There are all sorts of super powers in movies and comic books, but most of them are not very practical. So here’s a practical one.
Suppose you could easily measure things. You could just look at a room or a piece of furniture and know exactly how big it is. Or pick up an object and know its exact weight.
It would be like having perfect pitch, but for everything — color, proportion, time, velocity, you name it. To me, that would be a lot more useful than being able to put on a colorful cape and fly through the air.
So that’s my super power for today. If you could make up a new kind of super power, what would you choose?
My go-to superpower is always teleportation, as it seems the most practical and helpful of the common superpowers. Commuting, vacationing, socializing, it has all sorts of benefits. It’s certainly not a new power though.
For something new (or maybe not, I’m not well versed in superhero lore), how about the ability to see not an object’s future, but its past? Seeing the connections to where it is, where it was, what touched or interacted with it. Perhaps they could follow the connections through to other objects, people or locations as well. And to balance it, the more connections the object has, the more effort/time is needed to follow them.
Something like a newly-discovered ancient artifact would have few connections because it sat undisturbed in one place for a long time. Finding out where a coin came from would be harder as it would likely have gone through multiple places via many people and touched many other items along the way. Or for a person, it could be almost impossible to trace as they would generate new interactions with every action and every place they went.
Balanced well, maybe this would prove to be interesting. Or like I said, maybe it has actually been fleshed out before. 🙂
Jim
I read that Shuji Nakamura, the Noble prize winning inventor of the blue LED, could very accurately estimate the wavelength of a light source by just looking at it.