However, the powers that these characters possess aren’t the only unreal aspects of the media they inhabit; their entire universe is built to support and contain these powers. Even the advertised “realistic” depictions like the classic Watchmen or the ill-fated TV series Heroes ask you to suspend a great deal of belief about their world. While it’s only natural to dream of having the amazing abilities that make many superheroes and supervillans…well…super, we usually don’t think about the implications that having those powers would carry in a world like ours. Here are 25 Superpowers That Would Actually Be Super Inconvenient. The results? Even if the force you exert is distributed and assuming you hold back a large majority of your strength, you’re going to apply the equivalent pressure of just over seven times the force of that gunshot blast: Hugging somebody will immediately crush them to death, opening a door will rip it apart, and (without massive amounts of care, concentration, and training) it will probably be impossible to walk properly, as gravity won’t be able to compare to the force you exert when you take a step. First, no matter your speed, you’d need goggles. Your puny human eyes are not made to handle constant wind drying them out and insects that can easily blind you at relatively low flight speeds. Speaking of speed, insects are one thing, but birds will straight-up kill you (Google: bird hits plane, you’ll get the idea.) You’d also cause panic to anyone who saw you, encounter problems with atmospheric pressure (which will make your lungs explode), and experience extreme temperatures; it might be better just to keep yourself grounded. If you’re traveling super fast, you’re going to literally set yourself on fire and rapidly burn to death due to molecular friction, so watch your speed. Inertia is another problem; assuming your organs can handle takeoff and your speed, you won’t be stopping on a dime. Trying to stop suddenly will quite simply kill you. Your heels will literally shatter and you’ll probably pancake yourself on the ground as your remains skid across the landscape. The primary question is how do you navigate? Typically this is described as visualizing a place before activating your power. That’s great, but you’re going to have to be very specific with the picture in your mind, and keep a pretty clear focus on it. You also better hope wherever you’re going hasn’t changed since you saw it last. The result of screwing any of these things up is potentially teleporting into a solid object. At best, you might find yourself in excruciating pain with a Lego that is now a permanent part of your foot. At worst, there have been some remodels and they moved the walls, causing you to permanently (and obviously fatally) fuse with it when you appear. Stopping time basically means you’ve paused the timeline of everyone and everything but yours. This is probably the result of some kind of energy field you generate that allows you to move outside of time. If that field doesn’t also animate the oxygen in your vicinity, you’re going to suffocate the moment you use your power. Assuming that’s covered, this also means you’re going to age faster than everyone else. If you’re using your powers to travel instantly, you still have to make the trip, and vehicles are all frozen, so you’re going to have to walk. Do this enough, and you’ll find yourself years older than people who were the same age. Another amusing but potentially horrifying possibility is freezing time while moving in a vehicle; you’d better hope your personal inertia stops with time, or things will get messy. Depending on when in time you travel, you’d better hope the Earth is in a habitable state at that moment. In both the future and the past, it would take a matter of minutes for you to succumb to a virus that either existed before or after your time, and that you have zero evolved immunity to. In that case, as soon as you come back, you might also unleash the next great plague on humanity. This is still ignoring the “butterfly effect,” in which anything you do in the past might end up changing history and the world as you know it. Contrary to what some movies would have you believe, it’s not so easy (if even possible) to fix that. Finally, there’s also the theoretical possibility about what happens when the same matter from two different time periods occupies the same space. Though some movies made it look silly, you would have to be extremely careful around your past/future self. Depending on how time works, even you tripping and bumping into yourself could create an infinite loop of self injury that would brutally beat both versions of yourself to death. Oops. However, the physics behind phasing leave two possibilities: either the size of your molecules are reduced to a sub-atomic state, or you manage to vibrate your molecular speed fast enough that they can get cozy with other molecules without losing coherency. The second option would cause you and whatever you were passing through to explode almost immediately as electrons really don’t like being made to occupy the same space. The first option isn’t much better as the moment you activate this ability, your body will theoretically be able to pass through all solid objects including the ground. Implications of this range from losing a leg to not being able to breathe once below the surface. The immediate problem is outside factors. The most obvious challenge is clothing as it won’t integrate and remains visible. So while you’re invisible, you’re naked. Which is all fine and well, until you get dirty. There’s dust and moisture in the air, and while it won’t make you immediately visible, people will see something. If you manage to get around that challenge, you’re still naked and invisible in public. This is more dangerous than it sounds as everyone is used to people being physically aware of them on some level. In this case, if you aren’t paying attention, somebody is going ram into you (with their body or their car) with zero warning or chance to brace themselves, potentially hurting you both, especially because you’re naked. Well first of all, when everyone wants something, they’ll fight over it. If your power is strong enough, it will not only make people irritatingly clingy, but possibly very possessive and violent towards each other (and maybe you.) In short, you’ve permanently become their “precious,” and they will do anything to protect their precious. Additionally, you’ll also question how genuine your relationships are for the rest of your life. Do they love you because of your merits as a person, or because they’re under the influence of your power? Probably not. In fact, it would likely make your life a living hell. You see, the comforting thing about people’s brains is that they are private. This is because perfectly normal people think completely insane and horrible things before rationality kicks in. Now, imagine being the one person in the world who saw all of those pre-rational, deep, dark thoughts. There’s no way to avoid a severe psychological impact. If you couldn’t control your telepathy, you’d probably be overwhelmed and lose your mind in a matter of hours. But controlling it would only make the inevitable descent into misanthropy and madness more gradual and painful. Without getting into the psychology behind it, for most people, being able to get away with immoral things without any real consequences is addictive. The same principle applies to a getting a great deal of reward for little effort. This pattern consistently leads to corruption and eventual misery as a result. Eventually, people will also start to ask questions when things don’t add up around you. Once people start asking questions, they’re coming after you for answers. How many minds do you think you can control at once? Assuming that time is fluid and constructed on the actions of the present, every time you see something, you have to choose to let it happen, or take action to change it. If you change it, the potentially horrible butterfly effect is your fault, and there’s no taking it back. There’s a good chance you’ll accidentally be responsible for the horrible and senseless deaths of millions. Assuming that time is fixed and will self-correct is, by far, the quicker road to insanity. At some point, you’re going to see the horrible death of yourself, somebody you care about, or maybe humanity as a whole, and you won’t be able to do a damn thing about it. Unfortunately the downside is pretty obvious: you see the history of whatever you touch. Think about all the different things, and people, you might touch throughout the day. Now think about all the places those things or people have been, and what they’ve experienced. Intimacy would be… a major exercise in focus and open-mindedness. And if you ever want to focus on anything, ever again, I suggest you invest in a very comfortable pair of gloves. This might sound like a good “diet” version of telepathy. However, empathy means you are going to feel what the people around you are feeling. All. The. Time. When somebody nearby starts having a panic attack, you get to feel it. A decade-long relationship just ended? Enjoy the second-hand heartache. Often you won’t even know where it’s coming from, you’ll just be ridiculously happy or in an absolute rage with zero explanation. Good luck explaining that to your therapist. As human eyes see less than one percent of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, seeing much more than that could flood your vision, very possibly rendering you effectively blind. Your ears are no different. While it might be nice to know what the people in the next room are saying about you, good luck making that out with the ridiculous amazing amount of ambient noise your enhanced ears pick up. Smell might be the worst of all. Just imagine the last time you smelled somebody with an obnoxious amount of cheap body spray on and amplify that ten times. That smell of unadulterated desperation will still be better than when you are near a port-a-potty. There’s also the question of what might possibly happen on a molecular level. Will you ever truly 100% be yourself again or will shape shifting have an impact on your DNA? The first major issue is whether or not you need to trigger your return to your previous form. When you assume the form of an animal, you’re also assuming its brain size. Even if we give you the benefit of the doubt in terms of being able to hold on to an objective, remembering something as complex as triggering your return to human form is going to be beyond pretty much anything other than maybe a gorilla, dolphin, elephant, or golden retriever (because you’re a goood dog!) Should you automatically revert after a certain amount of time, this presents its own problem. Realistically, your clothing isn’t going to shift with you, and now you’re on a time limit, so you better be fairly aware of the clock or at the very least you’re going to be pretty embarrassed. While it might be a simple matter to convince them to do what you ask initially, they have powerful instincts and lack the human ability to reason past them. So while asking that tiger to not maul you and allow you to ride it might go okay initially, if it decides it’s hungry, or you’re threatening it’s cub, or that it’s just feeling a little frisky, it only takes about 0.02 seconds for the tiger to maul you. Mind control is probably worse. While asking might give you the chance to train and co-exist for an extended amount of time, directly mind controlling an animal (or several) is going to leave them very, very confused, and therefore probably scared, which also means aggressive. So when your power wears off, you better be sure you’re nowhere near them or you’ve got a barrier between you. Frankly? Everything. You’re potentially a walking natural disaster. The issue is that the world’s weather patterns are connected, and the system is pretty sensitive. So while it seems harmless enough to clear a circle of sunshine above your beach, you’ve just redirected and thrown off all the weather patterns in your area (at least.) That weather that you knocked off-course could potentially produce very unusual, (and likely violent) conditions in places that don’t normally see them. All of a sudden there could be tornados, floods, giant hail, mudslides, blizzards, lightning storms, and possibly even hurricanes, all of which can not only kill countless people, but also damage entire ecosystems as a result of unnatural weather. Billions in property damage and countless lives lost… all because you wanted your tan. Your Pyrokinesis could create the next great forest fire or burn down a town; Cyrokinesis could cause you to damage or kill anyone or anything around you, including yourself; Electrokinesis would allow you to fry expensive electronics or zap your entire city temporarily back to the dark ages; Hydrokinesis is actually the most dangerous of this group in that you could conceivable effect tides, and extracting water from underground to a place that is normally dry could have a number of adverse effects from causing unusual drought elsewhere, to throwing off the entire local ecosystem. A truly immortal life is a life of constantly waiting for something new, and eventually new things are going to become pretty rare. Everyday human life will cease to have meaning as you age well past a normal lifespan, and your brain’s tendency to measure time relative to how long you’ve lived will make years go by like days. Eventually, if you are truly indestructible, you’ll end up drifting alone in space long after earth has been destroyed. The ultimate eventuality is, you will be alone, drifting, completely insane and trapped in this plane of existence until the end of time. Telekinesis demands a great deal of willpower and discipline to keep yourself in check, but instead it will most likely make you incredibly lazy. Without mental discipline, you’re also very likely to lose your temper and do something stupid. When your mind can throw a car 100 yards without much effort, imagine what it could do to person in a moment of rage. This power is also one of the most overt and obvious powers on the list based on its nature. The ultimate power would make you the ultimate target. Take every single downside listed above, and then stack them. After that, factor in the fact that you’re probably, accidentally, picking up all sorts of different versions of said powers and you have no idea how to use them properly. With individual powers, you might have a chance to explore or figure them out before you accidentally murder your family or level a city. But if you’re using other people’s powers without even knowing what powers you have, the chances of a mistake increase exponentially.
