Imagine for a moment that alien space bats endow you with total, complete, 100% Superman style invulnerability. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can harm you (unless you want it to, so you can still get haircuts or whatever.) Whether or not you can feel pain, I’ll leave up to you, as there could be reasons you’d want that but I don’t know what they might be. Point-blank bullet to the eyeball? No problem. Ground Zero of a nuke? Bring marshmallows. Dropped out of the space station? Re-entry is fun! Whatever. Not a scratch on you, you get up and walk away.
Of course, you don’t have any other benefits. Can’t fly, can’t run really fast, can’t bend steel bars with your bare hands, you’ll age normally, etc. The only benefit is that you absolutely cannot be harmed in any way.
What would you do? Serious and Fun answers are both welcome.
For myself, serious answer is that I’d go into either police or firefighter work. Burning building full of babies and puppies? Yeah, you go get the hoses ready, I’ll be right back. Pull over a car full of heavily armed drug dealers? Let 'em shoot, they’re still gonna get arrested. I would avoid military service, most likely, unless a really important war happened. I may consider covert operations to take down a single enemy leader, but only if I were completely convinced that they were really that bad.
Fun answer? Either crash-test dummy or suicide bomb tester. I’d also probably have some fun as a suicide jumper, just to mess with people. “I can’t take it any more, I’m gonna jump! Aaahhhhhh… THUD! Hmm. Damn, I can’t do ANYthing right!”
Or standing near a nuke; I recall a short story where a guy tried to demonstrate an invulnerable force field by standing near a nuke as it went off. The shield worked, but it didn’t keep him from being flung off the planet past escape velocity.
Hire myself out to work at ground zero at Fukushima and Chernobyl. Forklifts and other power equipment still work normally in high radiation environments, don’t they? It’s the human operators that are the weak link, right? I’d ask for a modest salary, since the opposite could be spun as taking advantage or even blackmailing Japan and Russia.
To make big bucks, maybe fix satellites sans spacesuit? I could freefall home and sell the footage to IMAX.
First, curious what “aging normally” means in this context. I take most signs of aging as the body slowly losing it’s ability to heal. Loss of collagen, maybe tooth decay, etc. I am not sure you would really age with this type of ability.
I usually worry about falling into the wrong hands and being tortured forever (like dropped into a large amount of molten metal which is then allowed to cool), but you offer the “unless you want it to” clause, so I guess I could end my life if I needed to rather than being trapped forever.
But what would I do? My daydreams about such things would fill volumes.
I’d probably dive down the Mariannas Trench. For 21 minutes.
But yeah, serious answer, and assuming that “death by drowning” counts as something harming me, then deep sea diving for stuff that we don’t have the technology to explore or recover yet. Scouring archeological wreckage, deep abyss marine biology, that kind of stuff. Any schmoe can be a cop, a firefighter, or kill Hitler. Only I can further Science! and History!, all they need to do is design me a flashlight than can take a thousand bars of pressure.
Make sure you still wear some sort of anti-contamination suit to keep loose radioactive materials out. You might be invulnerable, but that won’t keep you from getting contaminated to the point it’s dangerous for normal people to get near you.
I’m guessing the best money would be in oil field firefighting. Red Adair would have nothing on me!
I’d also probably want to climb everst, but I’m wondering if that works? Could I be knocked unconscious by the lack of oxygen and just lay there “unharmed” byt the cold? Or would I be safe from suffocation as well? I’m sensing a difference between being “harmed” and “temporarily disabled.” Like I couldn’t be injured, but I could be incapacitated? So I could just lay there for the rest of my natural lifespan but be unable to regain consciousness?
