If superpowers were real: Super strength - Joy Lin

If you wake up one morning

with 1,000 times the strength you had the night before,

how will you handle delicate day-to-day tasks?

Everything must seem so fragile to you

since the scale of your strength

has expanded one thousand times.

You'd have to be very careful

when you're shaking someone's hand

so you don't end up breaking their bones

or crushing everyone you hug.

And using a fork to pick up a piece of broccoli

from a Styrofoam plate

without driving the fork through the plate

is going to be as difficult as brain surgery.

Say the day comes

and you get the chance to save a damsel in distress

falling from a helicopter.

So, you hold out your arms,

hoping to catch her.

Seconds later, you will find yourself

holding her lifeless body.

What happened?

Well, pressure is force divided by area.

The smaller the area,

the bigger the pressure.

This is why we can lift heavy objects

without breaking our skin,

but a tiny needle can make us bleed

with just a little poke.

The pressure that will be exerted on her body

can be calculated by force

divided by the area on the top of your arms

that comes in contact with her.

It doesn't matter if your arms are strong enough

to catch her body without breaking your bones.

Her spine is not strong enough

to be caught by you without being damaged.

Even if you rip off the nearest door

to provide a bigger area to catch her with,

you still wouldn't be able to save her anyway.

Remember, it's not the fall that kills her,

but the sudden stop at the bottom.

Let's say she's falling from a 32 story building,

about 300 feet,

and you are 6 feet tall,

maybe 10 feet on your tippy-toes,

with your arms above your head

holding a door,

in hopes of distributing the pressure

across a larger surface area,

but all you're doing is essentially moving

the ground up by 10 feet.

So, she's now falling from 290 feet,

instead of 300 feet,

reaching the speed of 173 feet per second

just before impact,

not counting air resistance.

It's the equivalent of crashing at 94 miles per hour

into a wall with a door in front of it.

The only thing that could save her is flying.

But that power comes with its own host of scientific issues.

If you could fly,

what you must do is fly up to her,

start flying down at the speed she is falling,

hold on to her,

then gradually slow down

until you come to a complete stop.

This process requires a lot of cushion space

between the point she starts falling and the ground.

Every second you waste

on changing into your superhero costume

and flying up to her height,

her head is getting that much closer to the pavement!

If she's falling from a high place,

and you can't get to her

until she's only a few feet above the ground,

there's really nothing you can do

other than magically turn the pavement

into marshmellow

to allow her enough time to slowly come to a stop.

Then, break out the chocolate and graham crackers

and you've got s'mores.

Mmmm, delicious!

Now, which superpower physics lesson

will you explore next?

Shifting body size and content,

super speed,

flight,

super strength,

immortality,

and

invisibility.