Super speed. So… Let’s say you can move at light speed, and let’s just hand-wave away the problems like turning everything in front of you into an exploding ball of superhot plasma or shattering the Earth’s crust with every step. We’ll just take as a given that you can actually use this power.
Would you want to?
Let’s be clear… This isn’t teleportation, this is being able to move at super speed. That means you still experience all the motion between point A and point B. That could go one of two ways:
Your mind can also operate at super speed. Great! You’re running across the United States? You get to experience every single footstep. You get to experience the subjective time it takes to walk or run ~3000 miles - five to seven months. Depending on how much control over your subjective experience of time you have, maybe you can make it feel like you’re going at the speed of a car on a highway or something, but you’re still looking at a week or so of subjective time. Hope you like time alone, because you’re going to have millions of years of it, from your perspective, if you use your power a lot. But that’s still better than the alternative…
Your mind operates at normal speed. You are now the most dangerous thing on the planet. Every time you use your super speed, the landscape blurs around you and you have no idea where you are, how far you’ve gone, or how many people you’ve exploded into red mists without even realizing they’re there along the way. You could easily plow through a line of buses filled with orphans and puppies, and never even notice the trail of carnage behind you, because they were in New Jersey, and you stopped in San Diego.
That’s why the comics always gloss over what it’s like to have super speed. The dark side of it is that for it to be anything but terrifyingly destructive to the entire planet, you have to have control. And in order for you to have control, you have to be capable of seeing where you’re going and reacting to obstacles. That means sped up perceptions, and thus the subjective hell of experiencing every single step you take at super speed.
I would guess that you have seen the first episode of “The Boys”?
Anyway, option 1 is very clearly superior, even if incredibly boring, because it includes not becoming tired or hungry during the trip. You kinda would get to zone out for months at a time, like a super long scenic vacation.
Option 1 also isn’t necessarily as bad as they make it seem. If you suddenly gained super speed and your perception of time altered over night then, yes, you’re suddenly going be spending a lot more time in your own head relative to before and it’s going to take some adjustment as best, a lot of therapy at worst. But if you’re born like that, surely it’d just be normal for you and you wouldn’t necessarily know anything different?
The other option that wasn’t mentioned is that you can “turn on” your powers and the world feels like it goes into slow motion around you, and then you turn them off again afterwards and it’s all back to normal.
Your second point is how most comic speedsters operate. They can raise and lower their reaction speed at will.
In fact the only speedster I know of that can’t change reaction speed at will is Red Rush from Invincible. He’s permanently stuck at high speed so to him a simple conversation feels like hours.
I’ve seen an explanation somewhere that I likes which is super speed and super reflexes are like tensing two different muscles.
You can make your body move at 10x speed to run across town (even 2-3 speed makes you faster than the fastest humans and 5* is like a car going quickly), then you use your reflexes 3 times faster to make that superspeed feel like only 3 times your natural speed. You can also seperate them in other ways like buying yourself time in an exam by speeding up your thinking without actually increasing your muscle movement.
Your mental and physical speed being like tensing muscles also means you can have them kick in like a withdrawal reflex. As the air pressure changes before an explosion or bullet hits you, you involuntarily crank your limit to 50x speed (or whatever is required) to dodge.
It also has the obvious weakness of being exhaustable. It’s worth mentioning that 10x speed is absolutely enough to do most superhuman abilities, and 3x speed makes you basically better than most humans, not just at running but also dodging and punching, and it’s absolutely up to the storyteller to decide if such a low speed multiplier exhausts said speedster or if they can maintain that indefinitely like the muscles we use to stand.
Also even if you are protected from the repercussions of moving at super speed, anything you move isn’t. If you carry your friend across the street, your friend is now pulverized and probably burnt to a crisp. If you move your water bottle, congrats on delivering a pressure vessel of steam to wherever you just went. Acceleration that fast and impacts at that speed would destroy basically everything you touch while moving at super speed.
If you have the power of super speed you can control when it’s active. Likewise you can adjust the speed your mind processes things to always ensure you’re 1:1 with your frame of reference.
Being 1:1 with your frame of reference is actually one of the problems.
Say you’re Barry Allen and you’re running from Los Angeles to New York city. Given the nature of your powers, you arrive there basically instantly as far as anyone else is concerned.
But for you? You experience every single footstep you took along the way. You arrive bored out of your mind and possibly going insane after running across the continental United States in, for you, months of being absolutely alone in a world of utterly still statues and an unmoving sun.
Super speed. So… Let’s say you can move at light speed, and let’s just hand-wave away the problems like turning everything in front of you into an exploding ball of superhot plasma or shattering the Earth’s crust with every step. We’ll just take as a given that you can actually use this power.
Would you want to?
Let’s be clear… This isn’t teleportation, this is being able to move at super speed. That means you still experience all the motion between point A and point B. That could go one of two ways:
That’s why the comics always gloss over what it’s like to have super speed. The dark side of it is that for it to be anything but terrifyingly destructive to the entire planet, you have to have control. And in order for you to have control, you have to be capable of seeing where you’re going and reacting to obstacles. That means sped up perceptions, and thus the subjective hell of experiencing every single step you take at super speed.
I would guess that you have seen the first episode of “The Boys”?
Anyway, option 1 is very clearly superior, even if incredibly boring, because it includes not becoming tired or hungry during the trip. You kinda would get to zone out for months at a time, like a super long scenic vacation.
Option 1 also isn’t necessarily as bad as they make it seem. If you suddenly gained super speed and your perception of time altered over night then, yes, you’re suddenly going be spending a lot more time in your own head relative to before and it’s going to take some adjustment as best, a lot of therapy at worst. But if you’re born like that, surely it’d just be normal for you and you wouldn’t necessarily know anything different?
The other option that wasn’t mentioned is that you can “turn on” your powers and the world feels like it goes into slow motion around you, and then you turn them off again afterwards and it’s all back to normal.
Your second point is how most comic speedsters operate. They can raise and lower their reaction speed at will.
In fact the only speedster I know of that can’t change reaction speed at will is Red Rush from Invincible. He’s permanently stuck at high speed so to him a simple conversation feels like hours.
I’ve seen an explanation somewhere that I likes which is super speed and super reflexes are like tensing two different muscles.
You can make your body move at 10x speed to run across town (even 2-3 speed makes you faster than the fastest humans and 5* is like a car going quickly), then you use your reflexes 3 times faster to make that superspeed feel like only 3 times your natural speed. You can also seperate them in other ways like buying yourself time in an exam by speeding up your thinking without actually increasing your muscle movement.
Your mental and physical speed being like tensing muscles also means you can have them kick in like a withdrawal reflex. As the air pressure changes before an explosion or bullet hits you, you involuntarily crank your limit to 50x speed (or whatever is required) to dodge.
It also has the obvious weakness of being exhaustable. It’s worth mentioning that 10x speed is absolutely enough to do most superhuman abilities, and 3x speed makes you basically better than most humans, not just at running but also dodging and punching, and it’s absolutely up to the storyteller to decide if such a low speed multiplier exhausts said speedster or if they can maintain that indefinitely like the muscles we use to stand.
Don’t Invincible and the Boys have a speedster for both those two outcomes?
barry Allen the flash aswell i think.
Also even if you are protected from the repercussions of moving at super speed, anything you move isn’t. If you carry your friend across the street, your friend is now pulverized and probably burnt to a crisp. If you move your water bottle, congrats on delivering a pressure vessel of steam to wherever you just went. Acceleration that fast and impacts at that speed would destroy basically everything you touch while moving at super speed.
If you have the power of super speed you can control when it’s active. Likewise you can adjust the speed your mind processes things to always ensure you’re 1:1 with your frame of reference.
Being 1:1 with your frame of reference is actually one of the problems.
Say you’re Barry Allen and you’re running from Los Angeles to New York city. Given the nature of your powers, you arrive there basically instantly as far as anyone else is concerned.
But for you? You experience every single footstep you took along the way. You arrive bored out of your mind and possibly going insane after running across the continental United States in, for you, months of being absolutely alone in a world of utterly still statues and an unmoving sun.
That’s why I said you can adjust it. But if you did it in a flash you wouldn’t be able to avoid obstacles in time and you’d be a fine red mist.
Related song, The Ballad of Barry Allen:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YMe1qlyuMXQ
Holy crap, that’s perfect!