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.
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.
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.