This begs the question for me - at terminal falling speed, what's the fastest you can decelerate to 0 and not sustain injury? And given that, how much more distance would you need to move?
Maybe a superhero can catch you, decelerate you to 0 over 3 inches and that's good enough?
Human terminal velocity is roughly 56 m/s. Let's say our superhero wants to decelerate the person at 10G, which should be survivable for a short period. That would be 0.6 seconds of deceleration over 48 m. That's a short time but quite a long distance, let's slow down faster:
20G -> 0.28 seconds, 24 m.
30G -> 0.19 seconds, 16 m.
50G -> 0.11 seconds, 9.6 m.
100G -> 0.057 seconds, 4.79 m.
200G -> 0.029 seconds, 2.45 m.
5000G -> 0.0011 seconds, 3.6 inches.
A 40 mph car crash in a modern car into a solid wall gives around 15G.
F1 driver David Purley survived a 180G crash in 1977.
In short, I don't recommend catching someone with 3 inches to spare.
I read a fan theory somewhere that Superman's actual powers are matter manipulation, able to change things like densities, speed, and energy with just a touch. It was interesting to think about.
How does the light from a different star give him all those powers? The original story is that the gamma rays from our star feed his cells, giving him super strength and speed. His power creep over the decades has truly become ridiculous.
At one point, he had a power where he could create a mini version of himself from the palm of his hand. He had so many ridiculous powers, even the comic writers themselves went "hold on, we gotta get this shit under control."
Sheldon: No, no let's assume that they can. Lois Lane is falling, accelerating at an initial rate of 32ft per second, per second. Superman swoops down to save her by reaching out two arms of steel. Ms. Lane, who is now traveling at approximately 120 miles per hour, hits them, and is immediately sliced into three equal pieces.
Leonard: Unless Superman matches her speed and decelerates.
Sheldon: In what space, sir, in what space? She's two feet above the ground. Frankly, if he really loved her, he'd let her hit the pavement. It would be a more merciful death.
Superman should just fly completely under Lois, grab her and instantly match her speed, and crash through the concrete and the layers below (protecting her with his Super Bod), decelerating slowly enough that Lois is saved without harm.
Couldn't he just fly in the direction while protecting her from the ground he's currently going through? I don't think he needs to actually dig with his hands to go through anything
Gotta love the movies where someone is falling only to be caught by a superhero who has accelerated to ludicrous speeds to catch the fallen and intercepts their trajectory at 90° just before hitting the ground. So the victims goes from 150mph down to some crazy speed at a 90° vector to their original path after being slammed into by superhero.
They’re so dead.
But the superhero Suspension of Disbelief Field extends to secondary characters in the story.
Isn't it well known that if you're near Superman you"get" some of his powers. So him coming in to save you like this would be ok because you'd have some of his invincibility.
The cleanest explanation was that he's Superman because his powers give a psychokinetic field around his body that can absorb kinetic and other energy. It's what makes him invulnerable except for kryptonite that can just bypass and negate that field. It can also extend over other people so they can lift along and it can absorb the energy from the fall.
I believe there is the unified theory of Superman's powers where he actually has the ability to molecular structure of the object he touches.
He is shown picking up cruise ships and the ship doesn't split in two, that's because he's strengthening the structure and making it lighter as he lifts it.
He causes the air around him to thicken and squeeze him through the sky.
He causes the air touching his eye balls to turn into hot laser beams.
So when Supes catches a falling human, he instantly makes them invulnerable to the sudden stop
The most famous (and internally consistent) version is control over inertia, not molecular structure.
I don't agree with it because inertia alone can't explain everything, but I think it's the right track, in the form of some kind of general control over universal forces that manifests in a way he intuitively understands (unless we want to argue that all energy has inertia just as all mass does, in which case okay fair enough)
His varying power levels are both dependent on how much energy he has stored from the sun, because it is a specific EM wavelength that he can absorb and store, and how much control over the forces he can deliberately or intuitively exert.
This implies that his most powerful form is not the one that punches the hardest, but the one that realizes he doesn't need to punch at all.
I always thought it would be neat if his super strength also meant very fine control, so he could do stuff like decelerate a plane with his bare hands, even if that'd be equal to an ant catching a paper mache egg filled with lead. Maybe when he catches someone, he manually decelerates each piece of them bit by bit, controlling where the waves of force go until they all cancel out and have zero inertia.
You're not wrong but there is one thing: hitting the ground is an instantaneous impact with a hard surface. Being swooped in some direction is a relatively slower process - the swooper is softer than concrete, and the change in velocity is spread over a longer period of time (even if it's still "instantaneous" to the casual observer, it can be an "instant" 100 times longer than ground impact).
It's like landing on a mattress vs a hard floor - from a high enough height both are deadly, but I'd still pick the mattress.
I also assumed the swooper still decelerates you a little even if not by much. If you're falling at 50m/s as you are trying to slow your fall by taking a skydiver pose, and a superhero caches you midair, you could decelerate over half a second and stop moving within 12 meters while still only experiencing 10g.
12m is pretty tall but not insane in a superhero style piece of fiction where people may be dropped out the sky or from tall buildings. If you want to increase that g-force to the maximum survivable limit of near 100g (in theory), you'd only need to go from terminal velocity to 0m/s in 1.5 meters. Being reasonable, being caught 5 meters above the ground would be enough for most people to survive without major reprocussions, and is always better than hitting the ground.
That's exactly what I thought when I was watching that scene with that superfast dude in X Men where he saves a bunch of people by carrying them away from an explosion. They must accelerate from 1 to 1000 km/h in a mere second.
The scene is still awesome, but I don't think anyone would be alive after that.
He would have created his own explosions just getting there either from the friction of moving all that air out of his way so he didn't collide with the atoms, or from the nuclear forces involved in colliding his atoms with the air's (and still creating a lot of friction in the process).
It would be like that light speed baseball pitch question and answer that ends up killing everyone in the stadium with a nuclear blast.
And Xavier would have done one of those himself in X2 when he freezes time at the mall... Maybe, actually I'm not clear if his ability is a time stop or if he did a mind control on everyone and made them stand still. There's another one like that in Logan, though Logan is able to fight through it, which kinda makes it even less clear exactly what he's doing. Powers!
Generally when people postike this, on an open forum, they're asking readers in general. It wasn't directed specifically at you, but was a response to what you said.
I don't experience it myself, so I couldn't say why it is the case, but I've known people who felt more freaked out or unsettled by things like death via necks snapping. If I were to try and guess, maybe it is easier to process direct impact causing lethal trauma than something that seems less... sonething? Idk. Maybe someone who has experienced this can explain.
There is. You just need to spread out the deceleration from a few centimeters to a few meters in the falling direction, and make sure the force is being applied all over their body, not just a few spots (think bouncy castle vs rebar).
It wasn't originally. It was essentially the scene from the first Spider Man movie where Goblin makes Spidey swoop in to save her, but she was already dead.
They retconned it later to make it so Spidey killed her, which is a better story.
In The Amazing Spider-Man #125 (Oct. 1973), Marvel Comics editor Roy Thomas wrote in the letters column that "it saddens us to have to say that the whiplash effect she underwent when Spidey's webbing stopped her so suddenly was, in fact, what killed her. In short, it was impossible for Peter to save her. He couldn't have swung down in time; the action he did take resulted in her death; if he had done nothing, she still would certainly have perished. There was no way out." Source
The comic (#121) is ambiguous though. There is really no way for the reader to know whether she was dead before her neck was snapped, Green Goblin certainly seems to think so (but he is hardly a reliable source). But snapping her neck certainly would have killed her anyway.
I'm disagreeing. The ambiguity was retconned later because Marvel didn't want to commit to Spider-Man "causing" her death.
In the original comic, she is alive and looks like she's in a state of shock according to Peter. Goblin even threatens to kill her, further confirming she is alive. She gets pushed over the edge of the bridge, and he neck is snapped when the web stops her fall. The clear intent in the story telling is that she is alive until the snap. You even quote Roy Thomas stating as such in print a few episodes later.
OK, now I understand what you're getting at and I don't disagree actually. I also think that the original intent was that she died of a broken neck but the ambiguity is there, whether by design or accident, which makes other theories and later retconning possible. I personally suspect they made it a bit ambiguous to give themselves a bit of a back door in case the public would react too harshly to Spidey accidentally kiling his girlfriend. One has to remember how unexpected and grim this was at the time, it was a huge risk to take for the writers (Stan Lee even said later that he was tricked into OKing it while he was packing for a trip...not sure I believe that though).
It would have been easy to make her perhaps say something or make a sound when she's lying on the edge of the bridge, or make Peter feel her pulse to confirm she was alive before the fall. As the scene unfolds now, and the way she is drawn when lying on the edge (she looks dead), I feel its unlikely that wasn't intentional. But this is ultimately a matter of interpretation.
Transformer movies were awful with this. Human falling hundreds of feet to the pavement. But wait! They'll hit a giant steel hand instead! Much better. Soft.
I guess technically this could work if the robot lowers the hand at the same speed they were falling and then decelerates gently, but I bet that's not what happens in these movies.
What's the name of this comic and/or the artist. I recognize it from the fortune teller "I see you alone in an apartment with a lot of X... Jesus that's a lot of X" meme.
Incorrect. There are additional lateral acceleration forces due to SuperDude flying at the speed of sound to catch him. At least the sidewalk doesn’t need to be cleaned.
If Superman (or whoever) uses the remaining distance between you and the ground to reduce the impulse on your body. But they also have to be careful about their speed coming in to grab you, because they could easily substitute your impact with the ground for an impact with them.
Eh, Spiderman is both insanely fast and strong compared to a normal person, still. He can canonically catch cars and punch concrete and the like. Not sure how much spidey sense plays a role, but he's nigh impossible to shoot, too. He'd likely be capable of the feat just with his strength and speed, let alone his other options.
Superman is still waaaay stronger and faster but he's pretty much cheating even for a super hero. lol
I think their thought was if Spider-Man came swinging in for the catch, at that point it’s basically out of his control how hard he hits. But he could potentially save the person via other spidey means
Ahhh yea, the cliche swing and nab IS a pretty tough one. Not sure he'd be accelerating anyone slowly enough mid-air! At least Superman can just kinda' will himself what ever direction, or how ever his flying works.
See, that's how you know people here have never touched grass. Otherwise they'd know how big of a difference it makes to fall on grass vs concrete. All over a few mm of yield.
Also anecdotally I've seen videos of people catching falling children (back in the day in/r/DadReflexes). It works, empirically.
The slicing forces would actually be helpful, because the resistance of the arms would spread the impulse out over a longer time period. So maybe you get decapitated, but your head doesn’t just instantly splat. So you get… a few seconds? more of life.
Largely true, but it's crazy what the difference of just a few feet of slowing down does (rather than zero feet of abrupt stopping) to acceleration forces. The crumple zone on a car only has to be 3 feet long to turn a 60mph crash from a fatality to a horrific injury.
Crumple Zone is the superhero we really need here. With thick arms and soft bones he can rush to the scene and turn sudden death into mere horrific imjuries.
Well in Spiderman's case Gwen would've survived if she was caught before. Spidey's web is stretchable so it would have decelerated her fall. It even stretched on catching her but she was too close to the floor and hit her head.
Is that in the movie? This is the image I have in my mind but I forgot that she hit her head. I think that's not the case in the comics IIRC. Instead it's unclear whether her neck was already snapped before she fell, or the late web catch caused the snap.
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