Why You Don't Actually Want Super Strength! | Because Science w/ Kyle Hill

oh yes,

super

strength

may, in fact, be the first

super

power humans have ever devised. Incredibly strong men and women have been in our stories for literally thousands of years, from Hercules to the Incredible Hulk, it seems like it's human to fantasize about breaking unbreakable things, but if we consider the reality of having immense

strength

. I don't think this is a superpower you would really

want

. We'll just continue, let's go. Superpowers are incredible thought experiments that we can imagine and create stories about what would happen to us and the world if our mortal variables change, but we tend to focus on only one side of the superstrength equation, which is the punching fantasy. , overpowered lifts and crushes we could do, the other side of the equation, however, is the reality of being this strong is a reality that comes with strange and serious consequences. oh yeah, first, what is strength?

Well, if we're talking about muscles, oh yes, then we're talking about the force that muscles can generate. Digging into a soccer ball An easy way to measure the forces that muscles generate is with something called a strain gauge and it looks like this, basically it's a coil of conductive wire attached to some sticky substrate or less technically under something. now if this changes its length when I hit it, then it will change the length. of the coil of wire that will change the ease with which electricity flows through it, so if you mount it with some known force, say you hang a five kilogram weight, you will know if you push, pull or hate exactly what means the change in voltage.

In terms of force for context, 2500 Newtons would be a very good hit, so what is super force? Well, you have to apply forces larger than what humans can generally generate to affect objects in ways that humans generally can't think of when drilling through concrete. classic super strength wall move that estimates the surface area of ​​the average human fist and the compressive strength of concrete you'll get more into that math in a minute, punching through a wall like this wouldn't require 2,500 Newtons of force, no, it would take 250,000 hundred times as much to do this you would have to be a hundred times stronger than the average person which sounds good oh yeah but what would life be like if you were a hundred times stronger or more?

Well, it wouldn't all be fun and games. like ping pong is oh oh darwyn human society is designed for the average all the door sizes are designed for the average height person and the stop signs have letters that can be seen by a person with average eyesight now imagine what How difficult would it be to interact with society if you were a hundred times stronger than the average person or more handles would fly off heavy doors when you try to open them, you know the kind of heavy doors in restaurants that make you look weak in public if you accidentally turn your glasses It would be a constant struggle and even if you could expertly control the application of your super strength prowess it would be a problem, imagine how difficult it would be to be a hundred times gentler in your daily life, any action other than crossing a bank.

The vault would be a lot harder, that doesn't make any sense, but you get the idea, okay, but how about doing other classic superhero stuff, like punching a hero so hard that, um sure, but it won't be as cool for you? Consider this. Very hittable Apple, no matter where I hid it or how hard I hit it, the Apple always presses me with the same amount of force just in the opposite direction, that's what the clever Isaac Newton established in his third law of motion, no force can exist in the universe without an equal and opposite force accompanying it oh, you probably think I'm going to cut through that and say oh yeah, no, that would be silly.

Newton's third law of motion means that every super powerful punch or kick I throw is I'm going to apply as much force to myself as to my target in just the opposite direction, so if I applied the probably millions of Newtons of upward force I would need to throw to Superman to the Sun like Team Rocket, he wouldn't leave me alone. standing here looking cool, no, I would bury myself in the ground and if I try to punch him across a room like superheroes do each other all the time, if it's enough force to accelerate his mass to that point, then it's enough. do the exact same thing to me, so living a normal life with super strength would probably be a hassle, as would fighting other super beings.

What about playing the hero? Seeks revenge. Super strength stories are usually only concerned with strength, but that's the way it is. pressure that will prevent that super strength from being very useful oh no, a car has a row on top of my precious hat conditioner. I know I will use my super strength and lift her with just one, why did that happen well even though I can generate? Superforces are applied only to the surface of my hand, which is not much if the pressure is equal to the force divided by the area and then, when lifting a car weighing many thousands of Newtons with just my hand, we will apply hundreds or hundreds by mega Pascal. even thousands of pounds per square inch to the structural elements of the car.

Damn, nowadays we make cars with very strong materials, so if you grab it like Superman on the Action Comics cover number one, then the car might just fold into a You don't expect it, but if you grab it like Spider Man it will. you would smash it and if you pick it up like Christopher Reeve does in this photo you would throw it super fast, no yeah what did I expect? And the pressure problem only gets worse as you go. What you're trying to stop, lift, or save becomes heavier, consider this scene in Superman Returns where he saves an entire plane full of people by stopping it on the nose.

I'm going to be generous here and say that the plane has lost something. mass at this point and has slowed down its cruising speed and stops in approximately 5 seconds on the surface of Superman's hands. If that's the case, then Superman is applying 700 million Pascals of pressure to the nose of this plane. The same and military studies have discovered that when a bird unfortunately collides with a plane in mid-flight it does not produce even a quarter of this pressure, which means that Superman is more likely to pass through a plane than to save it by stopping it in this way.

Oh, don't worry, I'll save you. I'm sorry Mr. Super-pressures make great displays of super-strength much more difficult to achieve, if not impossible. Well, what about the most super-strength thing of all, beating up bad guys? Well, that's not impossible, it'll just be gross. Think about breaking through a concrete wall exerting that kind of force, hundreds of thousands of Newtons on an average sized person is enough to accelerate that person's body to hundreds of Gs of acceleration, more than enough. to throw them across the room like we see in movies, comics and TV shows, video games, so just hit them like that if our benchmark for super strength is being able to apply this much force over just this amount of surface area for a few dozen centimeters squares for your fist, this is equivalent to the compressive strength of concrete, which is much higher than the compressive or tensile strength of human, so if you applied this kind of super force to a bad guy, he would would you go through or rip something out of them oh oh I'm so sorry let me prepare that dark son of a bitch for you so even though we've fantasized about having super strength for literally thousands of years, I don't think you really

want

to.

At least not, the iteration of the current pop culture manipulating and interacting with everyday objects would be a total pain, lifting cars and throwing buildings would be next to impossible, and fighting bad guys would be less throwing them across the room and more killing plus super strength. It's not even a possibility without other superpowers, durability and density without those, the first thing that would break during a crush like Hulk wouldn't be a bad guy, it would be you

because

he sent you

because

science

Jimmy is a wall anyway, I'm going to get through, oh yeah. Sure you could argue that if you had super strength you could apply it gently so you wouldn't go through people and cars and stuff, but you wouldn't

actually

be doing the kind of actions we see superheroes do if you wanted to punch someone across a room or lifting a car or lifting a building, it's not going to turn out the way you think, I mean, you might, if you want to throw someone across the room, what you would have to do is just push very, very slowly.

Don't worry, I will save you, aah, I didn't kill him. I could have done it. Thank you very much for watching Diana. If you want more of me in something else, you can watch Squatch with me and Dan Casey or you can. Check out the space program at project alpha comm where, if you sign up now for a 30-day free trial, you can get this show and other nerdy, geeky, and miscellaneous content before anyone else, sounds good, cool, and drops because

science

is here. and know