Your artistic ability is so vastly improved that your every drawing or painting of what you can see is indistinguishable from a cellphone photo.
OK, then, if you can move as fast as The Flash, then you’d need the ability to somehow stick to the ground as you go, else you’d go ballistic and end up flying up in the air (moving fast in a straight line on a curved earth).
So when using your superfast superpower, you always end up way up in the air…and need a parachute to get down safely.
Only when you exceeded 7 miles per second. There is plenty of room for super speed below the escape velocity threshold. It would only take an hour to run around the earth and you would still be plenty fast enough to run on water.
Don’t need escape velocity to get off the surface of the earth; orbital velocity (4.83 miles per second) will do it. It’ll be 90 minutes to get around the earth. Agree though that this is still enough to run on water.
Huh, I though you had to go faster to get off the earth but then only had to maintain orbital to keep from touching back down.
Right. Exceeding this “orbital speed at ground level” is what would raise you into the air. Appreciate the numerical clarification!
And well before you got to orbital speed you’d have a hard time running, I suspect. The weight holding your feet to the ground would be much smaller than usual, so it would be like trying to run on the Moon or worse.
Yes! Hence my first sentence “…you’d need the ability to somehow stick to the ground as you go…”
Sorry - I lost that part of the context.
If I wanted to become a super villain I wouldn’t mind. Thick German Accent. “I am Baron Manfred Von Swastika.”
There is that one species of goose that migrates over (rather than around) Mt. Everest… But yeah, not too common to find birds over 30,000 feet.
If I could super-hero fly myself to work and back I probably would on good weather days, because it’s not that far. Crappy weather? Yep, that’s what the car/pick-up are for.
I do know my pet parrots like to be carried as opposed to flying themselves around all the time. For birds, flying is exercise and they’re just as lazy as mammals.
I was going to post some stuff about teleportation, but Tom Scott can say it better than me:
Those are some insane geese. One of the nature channels (Nat Geo? Discovery?) has an episode on long-haul migratory birds with a segment on them that’s well worth hunting up. Still, I’d bet those birds aren’t more than a couple thousand AGL most of the way up to the top of the Himalayas.
St. Louis is directly on the
and loaded with wetlands. When I lived there in the heaviest part of the migrations you’d see flocks of hundreds of geese at what looked like 4 or even 6 thousand. I actually killed a pair of geese with a jet at 8000 MSL ~= 7400 AGL one night. Had they hit a little bit higher on our nose I might well have been killed that night too.
Getting back to the topic of the thread.
Superman flying always looked pretty effortless. Three quick steps and a jump and away we go! I’d be all over that. Staying warm would be the hardest part. I’ve flown open cockpit and ridden motorcycles underdressed for occasion; both sucketh mightily.
Flapping bird-style looks like hard work. Although jet propulsion via repeated farting might also be real hard work. What?!? Makes as much sense as anything for Superman’s propulsion. 
I’d bet it’d be just a much better version of current forecasting of whatever. The error bars are small at first and grow with time. But for the short term it’d be super accurate.
A superpower able to predict tomorrow’s closing stock prices to within a few pennies would be a very valuable skill even if SuperTrader’s best guess about prices 6 months from now was no better than mine (i.e. LoserTrader’s!!!)
Even the birds that soar - looks effortless but how long can you hold your arms straight out?
Thanks for posting that. I noticed an error in the article and fixed it.
Little discussed in comics is the involuntary use of super powers while dreaming.
Of course I screwed that up. D’oh! St. Louis is actually on the next flyway to the east, the
Maybe you can find something to fix in that wiki too.
Holy Nocturnal Emissions, Bat-Man!
Storm having to explain lightning damage in the bedroom to the landlord.
Nightcrawler waking up in strange beds…or the middle of a freeway.
Kitty Pride ending up who knows where.