For example:
- You can fly but you can never stop flying
- You can turn invisible, but never be seen again
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.
Just play the lottery once.
Now you are rich, lucky, and screwed. Hopefully those last 2 cancel each other out.
Why screwed?
Because humans are terrible
Large jackpot winners face double digit multiples of probability versus the general population to be the victim of:
Homicide (something like 20x more likely). Drug overdose
Bankruptcy (how’s that for irony?)
KidnappingAnd triple digit multiples of probability versus the general population rate to be:
Convicted of drunk driving
The victim of Homicide (at the hands of a family member) 120x more likely in this case, ain’t love grand?
A defendant in a civil lawsuit
A defendant in felony criminal proceedingsBut since those events are based on probability, you would be one of the lucky few without those problems!
Like I said, hope the last 2 cancel each other out.
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.
I would choose to have the power to turn off superpowers and then I’d turn off my superpower.
What if breathing out only is your superpower
Ko re ga requiem da
What if breathing is your superpower
No, I mean turning off the superpower of turning off superpowers that can’t be turned off.
Everyone within my earshot has to tell the truth.
Works with TV, radio. Any real time communication.
I would use this power to make a communist organization of my choice completely immune to infiltration
Imagine an America without COINTELPRO
God of Toilet Paper.
You might laugh, but I would own the world.
If you were in my favor, you would get the softest, never-chafing, cleanest single-wipe-clean TP ever. No matter what you ate, no matter how spicy, no matter how ill, you could be assured of pain-free, cooling, soothing, wipes. It would be beautiful. Rainbows and peace, no matter how violent the shit
Piss me off? Anything you choose to clean your backside with is then designated TP. I will clog all the toilets, all the plumbing, all the sewers. I can make it all gympie-gympie leaves, sandpaper, wax paper, or just vanish mid-wipe. No matter how much you wiped your already raw ass, there would still be more. I would be a scourge on the Earth, and all would have to bow down before me. You would love me. You would hate me.
The USSR obviously
Super strength. I’m just always strong. Cool.
You would have to recalibrate your interactions, or you’d be breaking things and people constantly.
And don’t ever lash out on accident (even if it’s because you got ticklish or you jerked in your sleep)
Healing of all kinds. Ageing, sickness, and wounds.
You suddenly die of cancer that you’ve healed faster than your immune system can kill
Eh, I would class that under sickness.
Can’t die. It’s gonna suck in 800 trillion years. Imagine if you can’t sleep either because you don’t need to recuperate.
The dream of engineers: they can’t get sick so no depression, they don’t need to sleep so infinite focus and learning, and half a million years would be sufficient to build a large underground automated city and preparing space travel to find solutions for their curse
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.
Reading this reminded me that my ears are ringing. I can ignore it but if anything draws attention it can get pretty bad.
Sixth sense/ Intuition
I’m always at a comfortable temperature no matter what.
That is a really good one. Because you can’t stop it, but a comfortable temperature is always comfortable.
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.
Powers of a deity.
You are now Cyamites, the god of beans. Use your powers wisely.
Could be worse. Highly nutritious foodstuff providing plenty of vitamins, protein, and fiber. I could do a lot to alleviate some world hunger immediately. Making people fart all over the world would be fun, too.
I could also put beans in the no-bean-chili gatekeepers chili. Evil bean god could be fun, too.
I love the idea of evil bean god! Thought it was a nice easter bunny chocolate? BAM, BEANS.
THATS WHAT YOU GET FOR CELEBRATING ANOTHER GOD, HERETIC.
There is petty revenge and then there is this.
Revenge is a dish best served with beans.
I am incredibly resilient.
The doctors will have to find a chemist to even do surgery
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
“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
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.
My stepson asks all kinds of questions like this and highly scientific pedantry is my go-to move.
“Technically if you were invisible, your retinas would stop working, so I’d go with flight.”
Sometimes pedantry is beautiful
That’s like Arthur Dent’s girlfriend Fenchurch.
Just don’t travel through hyperspace.
Flyings fine as long as I have variable velocity.
Make billionaires turn inside out when they’re on the same planet as me
It happens continuously and so fast its not perceptible
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.
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?
Logically since all billionaires die, their lineage would be gradually wiped out.
Where it gets tricky is how they would manage the money. If the money is not directly controlled by them, are they billionaires? So does the CFO of a multi billion dollar company also get turned inside out?
It would be a heck of a monkey paw without stipulations that would make the point worthless.
Bro casted familicide
Unzip failure on all of humanity
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 Real for instance is just about 23752 USD.
