38 KiB
[D] Useless Superpowers (xpost /r/funny) -- Which of these are perhaps less than useless?
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Author: u/Arandur *
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Score: 43
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Created: 2015-03-18T19:05:42
Post:
Comments:
u/haeri [+66] (24 minutes later)
Fruits are sentient?!
u/noggin-scratcher [+44] I am a happy tree (33 minutes later)
and hats aren't just sentient, but sufficiently sophisticated to be seduced.
u/haeri [+11] (an hour later)
That just put a very dark twist on the notion of eating one's hat...
u/PeridexisErrant [+27] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (2 hours later)
Or a rather saucy twist. waggles eyebrows
u/Sparkwitch [+5] (21 hours later)
On the internet, nobody knows you're a hat.
u/literal-hitler [+3] (5 hours later)
First snakes, now fruits...
u/Action_Bronzong [+2] (3 days later)
It could be that your interaction with the fruit is what gives it sentience.
At least that's what I choose to believe. Much less horrifying that way.
u/alexanderwales [+58] Time flies like an arrow (12 minutes later)
Bullet attraction is actually a superpower in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series. It's a subset of a bigger power of pulling metal towards you, but the way they attract bullets is to pull them in towards the core of their body, which they keep heavily armored for just that purpose.
Invisibility in the dark is basically just "conditional invisibility". How useful it is depends on what we're defining as darkness, but it could be a very useful stealth power, allowing midnight burglaries without setting off motion detectors, being caught on camera, tripping lasers, etc.
One second super-strength depends on what the refractory period is, and how much strength is granted. I would have to crunch some numbers, but if the numbers were right, you might be able to use it to drive a specially made generator. One second is also enough to throw a single punch, though there you're limited by whether you also get the required secondary power of limited invulnerability.
Absorb bad luck implies that you can give someone good luck. Sure, this sucks for you, but that's why you have a trusted confederate. You suck up all their bad luck, they go buy a lotto ticket, and hopefully you don't get struck by lightning in the meantime. If nothing else, it's at least a service that you could get paid for.
Also, pretty much any of these would let you win Randi's prize of a million dollars, aside from "turn into a laptop forever" or "seduce hats".
u/blockbaven [+14] (an hour later)
One second super-strength depends on what the refractory period is, and how much strength is granted. I would have to crunch some numbers, but if the numbers were right, you might be able to use it to drive a specially made generator. One second is also enough to throw a single punch, though there you're limited by whether you also get the required secondary power of limited invulnerability.
I would just go around kicking people's cars over. It would be so fucking fun
u/coredumperror [+8] (6 hours later)
Amusingly enough, bullet attraction appears in another Saderson series, The Stormlight Archive. Practitioners of a certain lost art can infuse an object to make it attract projectiles. Late in the first novel, The Way of Kings, a character uses this to protect his army squad from hails of arrows by infusing his shield.
u/Action_Bronzong [+5] (3 days later)
Bullet attraction
Depending on the range and intensity of your power, you could sit your ass down in an armored tank and drive through battlefields acting as a living "aggro magnet" for your allies.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+3] Champion of Justice and Reason (4 hours later)
It doesn't say that you can choose who you absorb bad luck from and how much bad luck you absorb from each person. How do you know the bad luck you absorb won't gradually make you more and more unlucky in your search for clients? The more bad luck you absorb, the less likely you are to find a really unlucky person, and the less money you will earn. Once you've gotten a reputation for improving other people's luck, people who are already very lucky (and if you're particularly unlucky, people who aren't very generous) will come to you and have you absorb what little bad luck they have. When they don't see a significant difference in their luck, they will be less likely to pay you as much, if at all.
u/LordSwedish [+4] Q Continuum (16 hours later)
Well none of them have detailed explanations so they can be completely useless or really valuable. The ability to go invisible in the dark for example, do you become invisible if you step into a shaded area or do you have to be in total obscuring darkness?
u/ancientcampus [+3] juggling kittens (a day later)
Speaking of Brandon Sanderson - Super Slow Mo is also featured in the Mistborn series - in "Alloy of Law".
u/FountainsOfFluids [+2] (3 days later)
Bullet Attraction is also an ability of a character on Haven.
u/IWantUsToMerge [+52] (41 minutes later)
75% levitation = super jump. Plus you'd be able to control your arc by adjusting your levitation force mid-air.
Remote control of remote control: bind remote controls to your devices. You now have technomancy.
detect trash: potentially useful for detecting forgeries or defective parts.
read own mind: if that means anything, that means extremely enhanced introspection, and that is very very useful.
super slo-mo: this may grant a defensive buff ranging from OK to significant depending on the implementation.
revive bugs: I imagine this could be a million dollar talent in the market of rare bug collectors and transporters. Imagine a collector who wants to see their specific of an extinct butterfly fly again.
desaturation: Grey Boy cosplay.
u/markk116 [+9] (3 hours later)
Maybe with super slowmo you age slower too so you'd have a defenceman buff against time.
u/Roxolan [+3] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (27 days later)
They say the singularity won't happen in my lifetime, buuut theeeeeeyyy aaaaarrrreeeee wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
u/markk116 [+1] (27 days later)
Hahahha
u/benthor [+5] Concent of Saunt Edhar (a day later)
revive bugs: possibly unlimited food source, depending on the implementation. Can you revive a bug that has passed through a digestive system?
You wouldn't even have to eat them yourself, you could just grow chickens and feed them with mealworms (which are the larvae of the mealworm beetle) and then turn the chicken poo back to chicken food?
u/philip1201 [+9] (a day later)
If that works, then reviving bugs is basically equal to "have any organic material explode into bugs". Life on earth has existed long enough that pretty much every carbon atom in the biosphere has been part of a bug once. Revive those bugs, and you destroy the present container.
Even if there's a reasonable time limit, you could revive the bugs someone swallowed yesterday and remove/revive micrograms of bug atoms from their body, killing billions of cells.
u/benthor [+3] Concent of Saunt Edhar (a day later)
Very good point. That power doesn't make sense in the first place then without totally breaking the universe.
u/IWantUsToMerge [+2] (7 days later)
This seemed silly to me, at first, but I think there's a way to make it work. Much of the time, when a bug gets killed, it gets killed by having digestive enzymes injected into its body, then having its jellified guts sucked out through the same hole. If you can reverse that process, you will need a means of regenerating working insect guts.
The question is, what's the easiest way to extract the guts without completely destroying the body, is it worth it?
u/psychothumbs [+4] (18 hours later)
That's a good point about the bugs. I wonder how of how many extinct species of bug we have enough samples lying around to revive the species.
u/noggin-scratcher [+28] I am a happy tree (35 minutes later)
Read your own mind, if it's actually a superpower (as in "more than normal capabilities") sounds like a kind of supercharged introspection that would allow you to reflect on your own thoughts and where they came from, and perhaps thereby make yourself more aware of your biases and mistakes.
Trash detection could, in particularly poorly cleaned areas, be used to increase your situational awareness - inferring what else is going on around you by how it disturbs the trash.
75% Levitation suggests you would only need a little extra thrust to achieve "full" levitation, and even if you can't find yourself a 25% jetpack it might at least make you lighter on your feet, more agile, able to jump to great heights.
The picture for acid tears suggests that the problem is that they immediately flow into your own unprotected eye, but if there's a helpful Panacea/Bonesaw-type around, you might be able to have yourself modified to move your tear duct, so that you express acid from somewhere more useful.
Control remote control is a matter of perspective - who's to say a remote control couldn't have sharp edges or an attached explosive charge, at which point it becomes a mentally controlled levitating weapon. Or you could control a large number of the things to build them into some sort of agglomerated structure - build impromptu walls and bridges to control a battlefield, or swarm an opponent with the weight of hundreds/thousands of little plastic bricks.
Summon a lamp...once is of limited use since it's a single-shot but you might get something useful out of it by stretching the definition of "lamp" - anything that emits light could be considered a lamp, so you just need to will yourself into summoning into existence some sort of omni-useful progenitor device... with a light.
u/alexanderwales [+11] Time flies like an arrow (53 minutes later)
75% Levitation suggests you would only need a little extra thrust to achieve "full" levitation, and even if you can't find yourself a 25% jetpack it might at least make you lighter on your feet, more agile, able to jump to great heights.
This is actually one of the powers in the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. You can store your weight in metal bands worn around the arms and wrists (called metalminds), making yourself lighter while you do so. This is used for extra agility, to decrease falling damage, and to jump higher. Though it's a tad more useful there, because you can store closer to 99% of your weight (and, of course, extract it).
u/chaosmosis [+9] and with strange aeons, even death may die (an hour later)
Though it's a tad more useful there, because you can store closer to 99% of your weight (and, of course, extract it).
Wasn't there a time component as well, letting it exceed 100%? If I'm remembering right, one person had saved up their weight power for a really long time, allowing them to become super dense at a certain point.
u/alexanderwales [+9] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
Yup, you're basically storing "units" of weight/rate that you could measure in poundhours, and when you're not storing, those units are just sitting there waiting to be used. I don't think there's a limit on how many units you can use at one time either, aside from common sense. So if you need to weigh a 1000 pounds for a minute, you could get that by having stored up 16 pounds for an hour.
There's a Mistborn RPG that I have at home that gives all the rules for this which the novels sort of gloss over. IIRC there's also a limit based on how much metal you have available to you to dump weight in.
(And weight is only one of sixteen attributes that you can dump and then pull out.)
u/chaosmosis [+6] and with strange aeons, even death may die (an hour later)
I don't think there's a limit on how many units you can use at one time either, aside from common sense.
A microsecond black hole! That could result in one's own death rather easily, but it would be totally awesome.
u/None [+3] (6 hours later)
[deleted]
u/ulyssessword [+3] (8 hours later)
Interestingly enough, this specific case of increasing your weight doesn't increase your mass.
...yes it does, Sanderson misnamed it in Mistborn either deliberately or by accident. I made a thread about it here a few years ago. It has practically every quote related to the use of Iron Feruchemy from the start of Mistborn to ch. 6 of Alloy of Law, as well as analysis on all of it.
u/faul_sname [+2] (23 hours later)
it's nice to see the setting not immediately be sucked into a singularity.
Good news: even if a person stored up their mass for 20 years and "used" it all in 1 ms, they still wouldn't be dense enough to form a black hole. They would, however, extert a large (~500 GN) force on whatever they were standing on over a relatively small area -- even the compressive strength of diamond would not be able to hold up to that much (~10 TPa) pressure, so you'd end up with the person depositing a pretty large amount of energy into whatever they were standing on. And their own body. So the biggest danger to someone nearby would probably be shrapnel, not a black hole.
u/Arandur [+8] (55 minutes later)
Depending on how loose the definition of "trash" was, you could just pour confetti or plastic microbeads about the city.
u/kaukamieli [+6] (19 hours later)
Glitter. The worst supervillain.
u/kaukamieli [+5] (18 hours later)
You could summon the lamp inside Hitler's (or similar) head. Best assassin weapon ever.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+2] Champion of Justice and Reason (4 hours later)
or swarm an opponent with the weight of hundreds/thousands of little plastic bricks.
or better yet make a minifig robot.
u/Jace_MacLeod [+2] (22 hours later)
Does a Star count as a lamp? Does a Galaxy? What about a Quasar?
That's one hell of a doomsday device.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
What you really want for any of those things is a half-decent worldgate or temporospacial claudication that lets you channel the plasma in a controlled way.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (11 hours later)
anything that emits light could be considered a lamp, so you just need to will yourself into summoning into existence some sort of omni-useful progenitor device... with a light.
Summon the sun and bring down an Endbringer.
u/FeepingCreature [+2] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (17 hours later)
Summon a Green Lantern ring? Technically all it does is emit light...
u/DCarrier [+14] (an hour later)
Battery from Worm could be described as having one second super-speed and strength. It was pretty worthless before she understood her limitations, but once she did and learned to work around them, she managed to stop a villain who was repeatedly breaking villains out of the vehicles transporting them to the inescapable prison.
There's a character in League of Super Redundant Heroes who can telekinetically control cats. Being able to do that with remotes would work pretty much the same, but without being considered animal cruelty. You could tape remotes onto everything, and fly using a sufficiently large pile of remotes.
Doze from Homestuck has super slow motion. He's difficult to kill because of it, but he's also pretty useless.
Talking to fruits would be useful if they had some understanding of what's going on, but if they could only tell you things they could reasonably know like rainfall, it's pretty worthless.
Bullet attraction is incredibly useful. You could disarm your opponents by pulling their guns out of their hands. It never said the bullets have to be fired.
75% levitation would make flight a lot easier, so you could probably make wingsuits practical. You could also generate electricity by almost levitating on the way up and not on the way down.
Summon a lamp once could let you kill a supervillain by summoning it inside his head. The problem is knowing you have the power.
Turn into a laptop forever would make it vastly easier to upload your mind into a supercomputer, so you can think faster than a normal human. You could also mod your mind to make math really easy and stuff like that.
Define "hat". You could put someone onto your head and then seduce them. It's especially effective if you have a team member with super strength.
u/Transfuturist [+3] Carthago delenda est. (11 hours later)
put someone onto your head
For various definitions of 'head' and 'put on' this just got really interesting.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (14 hours later)
Talking to fruits would be useful if they had some understanding of what's going on, but if they could only tell you things they could reasonably know like rainfall, it's pretty worthless.
You could use it to gather very precise historical weather data.
u/GopherAtl [+1] (19 hours later)
you're making some strange assumptions about fruit. Got a lot of fruit grown more than a year ago lying around? Even if this works on preserves, I doubt there's much you could find older than humans have been recording our own weather data.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (20 hours later)
Well, it did say "fruit", not "organic fruit." Presumably it works on plastic apples too.
u/GopherAtl [+1] (21 hours later)
what would plastic fruit know about the weather, though?
u/eaglejarl [+1] (22 hours later)
Why wouldn't it?
u/None [+1] (6 days later)
It didn't get rained on when it was a kid.
u/The_Insane_Gamer [+12] Make life take the lemons back (35 minutes later)
Super slow motion means you would be hard to kill, medical assistance would reach you long before you bled to death.
u/None [+6] (32 minutes later)
Depending on the range, strength and controllability of the bullet attraction, it could be incredibly useful. Maybe you could pull the bullet toward you before it's fired, at a slow enough speed that it's harmless. Still, only really useful if you get shot at a lot.
u/blazinghand [+8] Chaos Undivided (3 hours later)
You could use it to disarm people, since they have bullets in their guns. Like if you're in a room full of armed people, if they haven't drawn their weapons, you can just telekinetic ally summon all their ammunition, easy. I'm sure you could find a way to use this against bullets that have already been fired, but it would be MUCH more useful against bullets that haven't been fired yet.
In effect, not too different from the disarming spell from harry potter. Guns aren't super useful without bullets
u/Traiden04 [+1] (7 hours later)
Else throw bullets past a person, re-adjust your standing and pull the projectiles to you so they hit who ever it is standing between you and the bullet.
u/Richard_the_Saltine [+2] (20 hours later)
If you can activate it at will, you could activate the power for a second and just bend all the bullets around you.
u/MadScientist14159 [+6] WIP: Sodium Hypochlorite (Rational Bleach) Eventually. Maybe. (2 hours later)
Okay, let's see...
Acid tears: I can't see an upside to this.
Invisible in the dark: low rated stranger power, great for covert missions at night.
Remote control control: depending on the strength of the TK this could be great.
Communicate with fruit: aaaaaaand I'm no longer a vegetarian.
Trash detection: could locate sentient alien life via detecting their trash.
75% levitation: energy from nothing, entropy is solved.
Summon a lamp once: ...does this power obey the Manton Effect? If not, it's a good assassination tool, because no one will believe you had anything to do with it, and even if they did all tests will show that you can't summon lamps.
Bullet attraction: wear sufficient armour and summon all bullets everywhere. The world is now much less armed.
Read your own mind: very useful rationality tool.
Instant hairloss: ...I got nothing.
Abnormal armhair growth: see above.
Absorb bad luck: absorb all bad luck everywhere, the rest of humanity now only has good luck.
Super slow-mo: slow your body to the point where time passes at a rate of 20 years per second for you. Instant cryopreservation.
Revive bug: team up with Skitter and take over the bay.
Ultra fast aging: this isn't a superpower, it's a progeroid syndrome.
Invisible handwriting: hide evidence by liquifying it, then writing using it as ink.
1sec super strength: Become a boxing champion.
Turn into a laptop forever: unless the laptop runs an emulation of your brain, or has something really useful for humanity on it, this is just suicide for no good reason.
Seduce hats: ...
Desaturation: allow scientists to study the effect you have on EM radiation, leading to breakthroughs in physics.
u/Nepene [+5] (an hour later)
Acid tears. assuming this lacks immunity to acid, a very bad power. If not it serves as a way to do touch attacks.
Invisibility in the dark. In mild moonlight. Very strong power.
Control remote control. Could be very useful, depending on how hard you can throw it. Could you attach a spike to the end of the remote control and use it as a spear? Attach a bomb?
Communicate with fruit. Since fruit isn't sentient, is this making them sentient? If not, then it's not really a super power- anyone can do a one way communication with fruit.
Trash detection. Hide some trash in someone's car, homing beacon. Throw trash at someone, now you can see them in the dark, even if they're invisible in the dark. Very useful power, depending on the range.
75% levitation. Potent speed boost power, would let you run very fast.
Summon a lamp, once. Very weak powers are predictably not very useful. If you can summon any lamp
http://www.greatestcollectibles.com/pink-lotus-lamp-fetches-2-8-million-expensive-lamp/#.VQnaATWshN8
Summon a lamp like this worth 2 million, or a lamp made of pure platinum fifty feet high.
Bullet attraction. Attract them to an armored body part.
Read your own mind. Useful for introspection I suppose.
Instant hairloss. Useful for disguise purposes I suppose. Perhaps if it really does instantly vanish the hair you could use it to get rid of radioactive waste? If you could do it to others you could give haircuts or threaten people with hairloss if they didn't help you.
Abnormal arm
chair growth. Depends on how abnormal.Absorb bad luck. Useful service to sell.
u/Igigigif [+2] IT Foxgirl (4 hours later)
Abnormal armchair growth.
FTY
u/DCarrier [+1] (6 days later)
You could potentially cry on someone with your acid tears. Or you could just fill a squirt gun with acid and make it a lot easier. And there's no reason to use your acid tears when you can just buy acid.
u/Nepene [+1] (6 days later)
Offensive crying sounds tricky.
Depends on how powerful your acid is. If it's super acid like Alien film acid then it could be better than anything you can buy.
u/DCarrier [+1] (6 days later)
You can't get much more powerful than sulfuric acid. Fluoroantimonic acid is ten quadrillion times stronger, but that doesn't have much of a practical effect. They'll both completely ionize water.
u/Nepene [+1] (6 days later)
You don't get magical powers because magical powers aren't real, clearly in this hypothetical universe something weird is going on.
Also, you can get much more powerful than sulfuric acid. If you get more potent acids then you can melt through a wider variety of materials that normally don't interact with acids. You also get mixtures that explode if they get into contact with water as they react so vigorously.
u/diraniola [+4] (3 hours later)
So what would happen if you absorbed all of the bad luck in the would at once? What is the worst/least probable thing that can happen to you? Assuming that the thing must be technically possible.
u/noggin-scratcher [+6] I am a happy tree (5 hours later)
A random quantum fluctuation causes all of your atoms to simultaneously tunnel a massive distance through space, coincidentally depositing you on another world that (by chance) closely resembles the Plane of Eternal Torment.
u/DCarrier [+1] (6 days later)
That would take many orders of magnitude more than all the bad luck in the universe. The probability of quantum tunnelling decreases exponentially with distance.
u/CeruleanTresses [+5] (3 hours later)
Maybe instead of one single phenomenally unlikely thing, it'd be an accumulation of smaller unlucky events. Like maybe you start getting a shit ton of DNA replication errors and inevitably die as a result.
u/notentirelyrandom [+4] (5 hours later)
If I had Super slow motion, I'd use it every day. Jump out the window, land slowly, don't bother waiting for the elevator.
u/coredumperror [+4] (6 hours later)
Communicate with fruit could potentially be a billion-dollar power. Being able to tell what works best for orchards, in terms of fertilization, watering, pesticides, etc, would make you an invaluable agricultural asset.
u/condortheboss [+5] (9 hours later)
"I'm the fruit whisperer."
-Goes to California-
"WHY IS EVERYTHING SCREAMING?!?"
u/coredumperror [+2] (10 hours later)
Nah, they wouldn't be screaming. They're be quietly rasping, since their throats would be too parched. I know mine is... (I live in SoCal)
u/None [+2] (a day later)
Or you could stick fruit everywhere in the city and use them as security cameras.
u/Igigigif [+3] IT Foxgirl (33 minutes later)
Remote control control could be amazing depending on the limits (rune anyone?)
75% levitation sounds awesome. Reduce the weight of anything by 75%? Looks like the space program just got a massive boost.
Super slowmo is just invulnerability
u/Drazelic [+3] Dai-Gurren Brigade (an hour later)
Someone do the math on 75% levitation. The ability to make your body weigh 75% of what it normally does should actually be really useful for things like hang-gliding and/or kickass parkour.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (11 hours later)
You could possibly do self-driven flight with 25% weight.
u/gibusyoursandviches [+3] (2 hours later)
Bullet attraction would be easy, just get a job as a guard protecting the pope, president or world leader and wear a vest.
75% levitation is not bad, if you can control it while running or jumping, you've essentially become as agile as an airbender and as light on your feet.
Absorb bad luck would be interesting. Go to children's hospitals, become a saint. Or go to a racetrack, and make your buddies rich by betting on the wrong horses.
1 second super strength means you can still do devastating kicks and punches if you can time it really well.
Super slow motion can stop you from crashing or falling onto something.
Invisible in the dark? That means you can become batman if you always fight at night and keep yourself covered in a shroud or cape.
u/None [+3] (4 hours later)
Bullet attraction could be heavily abused on a battlefield. Construct a movable bunker, basically just huge walls of lead carried on the back of a sturdy tank, and parade it slightly off to the side of your rushing forces. Bam, your troops can now close the gap.
Alternatively depending on what "bullet" translates to this could be used to assist orbital strikes in their accuracy.
Invisibility in the dark has basically created a perfect nocturnal assassin that can't be caught on film or with infrared. 75% levitation, if that applies to things you're wearing, means a person could carry almost twice the equipment of the average soldier/laborer. Have them use their power on an entire train car which is attached to their shirt then save 75% of fuel costs & undercut all shipping competitors. Reviving bugs could be used to decimate competitors crop fields, imagine bugs that refused to die despite the use of pesticides just continually eating your crops despite the fact they're covered in poisons.
u/Newfur [+3] Crazy like a fox. Literally. (4 hours later)
Reviving bugs would be useful right about now, actually: the mass bee die-offs are pretty bad.
Fruits are SAPIENT? WHAT.
Super slo-mo: whoops, you've figure out conditional immortality. About to die? SUPER DUPER SLO MO.
Reading your own mind mind allow you to access things you saw once and then stopped being able to consciously access.
u/Rangi42 [+3] (5 hours later)
Take advantage of definition-based powers.
Control remote control: Build a spaceship, then glue some numpad and volume+channel buttons onto it.
Trash detection: Require sanitation workers to collect loose change, truffle mushrooms, or something else valuable. Test whether these valuable things now count as trash.
Summon a lamp once: lamp [lɑmp], n. A block of gold polished to reflect candlelight across a wider area. (Wikitionary, 2015)
u/None [+3] (10 hours later)
I tried using detect trash to help me clean up my room and some public spaces outdoors, but I was blinded by the unfathomable nuclear glow my perception gave me radiating from over the horizon in the direction of Washington DC. It bled through the walls.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (11 hours later)
Beware the spiders.
Oh wait, this is bipartisan. The spiders cheer you on.
u/None [+2] (35 minutes later)
If "Attract Bullets" was strong enough you could use it to keep them in orbit around you, I think. Then release them to shoot other people.
u/Nevereatcars [+8] The Greatest Is Behind (an hour later)
But if it was too strong, they would de-orbit. You'd have to be incredibly precise with your orbital forces. Kerbal Space Program has taught me four things, and one of them is that orbital mechanics are the WORST.
u/Rhamni [+2] Aspiring author (3 hours later)
Trash detection. Hopefully these are heritable. Now my daughters will not bring home any trash boyfriends.
u/biomatter [+2] (4 hours later)
Trash Detection could be useful if you put yourself into the mindset that a specific person is trash.
Other than that, everyone else has all the good ideas on the other powers. I can't seem to make 'Ultra Fast Aging' useful.
u/Psy-Kosh [+2] (5 hours later)
My comment from a discussion on this elsewhere years ago
But yes, several of those are indeed potentially quite useful, some more situational, some having rather more general purpose.
u/zeekar [+2] (6 hours later)
Arm-fall-off Boy didn't make the cut?
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (19 hours later)
Heh!
Seriously though, I've read a webfiction story that had a person in it with the superpower of detachable arms. The main character was a baconmancer. I can provide the link, I think, if wanted.
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (13 hours later)
- Acid tears: Ow my eyes! No good.
- Invisibility in the dark: Very good for being sneaky in the dark. (Also, immunity to lasers.)
- Control remote control: With a custom-built "universal remote control", you can control a computer with your mind. Neat trick. Alternatively, build a sharp and heavy remote control and use it as a weapon.
- Communicate with fruit: Utility depends entirely on how much information is available to fruit.
- Trash Detection: Good for disposal of hazardous materials. Sweep an area to check it's clear of biological or radioactive waste.
- 75% levitation: I assume this means you can make yourself 75% lighter? Great for climbing.
- Summon a lamp once: Summon it phased through another object. Hope for an explosion.
- Bullet attraction: Wear bulletproof armour and all the bullets will hit you instead of anyone else.
- Read your own mind: True self-awareness! See your own cognitive biases in action! Mind powers are always the best.
- Instant hairloss: Instant disguise.
- Abnormal armhair growth: I simply cannot think of a use for this one.
- Absorb bad luck: Okay, bear with me on this one. Go to the casino. Bring a friend. Bet on the roulette wheel, red or black. Your friend bets twice as much as you, and on the opposite colour. You'll lose a lot of money, but they'll gain twice as much. Split the profits, then try the same stunt on the stock market.
- Super slo-mo: Slowmotion your way past the boring parts of life!
- Revive bugs: Work in conservation, protecting endangered species of bug.
- Ultra fast aging: Instant disguise that only works once. Adequate way to avoid being carded when buying alcohol.
- Invisible handwriting: Nope, I'm stumped here.
- 1 second super strength: Punch things. 1 second's all you need.
- Turn into a laptop forever: Instant disguise that only works once. Sort of.
- Seduce hats: Seduce the Crown Jewels. Elope with them.
- Desaturation: Turning back to normal is an instant disguise.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (13 hours later)
Abnormal armhair growth: I simply cannot think of a use for this one.
It depends on the definition of "abnormal." If it means "ridiculously fast", then shave it frequently and use it to stuff pillows / insulate your house / weave cloth / whatever.
If it mans "armhair that is made of palladium"...win!
u/None [+2] (43 minutes later)
The power to melt ice cubes... with your bare hands mwuahahahaha!
u/chaosmosis [+3] and with strange aeons, even death may die (an hour later)
Couldn't this violate the conservation of energy, with sufficient munchkinry?
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
Unfortunately, the heat is pulled from your hands, meaning energy is conserved.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (11 hours later)
That's not a superpower, that's what happens when you hold an ice cube in your hand.
Otherwise, I have a superpower.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (11 hours later)
Sorry, that was the joke.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (11 hours later)
I don't have a superpower anymore.
:c
u/ArmokGoB [+1] (18 hours later)
Ignoring the stuff others already mentioned...
Acid tears: emotional blackmail
Control remote control: why does everyone seem to think this is telekinesis? Sounds like infrared-based technomancy to me. Which is an awesome power.
Communicate with fruit: TONS of mechanical-turk style stuff you can do with this, explaining a task to the fruit and then having it do simpler communication with a computer using metabolic changes sensors can detect. Also most fruits are still alive and doing stuff you could presumably instruct them to change the timing of, such as germination and ripening. You could make lots of money telling crates of fruits to time their ripening to when they'll be eaten. Finally, fruits actually DOES have senses and "memories" about temperature, moisture, and the levels of various chemicals.
trash detection: capture illegal pollution stuff
read your own mind: possibly very usefully for cognitive science and AI programming, in addition to the rationality benefits. THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL SUPERPOWERS EVER; WAY MORE VALUABLE THAN ANY STANDARD ONES!
Super slow-mo: Very useful for science on stuff that normally happens to fast to detect or interact all the ways you want to. Also, greatly reducing life support needed for space missions.
Revive bugs: Amber get. Cue Jurassic Park. Or in more generality, getting back long extinct species from fossils is the way to go here. Insert all the standard arguments for why biodiversity is a very very valuable thing here.
u/Richard_the_Saltine [+1] (20 hours later)
With super slo-mo you can become one of the greatest street dancers of all time. Also if you turn it on and turn it off right before you get hit you become pretty good at dodging things, I think.
u/ancientcampus [+1] juggling kittens (a day later)
Bullet Attraction - Brandon Sanderson wrote a whole book about this. Well, this and a few other powers of similar specificity. Well, every book he writes is about this - though "Mistborn" features Bullet Attraction specifically.
EDIT: CRAP. Apparently I'm unoriginal.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Super-slow mo: Jump off a plane. Activate slow-mo the instant before landing. If you act like you have tremendous inertia while slowed to outside forces, you could basically have conditional super-strength by swinging a hammer and activating slow-mo mid-swing. Combined with 75% levitation and a jetpack that provides more than 2.95 m/s acceleration per your body weight, which has already been brought up, this would allow you to perform orbital strikes by yourself. Assuming the one-second super-strength comes with super-durability as well, you could even survive it if you timed it properly. Summoning a lamp that intersects another object might result in the annihilation of both, meaning a four-kilogram lamp materialized in a sphere of osmium would result in an antimatter-equivalent explosion with force equal to ((volume of lamp*density of osmium)+4 kg)*c^2. Bug revival - does this include fossils? Because, back in the day, there were some pretty badass bugs. Also, desaturation = urban camo.