Superhero Speculation

The comic mentioned in the podcast

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The name everybody knows, that’s Superman.

And it’s a question I’ve had since I was a kid, and it’s essentially how the

Superman fly.

In the early, early comics, which I haven’t read a lot of them, but I know

the very first few, just because I’ve read them on the Internet.

Superman doesn’t start flying. He starts by jumping, and that’s where you

get the leaps tall buildings phrase.

Just fine. So that’s something he’s learned how to do over time, is fly.

So it’s something he’s learned to control. It’s something he’s developed. It

‘s a skill, let’s say.

We also know that his physiology is very similar to humans. In that, he’s

got two legs, two arms, and his external body seems similar.

I did see a comic on the Internet where he was able to have sex with Lois

Lane, and his penis had pincers, and she was shocked.

It was a good comic. I’ll link to that if I can find it.

But basically, we could take that his internal systems are similar.

Of course, much more difficult to damage. He’s much stronger. But it’s never

been said that he has two hearts or four stomachs or anything particularly

unusual about him.

He’s just a humanoid. He is an alien, but basically he’s similar to us.

What I’ve always found interesting is that

he has to have some form of propulsion.

The only reason I know that is because he can change speeds. He can fly, and

then something exciting or dangerous happens, and he starts flying faster.

So there’s a push there, and it’s not coming from his arms. He puts his arms

out, and it seems more for stabilization purposes.

And his not like his legs, his legs seem to just trail behind him. He has

also been seen to hover.

And that to me was the clue as to what was going on, because then he’s

clearly not using his arms. He’s not using his legs because his legs have

actually seen images of him sort of in an almost a sitting position.

But his legs are not controlling, or his legs don’t seem to be controlling

his stable position in the sky.

So that means there is something pushing downwards to counteract gravity.

The image that came to mind was sort of those jump jets where the engines

pushed straight down, and then the wings turned and then they fly off.

We do know that one of his skills is what is referred to as super breath, so

he can blow out air really, really strong for a long time at a very, very

low temperature and freeze things.

And that would indicate that he has incredible control over the amount of

oxygen that goes into his body, which leads me to the conclusion that the

way Superman flies is by blowing air out his sphincter.

And that would also account for control speed. He could clench and it would

slow down and he could push harder and go faster.

When he’s doing his super breath, this is actually sort of a side issue. He.

does it for a very long time.

And we know that his lungs don’t have infinite capacity simply because they

‘re contained within his body, which means if he’s blowing for an extended

period, he has to be taking that air from another source, which makes me

think that he’s pulling air in through

his butt and blowing it out his mouth .

And the reverse could be true. He’s

taking air in through his mouth and nose.

and blowing it out his anus. And that is how Superman could fly.

Now, no one in the comics is ever complained about a smell because that

would lead to too many questions. I think

there are two possible reasons for this.

One, there’s the imminent threat of violence. I mean, you’re not going to

walk up to what is essentially a god on earth and telling him that when he

flies around, it really stinks.

But more logically, because it’s not really a fart, it’s not like student is

stomach, it’s just air blowing through

it, wouldn’t really have any smell at all.

Or because of his alien physiology, it smells great. It could smell like

mint. Superman flies by and there’s a nice minty aroma afterwards, which

would be great.

In one conversation, I even suggested that perhaps he farts ozone and is

therefore repairing the ozone layer as he flies around.

People have come up with counter arguments, but they always start bringing

in some pretty fantastic elements, whereas

this is a very basic solution to the problem.

And it takes into account his physiology

being similar to a human’s and does.

explain how he can modulate his speeds.

If you have a counter theory, please

feel free to post it and I’ll ignore that.

Wolverine. So he’s a mutant and that’s where he gets his healing abilities.

And we also know that in his forearms, there are sort of extra bones that

can come out and act like claws.

Later on as part of a military experiment, they decided to cover his whole.

skeleton in adamantium, which is cool because now he has like silver blades

that come out the front of his hand.

He was able to survive this process primarily because of his amazing healing

ability. It leads me to one question, which is why are his teeth not silver?

Because if they covered his whole skeleton in adamantium, why would you stop

at covering his teeth?

So we’re talking about his spine, his skull, his arms, his legs, all those.

bones. And it would seem like it would be more difficult to cover parts of

his skull rather than the whole skull, which would include his teeth.

So it seems to me that Wolverine should have

silver teeth. And that’s pretty much it.

The Hulk’s rapid expansion and contraction when he changes from Bruce Banner

to the Hulk. And the first question is when he goes from what seems to be an

average sized man to essentially a colossus of sorts, where does all that

material come from?

Now I actually came up with an interesting answer for this because it

actually what I really want to talk about is the second part.

But I have two ideas. One, it’s a form of photosynthesis, which is why he’s

green, which ties that in together really nicely because it gives him a

reason for being green as opposed to

the fact that that was just a cheap ink .

Or he just absorbs the water and material in the air around him. So he’s

just absorbing oxygen and hydrogen and water and anything that’s in the air

to convert that rapidly into new material,

which is what his body is composed of.

Most of our body is composed of water anyways. So just taking water from the

air and expanding your muscles and stuff would actually make a certain

amount of sense.

That’s great. So I could actually accept either of those answers. I’m sure

there’s some other ones to be great, but material just doesn’t happen. It.

just doesn’t exist out of nothing.

That leads to a slightly more disturbing secondary question of where does

all that material go after he shrinks down again.

The process of him going from being the Hulk to Bruce Banner again takes

only a matter of seconds. So that extra material has to be flushed out of

his system really quickly.

And that is sort of my first clue as to what should happen. Because to me in

my head, because it’s probably water or something like water, amino acids

and stuff, it’s liquid.

And we don’t see him vomit, although I think that would actually be really

appropriate.

To me, it seems that when the Hulk shrinks down into Bruce Banner, he should

almost instantaneously take a massive pee. Or probably more realistically,

he should take a massive liquid poop.

Now no one wants to see that. No one wants to draw that into a cartoon. And

that’s fine. But my thinking is that the

matter has to be absorbed into his body.

He becomes huge when he shrinks down.

That matter has to be disposed of. And.

that’s again, it’s something really gross that one of the things that they

don’t want to add into a column for kids.

Now one of my co-workers actually started discussing quantum states and the

distance between atoms and how that we are made up of mostly nothing.

Which is a fair claim. I didn’t like it

because it wasn’t as funny as taking.

a poop. But I brought that as a question

to a friend of mine who studied physics.

And he brought up the issue of if that’s how he expands and contracts, there

are two issues. One is the massive instability it would create.

And that would basically mean that he could be when expanding. He could just

keep expanding and explode. It would be like a nuclear bomb.

That would be an interesting story because it could be if he gets too angry.

So he gets angry and that sets off this process. If he gets too angry, it

just keeps going and he gets bigger and bigger and bigger. I actually don’t

know if that’s what happens.

So does the level of anger change how much of a hulk he becomes? It doesn’t

seem that way. It seems he becomes just state A gets angry and then state B.

The more terrifying aspect of this is when he shrinks down, he should

generate a massive amount of heat and just burn the whole area around him

because all that all that energy has to go somewhere because as he contracts

that the problem occurs that that energy has to go somewhere.

So it’s the same problem as I have earlier. Only I was using sort of

physical matter. If you do it with just

energy, that energy still has to go somewhere.

So yeah, every time he shrinks down, just a massive burn whole around him

and anyone close to him dies. Kind of interesting, to be honest.

Or, and this was the most interesting part to me was that if he collapsed

and just kept collapsing, he could actually become a singularity and develop

into a black hole.

So, this stability becomes a big issue when you start messing with quantum

space. And again, my coworker said that he’s a unique individual but humans

by nature change over time.

And that’s what my physicist friend said, which means yes, he was stable

when it happened at first, but over time his state would change, therefore

making him more unstable.

Which, to be honest, he’s a great storyline. So if Marvel wants to pick that

up, you know, just all I want is a finder’s fee. I don’t really, I don’t

expect a huge payday for this.

But again, if you have any theories as to what happens when the Hulk

particularly shrinks, it’s a bit I’m more interested in. I’d like to see it

in the comments.

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