We all know time passes and backstories have to change sometimes because of that. Reed Richards is no longer a Korean War vet. Magneto originally lost his wife and child in a concentration camp in WWII, but in the 2000 movie, it was written for him to a child then. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell caused Batwoman’s exit of the military, but is no longer in effect.
But are there any backstories/origins where the development of technology or medical science made them make no sense? For instance, every so often I read something about limb regeneration in amphibians and the idea of one day being able to do that in humans. Now, we’re not near it, but if that ever comes to pass, The Lizard’s origin just won’t work. That was a thought that randomly crossed my mind, and made me wonder if there were any origins that had already been re-written do to technological or medical progress.
Tony Stark was (early on) dependent on the Iron Man suit to keep shrapnel away from his heart. Open-heart surgery has advanced a LOT since then, and the shrapnel could pretty easily be removed now.
Well, a boy whose parents were gunned down in front of him would now have access to psychological and pharmacological coping strategies that were not available in 1930.
You’ll often find similar problems in some older horror or sci-fi movies, with points of righteous distaste—or indications of an ambitious mad scientist’s indecent hubris—being raised against the concept of organ and tissue transplant.
Shady mad scientist: “Complete transplantations. To be able to transplant limbs and organs. To be able to replace diseased and damaged parts of the body aa easily as we replace eye corneas now. So that the new parts will join together as though they were born there.”
Good Old Surgeon (aghast, shaking head): “It can’t be done!”
(The first successful Kidney transplant between non-related human donors took place that same year. Transplants from an identical twin donor had already taken place as early as 1954.)
Actually, there’s more about Iron Man that bothered me. What really made Tony Stark’s Iron suit so impressive in those early issues was that it used transistors to miniaturize all the electronics. This was a huge deal back then, when transistor radios were all the rage, and the solid-state components were replacing vacuum tubes in TV sets. The mind boggles at the thought of Stark constructing his first crude Iron Man suit in Vietnam (for the recent movies, they changed it to the Middle East, but back then the US was fighting in Vietnam) out of a lot of space-wasting, fragile vacuum tube circuits.
Of course, a lot of things have changed since then. Now Stark’s suit uses superconductors and AI and a lot of stuff that wasn’t around back then. It does so just as improbably.
Actually, virtually all superhero origin stories have been invalidated by technology, or just wouldn’t ever have worked. but that’s not the point. When I was a Teaching Assistant in grad school, one of my students asked me if getting exposed to gamma rays would make you into a super-strong green monster. I told him, not, it wouldn’t, and didn’t tell him about the awful cases of lingering deterioration of people exposed to high doses of gamma rays. (Look 'em up yourself)
Nor would exposure to cosmic rays turn you into the Fantastic Four
Nor would being bitten by a radioactive spider (or, later, a genetically engineered one) give you spider powers (especially “Spider sense”, whatever the hell that is)
nor would… aww, you get the idea.
Even Superman’s powers be the natural result of what was supposed to cause them. Actually, his case is particularly muddled. At one time Siegel and Shuster were contemplating having him be a time-traveler from the future (which would explain that “Man of Tomorrow” monicker they still used with him), who got his abilities from evolution and/or scientific meddling (a la Philip Wylie’s The Gladiator, one of their inspirations). Then they imagined him coming from a high-gravity planet, like John Campbell’s Aarn Munroe, which would explain his ability to jump so high (“Able to leap tall buildings with a single bound” – a claim that seems weird if you can fly, which Supes couldn’t, at first). But then it was more dramatic and useful if he could actually hover and fly, and he did so, on the radio and especially in the cartoons, and in the comic books, although that’s not the logical outcome of his being from a high-gravity planet, or of anything, for that matter. There’s no real rationale for that x-ray vision of his, either, or his heat vision. Science fiction writer Edmund Hamilton, who also contributed to the scripting, later “explained” it as Superman’s being from a planet with a Red Sun, and losing his abilities if he returned to a Red Sun world (or, as with the Kandorians, being in a Kryptonian atmosphere)
The point is that it gives you a setting for interesting stories and dramatic action. It’s not even logically consistent with itself, let alone science and engineering. Later writers, like John Byrne, changed the rationales for his powers, but it never really got more rational.
I’m not sure what our understanding of white-dwarf stars was back in the Sixties, but certainly no one today would think that Ray Palmer could pick up a handful-sized chunk of one and carry it around (and the idea that he turn it into a mechanism to shrink his body was always nonsense). could
Spoiler Alert for the Heechee Saga:
It’s not a comic book, but Frederik Pohl acknowledged at one point that advances in our understanding of black holes invalidated the hollow-shell model he had set forth in the Heechee novels.
What’s most profound about Byrne’s re-design was that he made Clark Kent a rational, self-actualized human being.
In the old comics, “Clark Kent” was a namby-pamby milquetoast whom Superman masqueraded as. But with Byrne, Clark became the “real man,” and Superman was the role he assumed to save lives.
Jules Feiffer wrote a rather brilliant essay, long before Byrne got busy, on how Superman was totally neurotic, because he was hiding away from his essential humanity. Byrne addressed and largely solved that problem. Best thing he ever did!
(Then he went and trashed Wonder Woman, so I’m mad at him again!)
Wonder Woman’s origins clearly hail from before the advent of satelitte technology. In 1941, it would already be a stretch to say there is an uncharted island paradise with a secret civilization living on it. But nowadays, there couldn’t possibly be a significant landmass that couldn’t be detected by a GPS device.
For that matter, the invisible plane would be useless against radar, which was introduced just a couple years after her first adventure. If the plane has solid-enough substance to contain passengers, then certainly sound waves would bounce of them and register as a definable object to radar.
Radar is an object-detection system that uses radio waves to determine the range, angle, or velocity of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. A radar system consists of a transmitter producing electromagnetic waves in the radio or microwaves domain, a transmitting antenna, a receiving antenna (often the same antenna is used for transmitting and receiving) and a receiver and processor to determine properties of the object(s). Radio waves (pulsed or continuous) from the transmitter reflect off the object and return to the receiver, giving information about the object’s location and speed.
Ahh, my bad. I must have had sonar in the back of my head. But the principle is still the same. Despite being invisible, the invisible plane still has enough mass that it would reflect radar and reflect as a significant moving object.
It’s an invisible plane. That means it does impossible things with electromagnetic waves in at least the 400 - 800 nm range. Why do you think it makes sense to insist the impossible effects are limited to that range and don’t extent into the micro and millimeter range of infrared and radar detection?
