Am I the only one who would immediately seek out appropriate labs to study my powers, or if I couldn’t find any, establish my own? Understanding how it’s possible for a human to fly unaided (or read minds, or resist bullets, or whatever) would be a lot more beneficial, in the long run, than the existance of a single human who can do so. The exception might be if my power were something exceedingly dangerous, like time travel: In that case, I would skip directly to founding the lab myself, and be very, very careful about who else I let in on it. And with a power like that, I wouldn’t use it in any public way (that its existance could be discovered) at least until I understood very, very well how it worked.
Well, Chronos, that’s sort of orthogonal to the heroic/non-heroic question, and it didn’t occur to me to address it. Besides, the answer seems pretty obvious. I would definitely investigate the mechanism behind the powers, although I’d be careful who I let in on it regardless of the nature of the power. Even if no one else stood to benefit from the information, I’d want to know for my own sake–what if my nifty power was slowly killing me as I used it?
You should have. Many people join the armed forces to serve their country, get some training, get college money or just to see the world. Do you think that Joe Average walks into a recruiting station and says “I want to go the middle east to kill motherfuckers?”. They don’t. I was a recruiter a few years ago and most people joined up for the other reasons I mentioned.
Sp why don’t we all lay off of the whole Iraq thing here? Its actually getting tiresome.
Oh, Mr. Dibble, would you be so kind as to step into The Pit with me? It will just take a minute.
Der Trihs wouldn’t be a supervillain because he wanted to stop the Iraq war.
He would be a supervillain because his first impulse when given the power to do so would be to go murder a bunch of people he hates.
The physicist in you is showing, Chronos. (Magic can’t exist. If it happens repeatedly it does not violate a law of nature, it is a law of nature. Now, how does it work.) I may be a physicist too, but I’m not sure I’d study my superpower. First, in order to get anywhere on something so unusual as to never have been noticed or existed before, you’d not only need skills I don’t have - I’m a theorist - you’d need a large, lab of the sort only govts can afford. And who says anything discovered would be used for good. Most likely it would be kept secret, as you proposed so how can you argue, and then used for purposes that someone else thought was right. (I’m sure even Hitler thought he was right.)
I think I’d give in to my heroic impulses - rescuing hikers, pedestrains, etc. No point in having powers, if I use them for no more taking the trash out after I’d forgotten. Eventually, I’d probably take advantage of the resulting opportunities to get laid, and end up the Wilt Chamberlain of superheros/villains. (Look! Up in the sky! It is banal hero/villain!) Eventually, politics would rear up, and I’d get confused.
Perhaps stopping a war requires actually killing someone. Or lots of someones. I don’t think I could. Isn’t murder if they have no legitimate defense? Or maintaining an evil status quo. I can’t imagine there are too many situations where I’d know what to do.
Unless my power was the ability to resolve knotty philosophical problems. Of course, I probably couldn’t use that power to get laid.
Oh, if it was something harmless like flight, I’d publicize it myself, before anyone got a chance to make it secret. And if it were something dangerous, I wouldn’t let the government (any government) in on it in the first place. There’s still a risk that whatever they learn from something like flight could be used for evil, but then, that’s a risk with any scientific endeavor. Fire and the wheel were both used for evil, but it doesn’t mean we were better off without them.
Oh, and I’m a theorist, too, but I have the opposite view you do on the implications of something so radically new. With an old, established science, you need an experimenter’s skill set to make any experimental progress, since all the easy experiments have already been done. But with something radically new, there’s still elementary things to discover, accessible to even us theorists. I’ve dreamt that I’m flying often enough to have designed at least a half-dozen experiments I could do on that alone (one experiment I even designed while I was still dreaming).
Because they’d just go right back. And being an army of conquest, I don’t think they deserve any compassion to begin with.
How else do you normally stop wars ? Assuming the aggressors won’t listen to reason ? Why, morally, is it evil for a superpowered individual to destroy an army of conquest, but moral for an army to do the same thing ?
It is NOT mass murder to destroy an army of conquest, whether it’s done by another army, Superguy, or an orbital beam cannon. It’s simply self defense/the defense of others.
Well, my son must be the only guy over there who doesn’t want to be there, then. Oh, and those five sergeants who wrote the letter to the New York Times. But I’m sure you’ve interviewed many, many of them, and are thus confident that all of the rest of the troops over there are just having the times of their lives, right?
Sorry, chump, I once considered you a well-reasoned if somewhat radical atheist who could be counted on to ground his arguments in fact and logic. No more.
I guess I was thinking of something like time travel. It just takes one person who knows how to go back in time to ruin it for everyone.
And no way I would know how to investigate flying. The energy comes from somewhere. Of the four forces we know about, I’m confident I could detect some forms of E&M. (If I’m at all nimble in the air, there has to be some frequency above 10 hz or so. If I don’t see anything, and I can fly in the dark, it can’t be light. Iron bars don’t wing their way to me as I fly. My photomultiplier container registers nothing when I fly in it…) But, frankly, if it was related to E&M at energies I can investigate, it is even more unlikely that I’d be the first exhibition than that I can fly. Any interaction of any of the other forces, or some new force, is going to be, um, difficult. (Let’s see, my pocket gravity wave detector is designed to detect two black holes colliding. I need a different frequency range, …)
I dunno…my normal desire towards godlike post-human power would be tempered by my natural fear of getting caught doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing—This, I suppose, rather illustrates the whole debate of the difference between “illegal” and “immoral.” And of “immoral” and “immortal to me, personally.”*
That, and the fact that I don’t really like dealing with people. At all. You ever watch Cops? And all the ambassadors of high culture that the police have to deal with on a regular basis? Multiply that by 1000, punctuated by the occasional Carlos the Jackal or natural disaster. That’s the life of Superman for ya. Plus I’d get people protesting me (believe me, I’m from California. I know…it doesn’t matter what I’d do, for who, or how well, I’m sure someone would be picketing.), the occasional assassination attempt, and obsessed fans and/or cultists. Great.
I’d probably end up wanting to use my powers to accumulate just enough wealth to retire to a cabin in the middle of the Sierras before I’m 40.
*insert pithy comment here.