Is superman actually not unrealistic?

[sensible27]

This is mantis shrimp https://youtu.be/i-ahuZEvWH8 it can regularly punch with the force of about 1500 newton, this is spaceloft xl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceLoft_XL which is a sub orbital rocket which can put about 36 kgs 115 km high with a thrust of 8240 lbf (or 36600 newtons) assuming the air resistance is neglected since drag increases with v^2 a mantis shrimp which weighs around 100 grams would produce 1500000 newtons of force given if it weighed 100 kgs and the force increase directly increased in relation to mass ie 1:1. That would pretty much be more than 40 times more powerful than the rocket, assuming it could jump with the same apparatus it used to puch I'd not be surprised if it could jump near space limits too.

(these are just off hand calculations but I don't think I've gotten anything wrong)

[MuddyMole]

As previously stated, it's all down to scaling effects.
There's a good explanation here: https://www.rigb.org/christmas-lectures/watch/2010/size-matters

[Ez-Bri-Z]

The mantis shrimp is actually so much cooler than just that.

That punch alone is enough to crack aquarium glass but even beyond that, the punch is so fast and with so much force it can boil the water around the punch itself.

They can also see colors way better than we can, as well as being able to see in ultraviolet and far red wavelengths. They also can form life long relationships and both help to care for the kids.

[Gwenhwyfar]

So pound for pound this shrimp could easily beat boxer Oscar de la Hoya?

[sensible27]

He could punch him to space,

[Gwenhwyfar]

Wow!

[sensible27]

(fun fact when it punches the temperature around temporarily shifts near to tempratures on the surface of the sun)

[Gwenhwyfar]

Damn…

[hahahmm]

Nah. What it means is that if this thing had legs as powerful as it punches.. it would kick through surfaces without going anywhere. Same as your rocket would do if you only turned the engine on for a fraction of a second.

[sensible27]

I'm not sure what you mean when you say "kick through the surface" energy is conserved.. and every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Sure, the ground can get damaged and have a hole but you'd be propelled upwards regardless. Now that I think about it the shorter the impulse the more energy you'd be able to transfer to the ground before lifting up so if you can't really fly, and the optimal strategy for you is to jump shorter impulses are good

[hahahmm]

Rocket isn't moving because it's pushing against the ground. The shrimp would need to. Unless you think it can magically fly like superman just by kicking it's legs rapidly. So yeah, to jump this thing needs to contact the ground with a force more powerful than the rocket... and we know that rocket would destroy the ground if it was launched from zero distance. If you showed us a bug that can expel fart gas/poo at massive velocities, we can start talking about superman flying.

[sensible27]

Yes, rocket isn't moving because it's pushing against the ground. You are able to jump because you push against the ground, the principle of energy conservation doesn't change. If you have evidence on there being a limit on how high something can jump it'd be interesting to see, and yes the ground will sustain damage. Lastly, I never said this creature would fly or sustain flight, it might be able to control where it's going to some extent with aerodynamics but in principle it's just jumping. Funnily enough there is a species which shoots bubbles to kill it's prey, pistol shrimp

[MCheetah]

Superman grew up in America and was never a scientist. He wouldn't ever use disgusting-ass metric. Anyway, he's still realistic. Everyone in DC is.

[genericname85]

these powers don't scale with size. the ammount of force created shrinks pretty much inverse proportinal relative to the size.

[sensible27]

I think that's more because of evolution than a limit in biology

[genericname85]

no seriously. it's a limitation of physics. that's why a cockroach can carry 300 times it's weight, you can carry maybe 2-3 times your weight and a dinosaur was even struggling with it's own weight.

more size = more mass. but the materials like chitin or bone always have a constant value for strucural integrity.

so if your arm for example was moved at that speed, your arm would just snap right in half... unless your bones are made from some sort of fictional super element that doesn't exist in reality, to be able to bear the load and be structurally sound enough.

[sensible27]

I think I've seen the same argument before, but from a physics presepctive if you scaled everything one to one why would the size interfere with something working or not working. The organism would have to be very different but in scaling things up I don't see a physics limitation.

[genericname85]

because the structural strength a material has does not scale up. so it becomes weaker and weaker the more you scale it up.

like a 1 meter I-Beam can carry like 10000 pounts. but a 1 kilometer I-Beam will bend under it's own weight.

[genericname85]

size and volume is scalable. the ammount of pressure or tension a material can withstand does not scale up. it's fixed.

[genericname85]

the reason dinosaurs didn't get any bigger than they did was cause they were litterally existing at the physical limitation of what bones can withstand. any more size and their limbs would just snap under the weight of their bodies. and you can't just make the bones thicker and thickker, cause then they have more volume, weighing more, needing more muscle to even move and it all becomes impossible at a point.

[sensible27]

That's not relevant no, of course a beam 10 kilometre high bends because it's carrying more weight. If you scaled up the whole beam proportionally I doubt that would happen. (I) agree on things providing minimal returns after a point because you have to carry your own weight and the more you carry, the harder it is to carry more, sort of similar to rockets, but again, if you scaled the whole thing up it wouldn't matter, the problem starts to exist when it's not scaled up properly. But your logic buildings shouldn't exist, but they do and ounce for ounce bones are stronger than steel

[genericname85]

"of course a beam 10 kilometre high bends because it's carrying more weight" exactly. just like with chitin or bone. a 1 mm bone can hole way more weight relative to it's size than a 1m bone. simply cause as i said before: mass and volume scales up but structural integrity does not scale up with size.

yes the EXACT same would happen, if you made the beam thicker proportionally too. because the more size, the more mass and metal can only hold so much mass without bednding. it litterally doesn't matter how thick it is.

this isn't "my logic" by the way this is physics dude. it's not fantasy or opinions. it's facts. look it up. and it is this very logic, that prevents "rigid" buidings from becoming any higher. the only way they went higher is by having the buildings not "rigid" anymore. they are actually flexible and swaying with internal counterweights to allow for the flex.

[genericname85]

you can observe it in nature. why is there not one tree in the woods that's twice the size of the other trees? cause it's not phsically possible. it's a limitation of physics, not biology.

[genericname85]

i can explain it in very simple mathmatics terms. strength of a material is always calculated in for force times area²... however the volume is always calculated in area³ so every time you increase the area, it grows quadratically, while the volume grows cubilcally, so there fore become exponentially more. and since the ammount of force per area² a material can withstand does not change, that means at some point it will fail under it's own weight.

metall can approximately hold 100.000 pounds per square inch. and since in volume, the mass is a cubical function, the total stress, one point in thematerial is subjected to is getting larger and larger per square inch but the 100.000 pounds per square inch is not a variable value. this is the breaking point of metal. and if you exceed a certain size, you will reach the breaking point without even putting aditional load.

[sensible27]

Let's take gravity out of the equation. Now does strength scale up with size? I get the strength not increasing with size because proportionally it has to deal with it's own weight but that only starts to work when you get close to the scales with you're actually accounting for the weight of the material itself, in humans or a 100 kg system the weight of bones accounts for ≈15% of the weight. I'm really not understanding your argument, in this case as to how a human sized shrimp couldn't exist

As for force, it's again about what the limits of the material are. If a cubic inch of bone can take about ≈8600 kg of force in compression it doesn't matter if it's own weight is even one kg. It can just scale up in strength (the organism), ie if a shrimp doesn't somehow break applying 1500 newton of force if everything in it was scaled up, I doubt just as a system it'd break if it was scaled 100x because it might not be reaching the point where the weight of the structure itself is relevant. Biology is of course a little more complicated than that.

I think I understand a better reason why it can't scale up, because square cube law. When something grows in size by say two x in length (in this case a cube) the surface grows by 4x and the volume by 8x. It's essentially about heat dissipation, metabolism rate. An etruscan shrew for example has to take about 2x it's own body weight just to survive, a cubic centimetre of shrew needs about 40x times more food than a cubic cm of elephant.

[genericname85]

if you would look at a non moving object, then yes. a bigger object can exist without breaking under it's own weight. but even if you take gravity out of the equation, and we speak about a moving object like your body for example: inertia is still a a thing. every time you wanna move an object, it's mass has an inertia that you have to overcome. and it's the exact same calculation for inertia. that's why i said your arm would snap, if it was accelerated the same way this animal in the video accelerats it's limb.

the only way to overcome this is to use a material that can withstand the stresses. and natural bone is not such a material. neither is chitin at the size of your arm.

[genericname85]

you can test it with a spaghetti. if you move it back and forth slowly, holding it at the end, it will just move with you. but if you move too fast, it will snap, cause it's inertia overcomes it's structural integrity.

[sensible27]

But again, that only matters if the proportion of the structural ability to the weight it actually has to support is decently low, if it's not then it doesn't really matter.

[genericname85]

well you don't get to arbitrarily choose the weight, cause certain types of matters have a set type of mass. like bone ALLWAYS weighs 1.85g per cm³. that's not a variable value. if you scale size, you have to also scale this weight. you don't get to ignore it :D

[genericname85]

yes, you can make bones hollow to a certain point, which is why birds can fly... but there's a structural limit to that, cause you still want the bone to carry your body at the end of the day.

[sensible27]

Oh, I didn't mean the weight wouldn't scale I meant the strength to weight ratio is just high enough that weight of the bone doesn't really matter. For example again if in compression a bone can take 19000 lbs of force per cubic inch it doesn't really matter even if that 1cubic cm weight 1lb

[genericname85]

so now you have to combine all that we learned before with lever laws. for movement of your arm, a muscle is attached at one point. to move your entire arm.

so now there's 2 issues with scaling either the size or the speed it is supposed to move. let's say you wanna flex your arm, using your biceps:

1: if you want to move your arm at the speed of this animal in the video, you would need a muscle that is probably 100 times the size of your actual arms, cause the ammount of power a muscle can generate is proportional to it's size. and in order to accelerate the weight of your arm that much, it would need way more power. again. cause size scaling is x³ and power scaling is x². you understand the difference caused by the exponent?

2: not only is the power greater needed to move your arm but also your arm has to withstand this bower. so now your arm needs like 1000 times the tensile and compressive strength of normal bone, so not naturally possible.

and since your arm is way longer and has more mass, the power needed to move it is even higher still, cause the distance of the weight to the fulcrum of the lever is higher.

[genericname85]

so in conclusion: it does not matter how much you evolve your arm biomechanically. it will physically in no real world ever be able to be accelerated in the same way as this tiny animal in the video.

just like no matter what you do to your muscles and bones, you will never be able to carry 300 times your body mass like an ant can.

[genericname85]

unless you shrink your body to the size of those animals. then it will be possible :D

[sensible27]

Point one is where you might be wrong, you assume that's the highest amount of power a muscle can produce but that might not necessarily be true.

I'm not entirely sure, but you can refer to this

https://youtu.be/MUWUHf-rzks

[genericname85]

dude i know i'm right on this shit. i told you how it is. this video focuses more on other valid aspects on why what you're claiming is impossible. but it is already impossible if you only look at physics. of course there's more but why even look at that? it just get unneccesarily complex.

tl;dr. it's impossible in the real world. that's why we have fiction.

[genericname85]

watch the first part of that miniseries.

www.youtube.com/watch

it says the exact same i did just differently.

[sensible27]

Your whole argument sums down to a structure can't support it's higher scaled versions because it has to support it's own weight. But given if it can support it's own weight why can't it scale up in power

Can you explain what exactly is stopping a 6 inch to foot long mantis shrimp to be about 6 times longer and about 1000 times heavier? Yes it'll have to have more support structure but even if you increase the support structure it could still be as powerful, maybe 30% less which is not really invalidating the argument.

[sensible27]

It might have made a little more sense if you had said ke increases with v^2 so bones have to be exponentially strong but to an extent that is true but you've also grown in size, maybe not as exponentially as the force so that could be a limiting factor

[sensible27]

Actually kinetic energy argument doesn't work if the apparatus is proportional in size, just making it more powerful without altering the speed

[OddBeMe]

enhanced humans? sure, I bet that will be in the cards soon.
An alien who crash lands on earth after his planet blew up? Probably not.

[EnglishEuropean]

Is it weird that I felt sorry for the clam? I mean its just food right?

[Jouth]

super man can stop a bullet with his eye.

Can you?

[jshm2]

Kid, when was any superhero meant to be realistic?

[GoodGuyBreakingBad]

Yes, superman might be unrealistic

[JesseJayNeak]

Nah, he’s still unrealistic