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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