My assertion was that he can’t, but someone later posted that was only because his moral code (or something) prohibited it, not because he can’t.
I think folks were talking past each other, there: He doesn’t fix the climate because there’s no way for him to do so, and he doesn’t fix dictators like Putin because his moral code prevents him.
Spiderman for a life is way better for me personally. I’d be the oldest new pro athlete ever.
Superman for a week means I go end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at a minimum.
Duty/guilt means I go with Superman I guess.
The problem with spending a week righting global wrongs - well, a problem - is that at the end of the week you have made a bunch of enemies and are no longer invulnerable.
It’s not insurmountable, but it does mean you have to give a lot of thought to keeping your secret identity secret.
The second, related, problem is that unless you commit mass murder on an unprecedented scale, their will still be bad actors on the wrong side of the various conflicts you’ve tried to sort out, and although your seven days of terror will have a salutary moral effect at first, this will wear off and when people realise you are not in fact coming back they will go back to the same old shit.
Which doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing! But does suggest you also need to tee up long term solutions alongside your busy programme of extra judicial assassination and extraordinary rendition.
Not being able to create a global utopia by winning the war for Ukraine doesn’t seem like much of an issue to me.
Okay, that is a good answer. But MY moral code as Superman is only destroy men guilty of crimes against humanity. Yeah, that means Supes/me cant bump off a few deserving US politicians, but you have to draw the line.
How fast can Superman fly in this hypothetical? I didn’t see it in the link. I’m curious what is the possible total mileage in a week.
One source I found says he can fly at Mach 10 or 7672.69 mph. Which means in a week he could fly 1289012 miles or circumnavigate the equator ~52 times or ~2.7 roundtrips to the moon.
Plus a healthy does of unintended consequences. If you take Putin out maybe someone worse steps up. If you remove Russia’s ability to wage war by wiping out their nukes and materiel maybe their neighbor’s attack – China, India, ex-Warsaw Pact; maybe even the EU or US make a preemptive move.
We theoretically have the ability to make these moves now, but we refrain because of the reaction. A one-week Superman doesn’t change that calculus at all. You have a loose cannon for a week and then you have to clean up their mess while they hide out in a bunker with a pile of diamonds.
Not to mention the philosophical question of where is the greatest need – the biggest impact? You only have a week. Should you be freeing people from North Korea instead? Or getting clean water to all of Africa? Or an initiative for the 1.4B people in India or China?
- Maybe, but likely not. Other Soviet or Russian leaders have not seemed so imperialistic.
- I dont think it is simply the lack or presence of a nuke that stops such wars.
Why would the results be acceptable if a one-week Superman took this action instead of the US doing the same with assassians or military? I don’t think the US refrains primarily because of the costs of the mission, but because of the response to the mission.
Russia both expects and is prepared for the US to try something like this. They’d probably see US missiles or drones as soon as they launched and attempt defenses and/or retribution immediately, and even if the attack was successful, they’d probably be able to reconstruct the US as the source after the fact, and retaliate then. But if everything appears to be going normally until Putin just fails to show up for work one day, with no trace, what then? Or if his broken body is found below a high open window?
Non attribution is a big advantage. So is doing it cost free. How much would it cost and how many lives would be lost for the US to sink the Black Sea fleet? A lot more than superman just flying through all the hulls. Another big advantage would be that this would have an enormous deterrence factor. Would Russia know the powers are gone in a week? Would they risk it after a flying man in a Ukrainian flag suit burns their tank factories to the ground and destroys all their equipment stored in occupied Ukraine?
If you’re super risk averse, you can just replicate the effects of storm shadows and ATACMS. Spend a week destroying Russian radar, air defense, planes, and long range fires. It’d be like if Ukraine could launch them non-stop for a week without any getting intercepted or missing their targets.
There are enormous political consequences and costs if the U.S. were to directly engage. Not so if Superman swoops in and says, “Fuck it. This is over, now.” Who does Russia invade in retaliation once Superman cripples them and restores Ukraine’s borders? Where do they lob missiles? What country do they renounce at the U.N.?
Go, Superman, go!
My perspective is that (1) if Putin disappears or suffers foul play (regardless of whether it was from one-week superman or not) and (2) in absence of evidence to the contrary, the assumption will be that the US was involved. Even with evidence to the contrary there will be strong suspicions that the US was involved.
It’s not a great outcome and adds a huge new unknown variable to a terribly unpredictable situation.
One-week superman would be better off using their heat vision to break down greenhouse gases, use his super cool breath at the poles, tap wells in the desert, and possibly toss nuclear waste at the sun.
Sorry I missed this in my last response. I concede that being able to execute a mission with low-risk and high-probability of success with a one-week superman is very valuable. I didn’t give it the weight in deserved.
I just don’t think it’s the best use of one week. It’s a band aid to a human problem that will re-assert itself elsewhere. Better off trying to solve a non-human problem.
While I’m open to the idea of better uses of the powers those seem like 1) not possible 2) incredibly short term solution 3) worse than stopping a war / nipping WW3 in the bud and 4) not needed and also a short term solution.
Stopping a war because “hey, there might be another war at some other time” doesn’t sway me.
Unnecessary on multiple levels, and also incredibly wasteful. Why throw away something as useful and valuable as nuclear waste?
Now, destroying all currently-extant nuclear bombs might be an interesting task for One-Week Superman. It’d lead to an unstable situation, of course, but it’s difficult to see how that situation would ultimately resolve itself, and it might well be for the better.
This would probably be seen as a first strike scenario and you’re going to start a global thermonuclear war doing this. And I don’t think the posited version of superman is fast enough to shoot down everything that gets launched.
My hope is that, since Superman is such an unconventional and unanticipated form of attack, that he’d be able to take out all of them before anyone noticed that he’d done so. Though on thinking about it more, it might be difficult to get all the prongs of the trident: ICBMs probably wouldn’t be too difficult, but it’s difficult to do anything to a submarine subtly.
I do not think the US can destroy all the nukes in the world.