since the object traveling back in time would just change the numbers going forward, and still be logical.

The version mentioned above though basically just resets the universe to a previous point with no changed made, so everything would continue forward mathmatically and be exactly the same. It pretty much nullifies the ability other then possibly creating a time singularity where nothing every escapes past that point in time, but if such a thing was possible, it would have already happened in the universe and we would not even exist.

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