For example:
- You can fly but you can never stop flying
- You can turn invisible, but never be seen again
How pedantic do we get to be? Like, I’d be fine with flying because I could just hover a millimeter from the ground instead of standing, I would think
Hmm I think anything is fine really hah. I feel like it’d get weird never being able to touch the ground again, like I’d feel so detatched from things
Technically, you can fly towards the ground while being upright(unless the feet are the sole thrusters), to get that feel, right?
Good point. If you fly feet forward towards the ground with an acceleration of 9,81 m/s2 it should feel pretty much like normal standing with gravity.
“I forgot one thing about the guy who had gained the ability to fly - it was actually only for a foot or two, and only an inch or so high”
- The Vandals, An Idea for a Movie
Make billionaires turn inside out when they’re on the same planet as me
It happens continuously and so fast its not perceptible
So, question: when the billionaire dies, does their wealth transfer according to local laws? So an entire lineage could instantly turn inside out, including bastard children on the fringes of inheritance, with only an estate tax to save them?
Counterpoint:
Who cares?
The traumatic shock of any one person personally possessing a billion dollars or more in wealth being Dr. Manhattan’d would eventually lead people to realize that they need to redistribute wealth.
The potential number of potentially innocent people killed by this process is infinitesimal compared to the deaths and uneccessary harm caused by the general hoarding of wealth.
The new, hard mandated moral norm of the planet would be that possessing over a billion dollars gets you functionally smote by god, obviously the universe has imposed a hard cap on wealth accumulation and thus it is actually bad.
You can quibble about inflation, and I can quibble about making some more precise measure based on a formulation revolving around proportion to the median wealth of 100 miles of where the ‘billionaire’ is currently standing.
We are talking about magical superpowers here, presumably there would be a magical way to force actual transparency of hidden assets and what not, account for non liquid investements, all that.
A sane world that exists after this paradigm would put in place basically the reverse of overdraft protection, it would automatically stop any desposit that would make your net wealth exceed the magic number, it would automatically disperse shares of stocks or CDs or bonds or whatever to some kind of public pool or random people such that no individual ever singly has over a billion bucks or whatever the magic number is.
If you did not create a world like that, then ‘random’ people would keep liquifying whenever their net wealth exceedes magic number.
Every incentive would thus exist for all but the literally suicidal to carefully manage their investments and basically create something like the above mentioned system.
… You could probably make a decent anime or show out of this idea.
Its like a Death Note on autopilot, and if it is actually emmenating from a single person, doubtless a number of oligarchs would attempt to hide their wealth, as well as probe the system to figure out its rules, figure out who the actual person with this ‘superpower’ is, and kill them.
This person may not even know it is them, and then they may figure it out on their own, or may be prevented from being assasinated by some other group that did figure out it is them, and wants to protect them because billionaires bad.
Tons of dramatic person to person character dynamics, as well as larger scale social conflict plot setups here.
If you don’t specify a currency or a grade of inflation, this might kill far more people than expected.
1 billion Iranian Rial for instance is just about 23752 USD.
A couple of multi-millionaires would pay you to stop and then you’d implode.
Still a net win for everyone else though, I support this.
This is pretty simple though right?
Healing factor - always-on healing.
Healing factor - always-on healing.
Don’t we already have that?
Not for everything and not good enough though.
Especially for something as complex as mental illnesses/trauma your body has hardly any ability to heal by itself.
Though then we can get pedantic: How long should you feel down when someone you love died? Because I don’t consider it a bad thing for something like this to take a while before healing. It’d suck to attend their funeral having completely healed already.
Monkey Paw: Cancer cells also heal
Deadpool?
What if there’s an earthquake and you get stuck under a mountain of rubble? Could take months for you to get out of there. How about a skiing accident involving an avalanche? Could take even longer. When you are completely immortal, you suddenly start to view certain risks in a very different way.
Always on healing includes mental health :)
Have you not read the hundreds of stories about people unable to die?
I’m always at a comfortable temperature no matter what.
If humanity finds out about that property of you, you might end up as some kind of human battery. If you can’t be cooled down under any circumstances, one could use your body to heat up infinite amounts of water/air with heat pumps and use you to heat entire cities. Super useful for the rest of humanity but not exactly the life I’d like to live. :D
I don’t think it would be worth it, as the thermal conduction would be far too low to be useful
However, it would be a useful ability in extreme environments, such as space or Antarctica or something like that. So your chances of becoming an astronaut would massively increase.
We could also run some heat pipes through the body to improve conductivity, stretch the skin to increase the surface etc.
If the person doesn’t need to be alive to stay at a comfortable temperature we could even grind the body into a powder of tiny heat emitting particles. Then add a very fast flowing liquid with a good conductivity and our super hero heating system is good to go.
But enough psychopath talk now. I personally don’t want to turn anyone into a heating system, but I’m sure capitalism will find a way to exploit this special property. :D
Jeazus.
That is a really good one. Because you can’t stop it, but a comfortable temperature is always comfortable.
Being lucky all the time would be cool. The only time I can think it might be a hindrance would be at a casino because they’d think I’m cheating but I don’t gamble so it doesn’t matter I guess.
Being lucky all the time will feel like nothing matters or is exciting anymore because the outcome is always positive.
hmmmm, “plot armor” sounds nice to be always on.
Shapeshifting. It’s what I wanted anyway and I can always just be continuously toggling the length of my little toenail to be 1mm longer or shorter.
Hell yeah, I get to choose my boob size, and I can have my hair changing colors like in Terraria!
super good luck. like the the chick from deadpool 2 I think or longshots if it always stayed on.
I would have the power to be naturally skilled at anything I do and having it always activated would be a bonus.
Everyone within my earshot has to tell the truth.
Works with TV, radio. Any real time communication.
I think this should also work on myself
I would use this power to make a communist organization of my choice completely immune to infiltration
Imagine an America without COINTELPRO
Never becoming deaf and always having good hearing. I’m not sure I’d be able to enjoy life anymore if I became deaf, so just having good hearing would make the rest of my life worth living, without any major side effects I could think of.
That is easy: super intelligence
Great way to feel lonely and isolated! It’s already an issue “gifted” folk struggle with, and the more “gifted” you are, the more isolated you tend to be
Not if you learn to understand the people around you, and their limitations, and to anticipate and work around them with compassion and understanding.
Having no to few peers is isolating no matter how compassionate you are.
This is the way.
I think I’d manage.
You are too smart and realize how fucked up the world is and become severely depressed.
You don’t need to be too smart to see this… unless you’re a liberal redditor then you surely think you are.
I’m using you the same as you are, not meaning you the commenter lol
Every lonely fuck thinking he is the smartest person on the planet is replying to this
Teleport. Its always on, so I’m just flickering on the spot constantly so fast that its only visible on some cameras.
At the same time this gives me the seeming ability to fly at will, be anywhere, and potentially float (destructively) through walls.
Easy: Max out luck. Literally no downsides
The ability to shapeshift doesn’t really get affected by this caveat, so that remains about as appealing as it was before.
Taken to an extreme, one can get a controllable/turn-off-able biological immortality and at-will violation of conservation of matter/energy.
