Saturday, May 02, 2026

Which super-power?

AVI remembered an old question: what would be the best superpower?

I suppose that depends on a balance of your fears, your dreams, your work, and your amusements – and your calling, if any.

Invulnerability, for example: It would be nice not to have to worry about falling or getting hurt in a fight, but it would also be very handy for a vulcanologist, or just somebody with 'satiable curtiosity. It's also handy if your calling is crime-fighting with emphasis on the literal fighting.

In college the topic came up with a small group of guys and one guy volunteered that his preference would be the "time stop" or whatever he called it because – OK, I tried to argue him out of it and never really dealt with him afterwards. Creepy.

Super-speed could be handy sometimes, but most of the time what use would it be? Skipping the commute is all well and good, but then you're at work.

Teleportation to anywhere would be wild, if you could afford the spacesuits to go with it. Even restricted to just teleporting on Earth would be handy – sometimes. Especially if your work involved acquiring portable and valuable property...

Talking to animals – might get boring, though zoos would probably love you. Super-hearing, super-vision – you'd be in great demand by researchers. Changing an object's relative momentum by arbitrary amounts just by touching it – a bit niche, but wonderful for some jobs, and lots of recreational fun taking pebbles and firing them at a cliff to chip out an image in the rock.

If mind-reading is a superpower – so long as you're not born with it; that could get really rough on a baby – if you could turn it off when you didn't want to be bothered it could be very handy. If you couldn't, given what flits through people's minds, that power could be very depressing.

Super-persuasion? I'm not sure I'd trust very many people with that. Maybe not even me.

Superfast reading could get me caught up on a backlog...

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