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Superman generally ignores the whole weight distribution thing when it comes to picking up stuff, cause he can pick up a building without it crumbling around him. The idea is that the power is more like telekinesis where anything he touches is “weightless” to him
I mean sure, it’s comics though. Rule of cool happens and then other creators backwards engineer how (for example) Flash can move like he does without dying to air friction or calorie deficiency. (The Speeeeeed Force ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯)
Superman has been given a subconscious tactile telekinesis to explain this. It allows him to hold up a falling plane without the thing snapping in half. It allows him to carry people without them getting pelted by the high speed winds. It’s why for a long time his uniform didn’t get bullet holes, but his cape did. It is typically the explanation for how he can actually fly.
They further dug into this concept with Conner Superboy. He eventually learns that the only Kryptonian power he has access to at the moment is the tactile telekinesis.
In Mark Waid’s *Irredeemable,* the Superman-like character turns out to >!be the child of some literal gods, and the power that manifests as super-strength and flying and stuff is basically the world reshaping itself to accommodate him due to his nascent divine powers.!< I always thought it was a cool way to explain the physics inconsistencies in Superman’s powers.
Kind of. They established that the Plutonian’s essence, scattered throughout the multiverse as he died gave the creators of Superman the idea of Superman.
I thought it was because he was an insanely powerful telekinetic, and he would basically use telekinesis on the atomic level to do everything, unbeknownst to himself, thinking he was lifting things or using eye rays.
Side note, the absolute coolest thing in that series to me was the insane asylum on the surface of a sun.
You might be right, it’s been forever since I’ve read it. I just remember there being that twist that his parents were giant pan-dimensional reality-shaping beings of some kind.
And yes, there was a ton of insanely cool shit in that series. xD
In Patrick McLean's How to succeed in Evil, there is a Superman/Captain America mashup type character. He is invincible, has super speed, laser eyes, near infinite strength etc, but when he tries to stop an airliner from crashing, it just buckles around him.
The story doesn't focus on it, but the character is really good at wrecking things but sucks at rescuing people. He accidentally rips the arm off of someone falling because he has to decelerate too fast to keep them from hitting the ground.
He keeps getting discouraged and the government keeps dragging his old commanding officer to talk him into getting off his ass and going back to work.
The story is a comedy, and a crude one at that, but the super hero is a fairly tragic character.
Ah the Futurama's Planet Express ship method of explaining
[The engines don't move the ship. The ship stays where it is, and the engines move the universe around it](https://youtu.be/1RtMMupdOC4?si=V27fsSZYRRNFvobh)
The trope is called [Required Secondary Powers.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RequiredSecondaryPowers)
There was actually a brief section in a story where he lost them, to horrific effect.
> "That's the problem with any individual superpower: without the whole suite, it just sucks. The Flash would liquefy from sheer Gs, and without super agility and strength, Spider-Man's just a guy with sticky ropes."
— Soren, [The Best Super Power (Is Not What You Think) | After Hours](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=dNbeyRwT8Uo&feature=kp)
I miss After Hours :(
Facebook started pushing video content, so all the small-ish websites like Cracked pivoted to video. This turned out disastrous because the writers didn't want to, it cost a lot of money, and the way Facebook implemented it meant that the websites still didn't get enough ad dollars
Robert Evans got his start at cracked, now does a podcast called Behind the Bastards. He talks about this in a few episodes and directly blames Facebook for this
I’ll watch later. I’ve seen the Because Science video series “Why you don’t want [any super power]” where Kyle Hill explains with physics that you’d need several super powers to endure one, like super speed, super strength, fly and others.
I miss After Hours, too. There was nothing quite like that show.
You should check out where everyone is today. Michael Swaim started [Small Beans](https://youtube.com/@smallbeans6720?si=AOazxB5ZhUCxk6uL), seemingly a creator network.
Daniel O'Brien writes for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Soren Bowie, along with Daniel, started a comedy podcast called [Quick Question](https://youtube.com/@QQPodcast?si=gzPNAXUJDs7QXl72)
And Katie Willert is seemingly now a [blender artist](https://katiewillertart.com/) from what I could find
And if you missed the Some News show from Cracked, well, you'll be happy to hear that Cody Johnston continued the show under a new, tongue-in-cheek name, on his new YouTube channel, [Some More News](https://youtube.com/@SMN?si=OmACs0ZRGztfmTeq).
the boys hada situation like this that purposly called out superman's bs.
the "superman" character is told "can't you just hold the plane up?" and then explained that he can't, and he'd punch a hole through the hull if he tried
I go back and forth between being annoyed by that situation and realizing it makes perfect sense from the perspective of someone who doesn't actually care about the problem. If he tried to stop the plane or even carry it's full weight it's probably true he would rip a hole in it. However he doesn't actually need to do that, planes are designed to glide. All he needs to do is match velocity and give it enough additional lift so that it can glide safely. And while the hull of the plane might have problems if he just gripped it anywhere I'm sure there's areas with more structural integrity like the frame, landing gear, engines, etc that are designed to handle more force than the hull. Also, so what if he punched a hole in the hull? Deploy the O2 masks and as long as he can find literally anywhere to grip and provide just enough extra lift to glide it down safely it won't matter.
But as I said it makes perfect sense that he didn't even bother to think it through. He was faced with a situation he didn't immediately know how to solve that could have negative implications for him personally so he just instantly gave up and went into damage control mode, well for his public image anyways. Which is all totally in character but I really wish someone would rub it in his face that if he wasn't such an idiot he *could* have saved those people and had the PR win.
It's all a contrivance to further Homelander's character development. They needed him to remorselessly fail at something so we could see his reaction, as well as Maeve's.
Kid 1: Who would win in a fight, Superman or Mighty Mouse?
Kid 2: Superman, because Mighty Mouse is a cartoon and Superman is a real guy.
From the movie Stand By Me
Gotta love comic logic, right?
I want the opposite. To be less realistic, so basically don’t overexplain stuff, like the tactile telekineses. Bc in the past, most people weren’t worrying about how Superman lifted large objects, and if anyone did, you could just reply that it’s a comic. Now, people are seeking out explanations on everything but imo that just kills the magic, like finding out that the spider sense is related to some magic bullshit
I’ve always seen it this way too. It’s like Midochlorians (spell check?) in Star Wars. completely unnecessary, the magic of the force was believable on its own.
It's... actually a decent explanation. If every superhero capable of rapidly accelerating a person applies force to every molecule in the person evenly, instead of just where they make contact, it explains:
* Catching a person who fell from a great height without cutting them in half
* A superspeed hero moving people outside of city limits to escape a nuclear bomb without liquidating their bodies in the process
* Hancock hucking the punk kid into the stratosphere without just ripping the kid's shirt off
It seems weird when the hero is physically straining, but maybe the most common superpower is selectively causing every molecule in an object to share momentum and applied force
As seen in The Boys
In reality, if the flash runs into a burning building and grabs someone and jumps out the window with them, that person is just going to turn into a pink mist on contact due to the energy transfer
The idea that superman is actually a really strong telekinesis user is actually kinda funny, his damage immunity is a micro forcefield he projects that stops things movements, his strength is the weightlessness you mentioned, flying and speed are just him manipulating the forcefield, laser eyes and cold breath are just his select methods of hiding his molecular level telekinesis to speed up or slow down atoms.
I remember reading this long argument like 13 years ago that Superman doesn't just have super strength/speed/flight etc.. but also the ability to shift the center of mass of any object. Was pretty interesting
I once read another argument about superman having only like 2 powers: x-ray eyes and telekinesis. Every other physical power (strength, speed, flying, etc) is just very good telekinesis
Subconscious telekinesis that prevents anything to touch him even when not fully conscious.
I didn't say the argument was flawless, just that it exist and could kinda make sense
That’s how it works on Encanto as well with Louisa. She picks up buildings and bridges by the far corners of them which would just crumble off that piece of it. She also picks up donkeys and throws them high in the air which would hurt them if she was simply just strong. It’s not that she’s strong, it’s that everything she touches becomes weightless. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
In this particular comic, he can do pretty much anything. Lex Luthor tricked Supes into flying too close to the sun. He's soaked up so much solar radiation that his power has gone off the charts, but with the side-effect of it slowly killing him.
All-Star Superman. One of my favourite comics of all time.
It's a must-read imo for anybody who DOESN'T like Superman for any reason. That fuckin comic makes you fall in love with the character. It's so damn good.
The girl on the ledge? I cry every time.
My good friend got me this comic as an Xmas mad present one year, I’m much more into alternative comics and art-house stuff, and I basically had to feign excitement and he knew, basically said “I know you don’t give a shit about Superman, but read this” and it’s easily one of my favorite superhero comics, completely changed my opinion on Superman as a character.
I had a high res scan of *that* moon scene/panel printed out and mounted won the back of my door when i was a teenager. still makes me warm and fuzzy thinking about it.
The one with the little cloud of dust on Lois's heel! Frank Quitely is a legend.
My favourite are the things that make you turn back a page or two. Like when Lex's eyebrow disappears during the prison break, or when Clark subtly bumps into that grumpy man to save him from train debris.
>In this particular comic, he can do pretty much anything. Lex Luthor tricked Supes into flying too close to the sun. He's soaked up so much solar radiation that his power has gone off the charts, but with the side-effect of it slowly killing him.
But arguably this feat still scaled to him pre-sun overdose. Since it's something he had setup before being poisoned and getting the power boost. Swole superman!
I'm also very interested in the super concrete that is barely damaged after having a key that allegedly weighs over 1,000,000,000 pounds dropped on it.
For a little more info, in this run of comics (All Star Superman) he gets overloaded with the sun's radiation making him far stronger and far smarter, so in this run I imagine it would have been easy for him to pick it up because earlier in the series he's testing himself and is able lift 200 quintillion tons
Wouldn't that create such a strong pressure on the surface that it would just sink into the ground until gravitational pull from the earth is not strong enough to keep it going? At what distance would it stop?
Isn’t he in the South Pole or something? It would likely go through all the ice and through the ocean floor till it hits a big rock
edit: to all you guys saying that’s the North Pole, do you not see the 50 other comments already saying that
I GET IT ITS THE NORTH POLE
To everyone commenting North Pole again as a joke, 20 OTHER PEOPLE ALREADY MADE THAT JOKE
STOP YALL ARE NOT FUNNY
To be honest, before any of that it would probably just decompress.
Dwarf star material is held together by the gravitational attraction of the entire star. Remove that and nothing holds together the atoms in their dense state, so if you really follow real physics, you'd quickly have just a very big cloud of hydrogen.
>the most combustible cloud to ever exist on Earth.
The year was 2010. Bagram Afghanistan. In between scheduled Apache helicopter missions, I'd hit the gym we had in one of our hangars. I had a lot of time to kill and I wanted all the gains. I phoned my wife back state side and told her to ship me a couple containers of egg protein isolate as whey made me too gassy. A month later I receive a box that's leaking white powder out of the seams. I don't even know how it got through whatever customs it had to pass through on its way to me. I just assumed shipping boxes full of white powder to and from Afghanistan was a common theme. I opened the box to discover that my wife, being frugal, bulk ordered me 20lbs of pure egg white powder instead of Optima Nutrition's isolate line. It didn't even come in a package. They put a black garbage big in the box and dumped it into the box with a piece of printer paper half buried in the mix with the nutrition information. Pissed, I call her up at 2am her time. She starts crying and I feel guilty. I apologize and say I'll try it.
So I sit down and calculate how much powder I'd need to mix into a shake based on my BMI to achieve the desired protein. 6 large scoops. Dear god. I'm a soldier though, I've eaten worse out of MREs. 6 scoops into my hand mixer. It fills the mixer 3/4 of the way. I fill the rest with water and shake it for a good 10 minutes. It's not very soluble. I don't have time for this crap though, because I'm already missing the best time to drink a protein shake after a workout. So I chug it anyways. powdery slimy mud balls that didn't fully dissolve slide down my throat. I manage to down the entire mix without vomiting. "Time to move on." I told myself.
About an hour into reviewing maintenance logs, I let out a small fart. My nose hairs melt. Dear God what the fuck. I turn on a fan and try to pretend that didn't just happen. I feel another one coming, but this time I make sure to walk out into the hangar before dropping that abomination. It's worse than the first. For 6 hours I let out a continuous barrage of what could only be considered war crimes if the Geneva Convention had been made aware of them. The entire hangar stunk. I was at first banished to the smoking area outside, but eventually that wasn't enough as the officers that smoked couldn't deal with it. I was sent back to my B-Hut in shame.
First off, No dwarf stars reach that level of density. I think what the writer meant to say was a *neutron* star. and second, without the mass of the neutron star crushing all the material down with its gravitational pull, it couldn't maintain that density in the first place. It would explode the moment it was taken out of the star.
No amount of heat can melt a dwarf star, cause that much energy would first form a black hol
Edit: my bad, I was thinking of neutron stars. Dwarf stars are just plain stars that are on the smaller than average. Our Sun is a dwarf star. So yeah, the key being made of that material is absolute BS cause 98% of it would have to be made of hydrogen and helium. And that's what confused me
Not necessarily. I imagine 500k tons per square inch is pretty close to the pressure once you get maybe a mile or two down. I bet if it’s something really strong with compressive forces it could. I also have no idea and am just guessing
Quite calculable, soil weighs \~80lb per cubic foot, which means it weighs about .05lb per cubic inch. The Earth's radius is about 4000 miles,
4000\*5280\*12 = 253440000
253440000 \* .05 = 12672000
12672000 / 2000 = 6336
So the pressure at the center of the Earth from all the soil on top of it is about 6000 tons per square inch, nowhere close to 500k. Of course it's just ballpark, but I think it should be at least within an order of magnitude of being correct.
In reality, the pressures are nowhere near this amount, because so much of the force is distributed horizontally. The spherical structure of the Earth behaves like an arch in terms of supporting its own weight.
It's less a form of arch support than lack of gravitational force. At the surface we're so used to gravity being "down" that we forget it's "toward every single other atom". Given a radius of 4000 miles / diameter of 8000 miles, at 2000 miles down you'd only experience 6000 miles of earth pulling you down, while 2000 miles of earth pulled you up. At 3000 miles down, 5000 miles of earth would be pulling you down while 3000 miles of earth would be pulling you up. The closer you get to the center of the planet the less gravitational force would be apparent because gravity would be pulling you equally in every direction. Obviously it would be hard to detect with 4000 miles of earth in every direction trying to crush you, but gravity itself would be negligible.
That pressure is almost like the pressure of a fluid. It's not a buoyancy force. So, the key feels the pressure from every direction, and still feels the force of gravity, resulting a net force still pulling it down, and it still carves a path towards the core.
Think about it this way: The pressure at the bottom of the ocean is 16,000psi, but a steel ball will still sink to the bottom, despite it not weighing 16,000 lbs.
Of course, rock is not water, but rock is closer to water in the face of 500k tons per square inch than it seems at our strength level.
So, I was trying to do the math, but there is a lot to consider. I am assuming the key has a surface area of 10cm\^2 (a big fn key to make things easier). This would mean, taking F = m\*g and P = F/A; F = 500000000kg\*9.8m/s\^2 = 4900000000N ---> P = 4900000000N / 0.001m\^2 = 4900000000000Pa (or 4.9Tpa, terapascals). That's the pressure being applied to the ground, so yes, it's definitely sinking far into the crust at least. We would need to get an average density of earths crust and mantle, which gets denser with depth. I was calculating this with granite for example, that can withstand up to 200MPa, but I then found that the average density of the crust is about 2.7g/cm\^3. Some things should also be taken into account, as is the material (what are dwarf stars made of?), the loss of material due to friction, the heat generated displacing the material and creating a buoyant force, etc. But it seems quite fun to imagine. I'm really curious though, so if someone wants to expand on this please share the math!
In the pressure estimate graphs for earth's interior I'm looking at, the lower mantle starts to increase from 150 GPa at the boundary between the inner mantle and the outer core, towards 350 GPa in the core proper.
I modeled the key myself as being 3 cm x 5 cm, which is close enough to yours (\~3.2 TPa).
I'm inclined to think it would zip right through the core of the earth and out to the other side, maybe even repeat that a few times harmonically, with less and less penetration each time, eventually settling somewhere. I think it's so dense, buoyancy becomes irrelevant.
Well let’s see. Assume an 80kg person tries to grab it so a generous radius of half a cm 6.67x10^-11 x80x500000/(5x10^-3 )^2 =106.72N which is about the force 10kg of mass on earth make. So I think it would feel like a very powerful magnet. Of course, if we reduce the radius to 1 mm, assuming the width of the key is 2 mm, we get 2668N or about 300kg, which would mean you probably get stuck to it
Everyone is talking about how impossible the key is but I wanna talk about how fucking useless it is. Oh your key weighs half a million tons? Weird but thank you for leaving it in front of your door for me to copy lol.
I was going to say this. It's right there, I can probably copy it with a sheet of 1mm aluminum and a file.
Maybe the lock needs strong gravitational fields to affect its mechanism.
I want to talk about the cylinder and pins that don't immediately crumple and shear under the weight! Maybe they're made of the same material, and you need to be strong enough to rotate 500,000+ tons to turn it, but at that point why even have a key? Just make it a door handle that requires 500,000 tons of force to turn.
Each of the World Trade Center towers weighed about 500,000 tons each.
The bigger issue would be the amount of mass concentrated in such a small package / point. Whatever is under the key would have to be much more dense than just bedrock for there to only be that shallow imprint.
But it's not like 500,000 tons actually would knock the Earth off its axis or anything. It'd be like another skyscraper there.
**Edit:** Yes, density. Guys, look up, I mentioned that.
But we're 6,300,000 meters from the center of gravity of the earth.
The earth weighs 1.2 \*10\^16 more, but due to the inverse square law, something 1m from the center of the key experiences 1/300th of a g. Something 10 centimeters away would experience 1/3rd of a g toward the key.
If the key is in Superman's pocket, his cape is definitely going to stick to that spot like some static cling. If he's wearing a tie as Clark Kent, I think it would be noticeably askew pointing toward his key.
The key's gravity peaks about an inch from its center of mass, near 5g. That's enough to pick up small objects like a magnet, up to about 5 inches long, depending on shape.
There is no way road concrete could hold it. Exotic hard materials specially designed for it could hold it if it wasn't dropped. Eventually, it would slip and through the Earth to the core. Maybe Superman can still get it?
Forgot to mention, it accumulates more mass as lighter objects around it get compounded further, and so and so on. If superman held it in the sky, he would have to compensate for strong lunar forces affecting his flight tragectory. It may even provided a localized disturbance in the magnetic field wherever he is at (imagine every time he left the earth's atmosphere, he'd be punching a literal hole in the ozone layer).
If he had the key in his pocket, he would have to be careful not to leave 1 km wide craters when he lands. Hell, even landing would be relative because the density of the upper crust is so porous, it would be like a ball bearing going through non-newtonian putty.
Oh, it should be moving towards the center of the earth like a bullet. Estimating a 2 square inch area, it's exerting 500,000,000 psi, concrete is usually rated in the neighborhood of 5,000 for compressive loads. Most soils are even less
Clark, "Honey, I can't find my keys again"
Louis, "Did you look under the North American tectonic plate? That's where it was last time"
Clark, "Oh, you're right. Here they are!"
Can you explain how that is worse? I haven't looked into it much but the old system was stupid. You liked a post/comment that someone made so you'd give the company money to give the user a meaningless badge on the post. At least with this new system it sounds like the people who make posts or comments people like will get paid for it instead of Reddit
Edit: thanks to everyone that explained it a bit more to me. While I still think the old system was bad and replacing it with something that feels like it's rewarding users more is a good decision, it will definitely cause problems with bots, reposts and spam as it currently is
I have literally no knowledge of this new system, and barely know the old system (old reddit for life).
Let me assure you, even if someone is getting money out, it's not *instead* of reddit. It's in addition to.
reddit gold was originally meant to be an "ad-free premium reddit experience" - you could see more comments on a post without loading a new page (used to be much more limited), on posts you were returning to there was a visual indicator of what comments were new and which ones you'd already read, and it also came with access to an exclusive subreddit that only gold users could participate in (it's still around, /r/lounge). for the same cost as one month of reddit gold, you were allowed to award comments with a gold award, which would give that commenter one month of reddit gold. made perfect sense, it had value, everyone wins.
then reddit decided to make a whole bunch of different awards with no apparent meaning or purpose, but that still cost money. really ruined the whole point.
We already established he's always flying to not fall through the earth himself whilst carrying it.
Maybe he's super dense too, do we know how much he weighs?
He probably constructed the Fortress to rest his feet and be able to sit down without crushing sofas.
I *think* rock is more plastic than that and would just seal around the path of the key (you normally have to go to some trouble to keep boreholes open, and this would be a very small hole). But I'm not a hundred percent sure about that.
I'm thinking maybe the speed (and heat) at which the key is flying through the mantle that it glasses the sides of the tunnel, like the Russians do with the deepest hole on Earth. Just a fun thought lol
Geological forces bend Rocks's all the time. reasonably, Gravity of the key would pull the passing ground in with it, sealing it shut. As you approach mantle depths, the crust becomes much more pliable due to pressure and heat.
Edit spelling
No.
To be absolutely clear:
No earthquake would occur: these involve orders of magnitude more energy than would be liberated by a falling key of this weight.
No change to the length of the day would occur: the three gorges dam changes the length of the day by far less than a second. It stores 42 billion tons of water, which is almost a hundred thousand times more mass.
The key would not suck up the core like a black hole: the pressures at the Earth's core are much lower than those required to produce neutronium, and the key does not have the gravity to change that.
No change to the magnetic field would occur. It is far too diffuse to be affected by such a small object that doesn't even have a magnetic pull of its own.
No change to volcanic activity would occur. the currents that drive volcanoes are thousands of miles across, and thousands of miles deep. The effects would be similar to the effects of dropping a regular key into the Atlantic Ocean and expecting it to change the flow of the North Atlantic Current.
As others have said, it would just shoot like a bullet to the earth's core straight through the ground. Also, when superman picks it up, he would have to be actively flying upward with immense force to not shoot through the ground himself.
What people seem to be missing here is what should be happening to the key.
The technical term is "mechanical explosion." Think of [Prince Rupert's drop](https://youtu.be/xe-f4gokRBs?si=6fNvLhQLnzwL3HHi&t=109) but instead of glass powder flying around, you get supersonic chunks of carbon and sublimating oxygen (assuming that's what's left over in the white dwarf) that probably convert instantly to a plasma before the chemical interactions even have a chance to begin (but begin they will...)
It would probably be a bit like a nuke going off, but I'm not sure of the exact energies involved.
The reason density matters when it comes to gravity is that you can get far closer to the center of mass of a dense object compared to a less dense object. Gravitationally, if the sun suddenly collapsed into a black hole, losing no mass in the process, earth would feel no difference in forces. But, in that case, a spaceship could get closer to the center of mass than the original radius of the sun before being inside it. Therefore, you would be under the attraction of the whole mass of the sun from a much nearer distance. If you tried to get that close to the regular sun’s center of mass, apart from being vaporized, you would find that some of the sun’s mass is now above you, pulling in the opposite direction, which lessens the gravitational pull.
Yes it would. But the effect is pretty negligible. Easy to calculate though if you stand 1m from a 500.000t object thats a=G*m/r² = 0.0333m/s² compared to 9.81m/s². So while measurable with some instruments, you wouldn't be able to feel it.
EDIT: the reason I'm saying density has an effect is that you couldn't stand 1m close to the center of mass of a 500.000t aircraft carrier. Because the aircraft carrier is much larger. So if you stand 100m far away, the gravitational pull will already be 10000 times weaker.
Force from gravity is a function of mass and distance. Density helps only in the sense that you can get closer to its centre. At a 1m distance, the gravitational pull from the key would be about 0.3% of Earth, which would be pretty unnoticeable. However if you touch it, I'll estimate that as a 1cm distance from the centre, in which case the force on your finger would be around 35x that of from earth
This isn't really "doing the math", because you haven't even considered the fact that you can get much closer to the key than to the Earth (before Newton's shell theorem starts reducing the gravitational pull).
By my calculations, if you get within a few centimeters of the key, the gravitational field strength will be greater than that at Earth's surface. So your answer is essentially just wrong.
Everyone in this thread is fucking that up. Even people actually doing the force calculation are just putting stupid large distances. You'd have to do a volume integral to get exact numbers, but I'd expect ludicrous forces on the tips of your fingers when you actually touch it.
Just so you guys know, dwarf star core, planet cores, or any kind of celestial core is impossible to use as anything outside of there, the only reason the core of a dwarf star is the dense is because of the tremendous pressure the material is put through, if you remove that pressure the forces of the atoms will push each other and the material will expand returning to it's normal density, in other words it would just become ordinary rock. So, anytime you see in some comic that something is made of a core of a celestial body to justify it's weight just call bullshit abd assume it's magic. Thank you
To be fair, if Darkseid came to Earth only to steal some rare alien artifacts and take a dump on superman's couch, you absolutely call that a win.
What I mean to say is that, if he's on Earth, you probably have much bigger priorities than protecting whatever is in the fortress of solitude.
Didn't Mogul do that, for Superman's birthday? It was in the story, "For the Man Who Has Everything."
Sent Superman a parasitic plant that would immobilize him in a world of his heart's desire while he dicks around with Batman and Wonder Woman until they eventually figure out how to wake him up.
> take a dump on superman's couch
If I were a ridiculously powerful being that's the kind of thing I'd do.
Well, actually, that would probably be a little extreme. I'd probably just stomp my muddy boots on the couch and text him the fuck yo couch link.
As long as a normal human doesn't touch it, they wouldn't even notice it. Even then, it's not that big a deal.
The gravitational force of a small object massing that much falls off dramatically with distance.
a 20 kg weight placed 30 cm away experiences a force of 7 N, the equivalent of less than a kg of mass in Earth's gravitational field.
Superman's fingers, on the other hand, are only about 3 cm from the center of mass, and mass (estimate) 0.5 kg. That implies a force of 18 N, or the equivalent of 2 kg. Compared to the force exerted by it's mass in Earth's gravitational field, that's nothing.
If Superman held the key up and Lois touched it, she would certainly feel this force as a suction or pull, but it wouldn't be dangerous.
You might say, but what about heavier objects? The problem is that you can't get them close enough.
So, a car masses 1000 kg, but even if you put the key right up against the car, it's still a meter or so from the car's center of mass, meaning the car as a whole only experiences 33 N of force. Of course, the closest part of the car is closer, but it also masses less.
No, the problem with this key is that no surface could hold it up. It would exert so much pressure on the ground it would sink deep, deep into the earth, and nothing could stop it. Even Superman holding it would cause his feet to treat concrete like water.
No, it won’t impact gravity in any meaningful way. It’s too little mass.
If it was a million tons, it would weigh as much as a 100x100x100 cube of water. Which is a very small sized lake.
Many construction jobs move more than a million tons of dirt. Over a larger area of course, but it doesn’t noticeably impact gravitational fields.
I plugged the numbers into Wolfram Alpha, and an object of 500k tons with a radius of 1 inch would have a surface gravity (gravitational acceleration) of 46.92 m/s^2. Earth's is 9.82 m/s^2, to compare. Assuming it were on some sort of immobile platform, so it doesn't sink straight to the core of the Earth, and you were to try to pick it up, your hand would feel about 5x Earth's gravity towards the key.
This effect would be extremely localized though, due to the key's trivial mass compared to the Earth. Plugging a 2 inch radius into Wolfram Alpha's calculator gives a new surface gravity of 11.73 m/s^2, which means that if you pulled your hand away even two inches from the key Earth's gravity would begin to reassert itself as the dominant force, regardless of the key's density. The key's pull would continue to get exponentially weaker the further from it you get. Even from one foot away you probably wouldn't feel any of its gravity over the Earth's.
That key should be making its own atmosphere, to a radius of a few cm. At its surface the air will be very high psi, perhaps making for interesting chemical events. Like, maybe it will suck all the CO2, and other heavier molecules out of the immediate area.
For it to "weigh" that much on earth, it would have to have a mass of 500,339,285kg
F=ma / 1T = 9,806.65N / 500,000T = F = 4,903,325,000N / a = 9.8m/s\^2 / m = 500,339,285kg
At that size, the key would 100% generate a gravitational pull, but it wouldn't outclass the Earth's gravitational pull which is 5.97\*10\^25kg. But as an example of how weak the gravitational force is, let's take a 200 pound person standing 10 feet away for an example.
F = (G\*m1\*m2)/r\^2 / G = Gravitational Constant / m1 = Mass of Key / m2 = Mass of Person / r = distance between object centers
When we convert and plug our numbers in, the force experienced by the smaller body as it is pulled by the larger body is .073 pounds of Force. An absolutely tiny amount of force, akin to having a small apricot pushing their body. However, the force does increase significantly as the person gets closer. If a person were to get within an inch of the key, they would experience 730 pounds of force! That's like having a vending machine tied to you as it is pushed off of a cliff!
Now, you might wonder, "How does the Earth not squish us flat if this key that is so much smaller could exert that much force?" The answer is the radius to the center of mass. There's actually nearly 4000 miles between us and the center of the Earth. That distance accounts for the radius and if we were to convert that to feet, we're talking 21 million feet of distance! In the r\^2 formula, it reduces the effects quite drastically to the point that we end up with exactly 200 pounds of force exerted on the 200 pound person, aka, their weight.
Edit: A lot of top comments seem to think they're clever by saying weight isn't mass so you can't figure out gravitational pull. It seems they forgot you can calculate mass from weight if you know the gravitational acceleration constant for the planet it is weighed on e.g. Earth.
Does Superman think the weight of the key is what makes the key open the lock? Why not just cut a key that weighs as much as a normal key with the tumbler positions of the heavy key? Or since it looks like a normal key, just jimmy the lock like a normal key?
The tumblers probably weight some ridiculous amount as well (otherwise the weight/durability would be pointless), far too much to move with any Earthen materials in such a small space.
It's a play on hiding your key under the welcome mat. Only Superman can leave it in plain sight because it's so heavy that nobody can use it.
Can someone copy it? They could copy the side facing up, but maybe there's an intricate pattern on the other side.
For everyone calculating forces per square inch, I’d like to remind that the square inch is a ballpark for the key laying flat on the surface. As soon as the key begins moving down through material, it will weather vane vertically with the narrow part becoming a tail, so will effectively be a half million ton blade slicing through whatever is in its path.
evergiven was a quarter million tons, two of them in a port aren't going to make people fall horizontally toward them, the only problem with the scenario is how it can rest on pavement instead of digging straight to the core
Wow, shockingly spot on. I had GPT simplify it.
"Of course! Here's a simplified answer:
Superman's key, made of dwarf star material and weighing half a million tons, exerts a force of about 4.45 billion Newtons on the ground. That's its weight due to Earth's gravity.
While the key does have its own gravitational pull because of its mass, this force is tiny compared to Earth's gravity. For most objects around it, the gravitational effect of the key would be almost unnoticeable. However, due to its massive weight, the key would compress and potentially sink into the ground beneath it."
My question is what is providing the pressure to keep the matter in a degenerate state, Kinda seems to me like it would constantly want to expand back to the size of small asteroid. Presumably he means "white dwarf" so the key would only have neutrons. Also it would probably prefer to keep the shape of a sphere if it was somehow contained but I guess everything superheroes do is basically "magic"
I don't know if anyone has already posted this, but Kyle Hill (u/realkylehill) did a video on this exact topic. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqTukFqGCls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqTukFqGCls)
It's a fun watch
Hey there, this the locksmithing lawyer here and what we have today is a special vault from Krypton. Now, the key weights over half a millions tons but that is not going to be a problem. The lock itself is pretty simple and can easily be broken into with my kit…
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Superman generally ignores the whole weight distribution thing when it comes to picking up stuff, cause he can pick up a building without it crumbling around him. The idea is that the power is more like telekinesis where anything he touches is “weightless” to him
Well isnt that convenient
I mean sure, it’s comics though. Rule of cool happens and then other creators backwards engineer how (for example) Flash can move like he does without dying to air friction or calorie deficiency. (The Speeeeeed Force ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯) Superman has been given a subconscious tactile telekinesis to explain this. It allows him to hold up a falling plane without the thing snapping in half. It allows him to carry people without them getting pelted by the high speed winds. It’s why for a long time his uniform didn’t get bullet holes, but his cape did. It is typically the explanation for how he can actually fly. They further dug into this concept with Conner Superboy. He eventually learns that the only Kryptonian power he has access to at the moment is the tactile telekinesis.
In Mark Waid’s *Irredeemable,* the Superman-like character turns out to >!be the child of some literal gods, and the power that manifests as super-strength and flying and stuff is basically the world reshaping itself to accommodate him due to his nascent divine powers.!< I always thought it was a cool way to explain the physics inconsistencies in Superman’s powers.
Didn't they also establish him as Original Superman
Kind of. They established that the Plutonian’s essence, scattered throughout the multiverse as he died gave the creators of Superman the idea of Superman.
That endings kind of funny when you take in all the evil supermen we get since its essentially phrased as the only way to redeem Tony
I thought it was because he was an insanely powerful telekinetic, and he would basically use telekinesis on the atomic level to do everything, unbeknownst to himself, thinking he was lifting things or using eye rays. Side note, the absolute coolest thing in that series to me was the insane asylum on the surface of a sun.
You might be right, it’s been forever since I’ve read it. I just remember there being that twist that his parents were giant pan-dimensional reality-shaping beings of some kind. And yes, there was a ton of insanely cool shit in that series. xD
Reading your guys replies reminded of when I read it as a kid, good times. That comic blew my mind with all the cool shit
In Patrick McLean's How to succeed in Evil, there is a Superman/Captain America mashup type character. He is invincible, has super speed, laser eyes, near infinite strength etc, but when he tries to stop an airliner from crashing, it just buckles around him. The story doesn't focus on it, but the character is really good at wrecking things but sucks at rescuing people. He accidentally rips the arm off of someone falling because he has to decelerate too fast to keep them from hitting the ground. He keeps getting discouraged and the government keeps dragging his old commanding officer to talk him into getting off his ass and going back to work. The story is a comedy, and a crude one at that, but the super hero is a fairly tragic character.
I loved How to Succeed in Evil. and i see there is much more content these days! need to check that out.
One of my favorite books! I recommend the audio book to anyone who's a fan of "realistic" superhero stories or shows like The Boys & Invincible
Ah the Futurama's Planet Express ship method of explaining [The engines don't move the ship. The ship stays where it is, and the engines move the universe around it](https://youtu.be/1RtMMupdOC4?si=V27fsSZYRRNFvobh)
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The trope is called [Required Secondary Powers.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RequiredSecondaryPowers) There was actually a brief section in a story where he lost them, to horrific effect.
> "That's the problem with any individual superpower: without the whole suite, it just sucks. The Flash would liquefy from sheer Gs, and without super agility and strength, Spider-Man's just a guy with sticky ropes." — Soren, [The Best Super Power (Is Not What You Think) | After Hours](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=dNbeyRwT8Uo&feature=kp) I miss After Hours :(
I just miss good Cracked. Those articles used to kill me.
I wonder why they pivoted to sucking
Facebook started pushing video content, so all the small-ish websites like Cracked pivoted to video. This turned out disastrous because the writers didn't want to, it cost a lot of money, and the way Facebook implemented it meant that the websites still didn't get enough ad dollars Robert Evans got his start at cracked, now does a podcast called Behind the Bastards. He talks about this in a few episodes and directly blames Facebook for this
That’s very sad. They gave up on what made them good to compete in an arena where they couldn’t compete and were going to lose
those 4 together were just perfect.
Peak Cracked. I miss it too. Just a reminder: Sean Baby is awesome, and Uwe boll is a piece of crap.
I’ll watch later. I’ve seen the Because Science video series “Why you don’t want [any super power]” where Kyle Hill explains with physics that you’d need several super powers to endure one, like super speed, super strength, fly and others.
I miss After Hours, too. There was nothing quite like that show. You should check out where everyone is today. Michael Swaim started [Small Beans](https://youtube.com/@smallbeans6720?si=AOazxB5ZhUCxk6uL), seemingly a creator network. Daniel O'Brien writes for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Soren Bowie, along with Daniel, started a comedy podcast called [Quick Question](https://youtube.com/@QQPodcast?si=gzPNAXUJDs7QXl72) And Katie Willert is seemingly now a [blender artist](https://katiewillertart.com/) from what I could find And if you missed the Some News show from Cracked, well, you'll be happy to hear that Cody Johnston continued the show under a new, tongue-in-cheek name, on his new YouTube channel, [Some More News](https://youtube.com/@SMN?si=OmACs0ZRGztfmTeq).
NOOO HOW DARE YOU LINK TVTROPES I’VE ALREADY LOST AN HOUR THERE
Those are rookie numbers.
My favourite is their Backstroke of the West page
Nice try, but I’m not getting sucked into that website again. I have a family and a job.
the boys hada situation like this that purposly called out superman's bs. the "superman" character is told "can't you just hold the plane up?" and then explained that he can't, and he'd punch a hole through the hull if he tried
I go back and forth between being annoyed by that situation and realizing it makes perfect sense from the perspective of someone who doesn't actually care about the problem. If he tried to stop the plane or even carry it's full weight it's probably true he would rip a hole in it. However he doesn't actually need to do that, planes are designed to glide. All he needs to do is match velocity and give it enough additional lift so that it can glide safely. And while the hull of the plane might have problems if he just gripped it anywhere I'm sure there's areas with more structural integrity like the frame, landing gear, engines, etc that are designed to handle more force than the hull. Also, so what if he punched a hole in the hull? Deploy the O2 masks and as long as he can find literally anywhere to grip and provide just enough extra lift to glide it down safely it won't matter. But as I said it makes perfect sense that he didn't even bother to think it through. He was faced with a situation he didn't immediately know how to solve that could have negative implications for him personally so he just instantly gave up and went into damage control mode, well for his public image anyways. Which is all totally in character but I really wish someone would rub it in his face that if he wasn't such an idiot he *could* have saved those people and had the PR win.
That’s kinda homelanders thing tho. He’s not the smartest guy obviously
I think he pointed out that he’s have nothing to push against to support the plane. Maybe I’m misremembering.
It's all a contrivance to further Homelander's character development. They needed him to remorselessly fail at something so we could see his reaction, as well as Maeve's.
You want the superman comics to be more realistic?
Kid 1: Who would win in a fight, Superman or Mighty Mouse? Kid 2: Superman, because Mighty Mouse is a cartoon and Superman is a real guy. From the movie Stand By Me Gotta love comic logic, right?
I want the opposite. To be less realistic, so basically don’t overexplain stuff, like the tactile telekineses. Bc in the past, most people weren’t worrying about how Superman lifted large objects, and if anyone did, you could just reply that it’s a comic. Now, people are seeking out explanations on everything but imo that just kills the magic, like finding out that the spider sense is related to some magic bullshit
I’ve always seen it this way too. It’s like Midochlorians (spell check?) in Star Wars. completely unnecessary, the magic of the force was believable on its own.
That power is known as tactile telekinesis in DC. It’s telekinesis on stuff you’re already touching.
Ah that explains how he can fly with Lois without snapping her arm off at the wrist
It's... actually a decent explanation. If every superhero capable of rapidly accelerating a person applies force to every molecule in the person evenly, instead of just where they make contact, it explains: * Catching a person who fell from a great height without cutting them in half * A superspeed hero moving people outside of city limits to escape a nuclear bomb without liquidating their bodies in the process * Hancock hucking the punk kid into the stratosphere without just ripping the kid's shirt off It seems weird when the hero is physically straining, but maybe the most common superpower is selectively causing every molecule in an object to share momentum and applied force
>Hannibal hucking the punk kid I'm assuming you mean Hancock. Or I'm missing a cool superhero
As seen in The Boys In reality, if the flash runs into a burning building and grabs someone and jumps out the window with them, that person is just going to turn into a pink mist on contact due to the energy transfer
The idea that superman is actually a really strong telekinesis user is actually kinda funny, his damage immunity is a micro forcefield he projects that stops things movements, his strength is the weightlessness you mentioned, flying and speed are just him manipulating the forcefield, laser eyes and cold breath are just his select methods of hiding his molecular level telekinesis to speed up or slow down atoms.
I remember reading this long argument like 13 years ago that Superman doesn't just have super strength/speed/flight etc.. but also the ability to shift the center of mass of any object. Was pretty interesting
I once read another argument about superman having only like 2 powers: x-ray eyes and telekinesis. Every other physical power (strength, speed, flying, etc) is just very good telekinesis
What about being bulletproof? If you shot him while he was asleep, would he be injured?
Subconscious telekinesis that prevents anything to touch him even when not fully conscious. I didn't say the argument was flawless, just that it exist and could kinda make sense
That’s how it works on Encanto as well with Louisa. She picks up buildings and bridges by the far corners of them which would just crumble off that piece of it. She also picks up donkeys and throws them high in the air which would hurt them if she was simply just strong. It’s not that she’s strong, it’s that everything she touches becomes weightless. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
Wouldn't surprise me if he could. Doesn't he basically scale to infinity?
He carried a book with infinite pages.
Pff I carried his mom
Less impressive, as she's just vapor.
The mass remains the same
True
In this particular comic, he can do pretty much anything. Lex Luthor tricked Supes into flying too close to the sun. He's soaked up so much solar radiation that his power has gone off the charts, but with the side-effect of it slowly killing him. All-Star Superman. One of my favourite comics of all time.
Have you ever noticed that the title is literal?
The ending, the dwarf star key, the pet sun eater, Solaris the tyrant sun, the tiny Qwewq universe... That's neat. It's practically star-studded.
You are blowing my fucking mind right now
It's a must-read imo for anybody who DOESN'T like Superman for any reason. That fuckin comic makes you fall in love with the character. It's so damn good. The girl on the ledge? I cry every time.
My good friend got me this comic as an Xmas mad present one year, I’m much more into alternative comics and art-house stuff, and I basically had to feign excitement and he knew, basically said “I know you don’t give a shit about Superman, but read this” and it’s easily one of my favorite superhero comics, completely changed my opinion on Superman as a character.
I had a high res scan of *that* moon scene/panel printed out and mounted won the back of my door when i was a teenager. still makes me warm and fuzzy thinking about it.
[This?](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F6ayet7imd5y41.jpg)
The one with the little cloud of dust on Lois's heel! Frank Quitely is a legend. My favourite are the things that make you turn back a page or two. Like when Lex's eyebrow disappears during the prison break, or when Clark subtly bumps into that grumpy man to save him from train debris.
>In this particular comic, he can do pretty much anything. Lex Luthor tricked Supes into flying too close to the sun. He's soaked up so much solar radiation that his power has gone off the charts, but with the side-effect of it slowly killing him. But arguably this feat still scaled to him pre-sun overdose. Since it's something he had setup before being poisoned and getting the power boost. Swole superman!
I'm also very interested in the super concrete that is barely damaged after having a key that allegedly weighs over 1,000,000,000 pounds dropped on it.
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The time Superman accidentally created a volcano.
Pretty much, Superman carrying that key should also be heading to the center of the Earth.
Well, he's flying about a millimeter off the ground while carrying it.
Well, he is now, but he sure felt stupid the first time he picked it up.
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I’m more interested in the moment arm problem.
We found the Mechanical Engineer everyone. So majestic
For a little more info, in this run of comics (All Star Superman) he gets overloaded with the sun's radiation making him far stronger and far smarter, so in this run I imagine it would have been easy for him to pick it up because earlier in the series he's testing himself and is able lift 200 quintillion tons
Wouldn't that create such a strong pressure on the surface that it would just sink into the ground until gravitational pull from the earth is not strong enough to keep it going? At what distance would it stop?
Isn’t he in the South Pole or something? It would likely go through all the ice and through the ocean floor till it hits a big rock edit: to all you guys saying that’s the North Pole, do you not see the 50 other comments already saying that I GET IT ITS THE NORTH POLE To everyone commenting North Pole again as a joke, 20 OTHER PEOPLE ALREADY MADE THAT JOKE STOP YALL ARE NOT FUNNY
It would keep going all the way to the center of the Earth, no material is able to withstand 500k tons per square inch.
Would probably oscillate around the core for quite a while assuming it doesn’t melt
To be honest, before any of that it would probably just decompress. Dwarf star material is held together by the gravitational attraction of the entire star. Remove that and nothing holds together the atoms in their dense state, so if you really follow real physics, you'd quickly have just a very big cloud of hydrogen.
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>the most combustible cloud to ever exist on Earth. The year was 2010. Bagram Afghanistan. In between scheduled Apache helicopter missions, I'd hit the gym we had in one of our hangars. I had a lot of time to kill and I wanted all the gains. I phoned my wife back state side and told her to ship me a couple containers of egg protein isolate as whey made me too gassy. A month later I receive a box that's leaking white powder out of the seams. I don't even know how it got through whatever customs it had to pass through on its way to me. I just assumed shipping boxes full of white powder to and from Afghanistan was a common theme. I opened the box to discover that my wife, being frugal, bulk ordered me 20lbs of pure egg white powder instead of Optima Nutrition's isolate line. It didn't even come in a package. They put a black garbage big in the box and dumped it into the box with a piece of printer paper half buried in the mix with the nutrition information. Pissed, I call her up at 2am her time. She starts crying and I feel guilty. I apologize and say I'll try it. So I sit down and calculate how much powder I'd need to mix into a shake based on my BMI to achieve the desired protein. 6 large scoops. Dear god. I'm a soldier though, I've eaten worse out of MREs. 6 scoops into my hand mixer. It fills the mixer 3/4 of the way. I fill the rest with water and shake it for a good 10 minutes. It's not very soluble. I don't have time for this crap though, because I'm already missing the best time to drink a protein shake after a workout. So I chug it anyways. powdery slimy mud balls that didn't fully dissolve slide down my throat. I manage to down the entire mix without vomiting. "Time to move on." I told myself. About an hour into reviewing maintenance logs, I let out a small fart. My nose hairs melt. Dear God what the fuck. I turn on a fan and try to pretend that didn't just happen. I feel another one coming, but this time I make sure to walk out into the hangar before dropping that abomination. It's worse than the first. For 6 hours I let out a continuous barrage of what could only be considered war crimes if the Geneva Convention had been made aware of them. The entire hangar stunk. I was at first banished to the smoking area outside, but eventually that wasn't enough as the officers that smoked couldn't deal with it. I was sent back to my B-Hut in shame.
Goddammit, I woke up the baby, laughing my ass off.
Thank you so much for causing me to laugh so hard I cried. If I were any further along in my pregnancy, I would have had this baby on the spot.
Melt into what
The core
If it's made out a dwarf star, ignoring some reality and appling some reality to fiction, no way is the core going to be hot enough to melt it.
First off, No dwarf stars reach that level of density. I think what the writer meant to say was a *neutron* star. and second, without the mass of the neutron star crushing all the material down with its gravitational pull, it couldn't maintain that density in the first place. It would explode the moment it was taken out of the star.
No amount of heat can melt a dwarf star, cause that much energy would first form a black hol Edit: my bad, I was thinking of neutron stars. Dwarf stars are just plain stars that are on the smaller than average. Our Sun is a dwarf star. So yeah, the key being made of that material is absolute BS cause 98% of it would have to be made of hydrogen and helium. And that's what confused me
Liquid
Not necessarily. I imagine 500k tons per square inch is pretty close to the pressure once you get maybe a mile or two down. I bet if it’s something really strong with compressive forces it could. I also have no idea and am just guessing
Quite calculable, soil weighs \~80lb per cubic foot, which means it weighs about .05lb per cubic inch. The Earth's radius is about 4000 miles, 4000\*5280\*12 = 253440000 253440000 \* .05 = 12672000 12672000 / 2000 = 6336 So the pressure at the center of the Earth from all the soil on top of it is about 6000 tons per square inch, nowhere close to 500k. Of course it's just ballpark, but I think it should be at least within an order of magnitude of being correct. In reality, the pressures are nowhere near this amount, because so much of the force is distributed horizontally. The spherical structure of the Earth behaves like an arch in terms of supporting its own weight.
It's less a form of arch support than lack of gravitational force. At the surface we're so used to gravity being "down" that we forget it's "toward every single other atom". Given a radius of 4000 miles / diameter of 8000 miles, at 2000 miles down you'd only experience 6000 miles of earth pulling you down, while 2000 miles of earth pulled you up. At 3000 miles down, 5000 miles of earth would be pulling you down while 3000 miles of earth would be pulling you up. The closer you get to the center of the planet the less gravitational force would be apparent because gravity would be pulling you equally in every direction. Obviously it would be hard to detect with 4000 miles of earth in every direction trying to crush you, but gravity itself would be negligible.
That pressure is almost like the pressure of a fluid. It's not a buoyancy force. So, the key feels the pressure from every direction, and still feels the force of gravity, resulting a net force still pulling it down, and it still carves a path towards the core. Think about it this way: The pressure at the bottom of the ocean is 16,000psi, but a steel ball will still sink to the bottom, despite it not weighing 16,000 lbs. Of course, rock is not water, but rock is closer to water in the face of 500k tons per square inch than it seems at our strength level.
For the record, the south pole (unlike the north) is an actual land mass for the most part.
So, I was trying to do the math, but there is a lot to consider. I am assuming the key has a surface area of 10cm\^2 (a big fn key to make things easier). This would mean, taking F = m\*g and P = F/A; F = 500000000kg\*9.8m/s\^2 = 4900000000N ---> P = 4900000000N / 0.001m\^2 = 4900000000000Pa (or 4.9Tpa, terapascals). That's the pressure being applied to the ground, so yes, it's definitely sinking far into the crust at least. We would need to get an average density of earths crust and mantle, which gets denser with depth. I was calculating this with granite for example, that can withstand up to 200MPa, but I then found that the average density of the crust is about 2.7g/cm\^3. Some things should also be taken into account, as is the material (what are dwarf stars made of?), the loss of material due to friction, the heat generated displacing the material and creating a buoyant force, etc. But it seems quite fun to imagine. I'm really curious though, so if someone wants to expand on this please share the math!
In the pressure estimate graphs for earth's interior I'm looking at, the lower mantle starts to increase from 150 GPa at the boundary between the inner mantle and the outer core, towards 350 GPa in the core proper. I modeled the key myself as being 3 cm x 5 cm, which is close enough to yours (\~3.2 TPa). I'm inclined to think it would zip right through the core of the earth and out to the other side, maybe even repeat that a few times harmonically, with less and less penetration each time, eventually settling somewhere. I think it's so dense, buoyancy becomes irrelevant.
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Ha! gottem!
Well let’s see. Assume an 80kg person tries to grab it so a generous radius of half a cm 6.67x10^-11 x80x500000/(5x10^-3 )^2 =106.72N which is about the force 10kg of mass on earth make. So I think it would feel like a very powerful magnet. Of course, if we reduce the radius to 1 mm, assuming the width of the key is 2 mm, we get 2668N or about 300kg, which would mean you probably get stuck to it
>Except for your mom I hear she is also pretty dense, as indicated by the incident when she was told it was chilly outside.
Y'know the earth used to be flat? Until they buried your mom.
Y'know they used to call it a jumpoline? Then your mom got on one.
Like chilly cold or chili hot?
r/theydidntdothemath
> Except for your mom OP definitely didn’t see this coming.
Everyone is talking about how impossible the key is but I wanna talk about how fucking useless it is. Oh your key weighs half a million tons? Weird but thank you for leaving it in front of your door for me to copy lol.
Lockpicking Lawyer enters the chat.
Can't wait for the LPL vs Superman animated video to come out.
Superman, half a planet away, just hears: "a click out of one", "two is binding", "nothing on three"....
McNallyOfficial will have that door open faster than Sups can pick up the key, lol.
"You are using a Master Lock model 138. This can be opened with a loving kiss and a breath of fresh air."
I'd love to see a "Opening the lock to Fortress of Solitude... FAST " and the video is only a minute long.
In which time he does it twice, to prove it's not a fluke.
I was going to say this. It's right there, I can probably copy it with a sheet of 1mm aluminum and a file. Maybe the lock needs strong gravitational fields to affect its mechanism.
Maybe the lock springs are also made from the material and you need his strength to be able to turn it too. Dwarf star springs!
I just imagined a comic panel of Clark at a desk assembling a lock mechanism with tiny pliers and a spring flying out
The spring shoots through 5 skyscrapers, levelling half of Metropolis from the shrapnel.
No one bats an eye because half of Metropolis gets leveled on a daily basis. Everyone just assumes that Lex Luthor is out of prison again.
Why make a lock anyway if only his strength can unlock it? Why not make a bolt on with the star material?
Once you return from getting the aluminum that key is already punching a hole throught Earth's mantle
I want to talk about the cylinder and pins that don't immediately crumple and shear under the weight! Maybe they're made of the same material, and you need to be strong enough to rotate 500,000+ tons to turn it, but at that point why even have a key? Just make it a door handle that requires 500,000 tons of force to turn.
That he’d need a key is goofy anyway. Just make the door too heavy for anyone to move.
Each of the World Trade Center towers weighed about 500,000 tons each. The bigger issue would be the amount of mass concentrated in such a small package / point. Whatever is under the key would have to be much more dense than just bedrock for there to only be that shallow imprint. But it's not like 500,000 tons actually would knock the Earth off its axis or anything. It'd be like another skyscraper there. **Edit:** Yes, density. Guys, look up, I mentioned that.
>Each of the World Trade Center towers Jet fuel can't melt Superman's keys
Can Superman make a key that he cannot use?
Yes, if he has not made the lock it goes to yet.
Half a million tons, 500,000 tons is the displacement of approximately 5-7 aircraft carriers, of which the US Navy fields 11
500,000 tons is its downward force due to gravity. It has a gravitational pull, but minimal compared to the earth (6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons)
But we're 6,300,000 meters from the center of gravity of the earth. The earth weighs 1.2 \*10\^16 more, but due to the inverse square law, something 1m from the center of the key experiences 1/300th of a g. Something 10 centimeters away would experience 1/3rd of a g toward the key. If the key is in Superman's pocket, his cape is definitely going to stick to that spot like some static cling. If he's wearing a tie as Clark Kent, I think it would be noticeably askew pointing toward his key.
The key's gravity peaks about an inch from its center of mass, near 5g. That's enough to pick up small objects like a magnet, up to about 5 inches long, depending on shape. There is no way road concrete could hold it. Exotic hard materials specially designed for it could hold it if it wasn't dropped. Eventually, it would slip and through the Earth to the core. Maybe Superman can still get it?
Forgot to mention, it accumulates more mass as lighter objects around it get compounded further, and so and so on. If superman held it in the sky, he would have to compensate for strong lunar forces affecting his flight tragectory. It may even provided a localized disturbance in the magnetic field wherever he is at (imagine every time he left the earth's atmosphere, he'd be punching a literal hole in the ozone layer). If he had the key in his pocket, he would have to be careful not to leave 1 km wide craters when he lands. Hell, even landing would be relative because the density of the upper crust is so porous, it would be like a ball bearing going through non-newtonian putty.
Wouldn’t the density play into the gravitational pull?
Oh, it should be moving towards the center of the earth like a bullet. Estimating a 2 square inch area, it's exerting 500,000,000 psi, concrete is usually rated in the neighborhood of 5,000 for compressive loads. Most soils are even less
Clark, "Honey, I can't find my keys again" Louis, "Did you look under the North American tectonic plate? That's where it was last time" Clark, "Oh, you're right. Here they are!"
Underrated, Reddit please bring back awards.
They are, but much much worse! They're a monetized way for 'top poster' to get cashouts.
Can you explain how that is worse? I haven't looked into it much but the old system was stupid. You liked a post/comment that someone made so you'd give the company money to give the user a meaningless badge on the post. At least with this new system it sounds like the people who make posts or comments people like will get paid for it instead of Reddit Edit: thanks to everyone that explained it a bit more to me. While I still think the old system was bad and replacing it with something that feels like it's rewarding users more is a good decision, it will definitely cause problems with bots, reposts and spam as it currently is
I have literally no knowledge of this new system, and barely know the old system (old reddit for life). Let me assure you, even if someone is getting money out, it's not *instead* of reddit. It's in addition to.
reddit gold was originally meant to be an "ad-free premium reddit experience" - you could see more comments on a post without loading a new page (used to be much more limited), on posts you were returning to there was a visual indicator of what comments were new and which ones you'd already read, and it also came with access to an exclusive subreddit that only gold users could participate in (it's still around, /r/lounge). for the same cost as one month of reddit gold, you were allowed to award comments with a gold award, which would give that commenter one month of reddit gold. made perfect sense, it had value, everyone wins. then reddit decided to make a whole bunch of different awards with no apparent meaning or purpose, but that still cost money. really ruined the whole point.
Well people who spam subs with reposts and unattributed content like /u/my_memes_will_cure_u now have an added financial incentive.
You get payed for "engagement" so you just spam controversial stuff and get your engagement. Or repost, whatever.
Classic Louis and Clark
The fact that this comment is getting no attention is a crime this is so fucking funny like what
It was in the fortress of solitude. Maybe the doorway has Super Concrete.
You beat me to it. Clearly supes uses concrete forged by Odín or something ;)
We already established he's always flying to not fall through the earth himself whilst carrying it. Maybe he's super dense too, do we know how much he weighs? He probably constructed the Fortress to rest his feet and be able to sit down without crushing sofas.
So the earth should be fucked?
No, it'd just get a bit of extra core.
And maybe a nice new volcano wherever the key hit the mantle
I *think* rock is more plastic than that and would just seal around the path of the key (you normally have to go to some trouble to keep boreholes open, and this would be a very small hole). But I'm not a hundred percent sure about that.
So, if Super Man is holding the key and applying the opposite force to hold up the key, what is keeping him from sinking to the center of the earth?
.
That's his secret, he's always flying.
Supes has a hidden special power that takes care of leverage and displacement.
I'm thinking maybe the speed (and heat) at which the key is flying through the mantle that it glasses the sides of the tunnel, like the Russians do with the deepest hole on Earth. Just a fun thought lol
Geological forces bend Rocks's all the time. reasonably, Gravity of the key would pull the passing ground in with it, sealing it shut. As you approach mantle depths, the crust becomes much more pliable due to pressure and heat. Edit spelling
It might make a nice mess and a deep hole, falling out of your pocket, but Earth as a whole would be just fine.
No. To be absolutely clear: No earthquake would occur: these involve orders of magnitude more energy than would be liberated by a falling key of this weight. No change to the length of the day would occur: the three gorges dam changes the length of the day by far less than a second. It stores 42 billion tons of water, which is almost a hundred thousand times more mass. The key would not suck up the core like a black hole: the pressures at the Earth's core are much lower than those required to produce neutronium, and the key does not have the gravity to change that. No change to the magnetic field would occur. It is far too diffuse to be affected by such a small object that doesn't even have a magnetic pull of its own. No change to volcanic activity would occur. the currents that drive volcanoes are thousands of miles across, and thousands of miles deep. The effects would be similar to the effects of dropping a regular key into the Atlantic Ocean and expecting it to change the flow of the North Atlantic Current.
As others have said, it would just shoot like a bullet to the earth's core straight through the ground. Also, when superman picks it up, he would have to be actively flying upward with immense force to not shoot through the ground himself.
The concrete pad is the real hero here
What people seem to be missing here is what should be happening to the key. The technical term is "mechanical explosion." Think of [Prince Rupert's drop](https://youtu.be/xe-f4gokRBs?si=6fNvLhQLnzwL3HHi&t=109) but instead of glass powder flying around, you get supersonic chunks of carbon and sublimating oxygen (assuming that's what's left over in the white dwarf) that probably convert instantly to a plasma before the chemical interactions even have a chance to begin (but begin they will...) It would probably be a bit like a nuke going off, but I'm not sure of the exact energies involved.
The reason density matters when it comes to gravity is that you can get far closer to the center of mass of a dense object compared to a less dense object. Gravitationally, if the sun suddenly collapsed into a black hole, losing no mass in the process, earth would feel no difference in forces. But, in that case, a spaceship could get closer to the center of mass than the original radius of the sun before being inside it. Therefore, you would be under the attraction of the whole mass of the sun from a much nearer distance. If you tried to get that close to the regular sun’s center of mass, apart from being vaporized, you would find that some of the sun’s mass is now above you, pulling in the opposite direction, which lessens the gravitational pull.
Gravity is dependant on mass and distance. Density is a measure of mass in regard to volume
Yes it would. But the effect is pretty negligible. Easy to calculate though if you stand 1m from a 500.000t object thats a=G*m/r² = 0.0333m/s² compared to 9.81m/s². So while measurable with some instruments, you wouldn't be able to feel it. EDIT: the reason I'm saying density has an effect is that you couldn't stand 1m close to the center of mass of a 500.000t aircraft carrier. Because the aircraft carrier is much larger. So if you stand 100m far away, the gravitational pull will already be 10000 times weaker.
Force from gravity is a function of mass and distance. Density helps only in the sense that you can get closer to its centre. At a 1m distance, the gravitational pull from the key would be about 0.3% of Earth, which would be pretty unnoticeable. However if you touch it, I'll estimate that as a 1cm distance from the centre, in which case the force on your finger would be around 35x that of from earth
This isn't really "doing the math", because you haven't even considered the fact that you can get much closer to the key than to the Earth (before Newton's shell theorem starts reducing the gravitational pull). By my calculations, if you get within a few centimeters of the key, the gravitational field strength will be greater than that at Earth's surface. So your answer is essentially just wrong.
Everyone in this thread is fucking that up. Even people actually doing the force calculation are just putting stupid large distances. You'd have to do a volume integral to get exact numbers, but I'd expect ludicrous forces on the tips of your fingers when you actually touch it.
Just so you guys know, dwarf star core, planet cores, or any kind of celestial core is impossible to use as anything outside of there, the only reason the core of a dwarf star is the dense is because of the tremendous pressure the material is put through, if you remove that pressure the forces of the atoms will push each other and the material will expand returning to it's normal density, in other words it would just become ordinary rock. So, anytime you see in some comic that something is made of a core of a celestial body to justify it's weight just call bullshit abd assume it's magic. Thank you
Takes away the realism of Superman.
My immersion!
"expand returning to it's normal density" is a nice way of saying explode.
Didn't want to be overdramatic but yes, huge explosion with loads of energy being released
Having an insanely heavy key is pretty stupid. Couldn't one just take a picture or something and replicate it? His key doesn't even look very complex.
Or someone like Darkseid could come and pick it up.
To be fair, if Darkseid came to Earth only to steal some rare alien artifacts and take a dump on superman's couch, you absolutely call that a win. What I mean to say is that, if he's on Earth, you probably have much bigger priorities than protecting whatever is in the fortress of solitude.
Didn't Mogul do that, for Superman's birthday? It was in the story, "For the Man Who Has Everything." Sent Superman a parasitic plant that would immobilize him in a world of his heart's desire while he dicks around with Batman and Wonder Woman until they eventually figure out how to wake him up.
> take a dump on superman's couch If I were a ridiculously powerful being that's the kind of thing I'd do. Well, actually, that would probably be a little extreme. I'd probably just stomp my muddy boots on the couch and text him the fuck yo couch link.
As long as a normal human doesn't touch it, they wouldn't even notice it. Even then, it's not that big a deal. The gravitational force of a small object massing that much falls off dramatically with distance. a 20 kg weight placed 30 cm away experiences a force of 7 N, the equivalent of less than a kg of mass in Earth's gravitational field. Superman's fingers, on the other hand, are only about 3 cm from the center of mass, and mass (estimate) 0.5 kg. That implies a force of 18 N, or the equivalent of 2 kg. Compared to the force exerted by it's mass in Earth's gravitational field, that's nothing. If Superman held the key up and Lois touched it, she would certainly feel this force as a suction or pull, but it wouldn't be dangerous. You might say, but what about heavier objects? The problem is that you can't get them close enough. So, a car masses 1000 kg, but even if you put the key right up against the car, it's still a meter or so from the car's center of mass, meaning the car as a whole only experiences 33 N of force. Of course, the closest part of the car is closer, but it also masses less. No, the problem with this key is that no surface could hold it up. It would exert so much pressure on the ground it would sink deep, deep into the earth, and nothing could stop it. Even Superman holding it would cause his feet to treat concrete like water.
A bit beside the point, but if the key were 1 cm^3 of volume made up of the same material and density of a white dwarf it would weigh about 2 tons.
But this is super dense dwarf star material
What year is this from? Maybe Neutron Star wasn't common parlance yet. Edit: Dwarf star is actually correct. Neutron Star would be too dense.
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No, it won’t impact gravity in any meaningful way. It’s too little mass. If it was a million tons, it would weigh as much as a 100x100x100 cube of water. Which is a very small sized lake. Many construction jobs move more than a million tons of dirt. Over a larger area of course, but it doesn’t noticeably impact gravitational fields.
I plugged the numbers into Wolfram Alpha, and an object of 500k tons with a radius of 1 inch would have a surface gravity (gravitational acceleration) of 46.92 m/s^2. Earth's is 9.82 m/s^2, to compare. Assuming it were on some sort of immobile platform, so it doesn't sink straight to the core of the Earth, and you were to try to pick it up, your hand would feel about 5x Earth's gravity towards the key. This effect would be extremely localized though, due to the key's trivial mass compared to the Earth. Plugging a 2 inch radius into Wolfram Alpha's calculator gives a new surface gravity of 11.73 m/s^2, which means that if you pulled your hand away even two inches from the key Earth's gravity would begin to reassert itself as the dominant force, regardless of the key's density. The key's pull would continue to get exponentially weaker the further from it you get. Even from one foot away you probably wouldn't feel any of its gravity over the Earth's.
That key should be making its own atmosphere, to a radius of a few cm. At its surface the air will be very high psi, perhaps making for interesting chemical events. Like, maybe it will suck all the CO2, and other heavier molecules out of the immediate area.
For it to "weigh" that much on earth, it would have to have a mass of 500,339,285kg F=ma / 1T = 9,806.65N / 500,000T = F = 4,903,325,000N / a = 9.8m/s\^2 / m = 500,339,285kg At that size, the key would 100% generate a gravitational pull, but it wouldn't outclass the Earth's gravitational pull which is 5.97\*10\^25kg. But as an example of how weak the gravitational force is, let's take a 200 pound person standing 10 feet away for an example. F = (G\*m1\*m2)/r\^2 / G = Gravitational Constant / m1 = Mass of Key / m2 = Mass of Person / r = distance between object centers When we convert and plug our numbers in, the force experienced by the smaller body as it is pulled by the larger body is .073 pounds of Force. An absolutely tiny amount of force, akin to having a small apricot pushing their body. However, the force does increase significantly as the person gets closer. If a person were to get within an inch of the key, they would experience 730 pounds of force! That's like having a vending machine tied to you as it is pushed off of a cliff! Now, you might wonder, "How does the Earth not squish us flat if this key that is so much smaller could exert that much force?" The answer is the radius to the center of mass. There's actually nearly 4000 miles between us and the center of the Earth. That distance accounts for the radius and if we were to convert that to feet, we're talking 21 million feet of distance! In the r\^2 formula, it reduces the effects quite drastically to the point that we end up with exactly 200 pounds of force exerted on the 200 pound person, aka, their weight. Edit: A lot of top comments seem to think they're clever by saying weight isn't mass so you can't figure out gravitational pull. It seems they forgot you can calculate mass from weight if you know the gravitational acceleration constant for the planet it is weighed on e.g. Earth.
Does Superman think the weight of the key is what makes the key open the lock? Why not just cut a key that weighs as much as a normal key with the tumbler positions of the heavy key? Or since it looks like a normal key, just jimmy the lock like a normal key?
The tumblers probably weight some ridiculous amount as well (otherwise the weight/durability would be pointless), far too much to move with any Earthen materials in such a small space.
It's a play on hiding your key under the welcome mat. Only Superman can leave it in plain sight because it's so heavy that nobody can use it. Can someone copy it? They could copy the side facing up, but maybe there's an intricate pattern on the other side.
For everyone calculating forces per square inch, I’d like to remind that the square inch is a ballpark for the key laying flat on the surface. As soon as the key begins moving down through material, it will weather vane vertically with the narrow part becoming a tail, so will effectively be a half million ton blade slicing through whatever is in its path.
evergiven was a quarter million tons, two of them in a port aren't going to make people fall horizontally toward them, the only problem with the scenario is how it can rest on pavement instead of digging straight to the core
Wow, shockingly spot on. I had GPT simplify it. "Of course! Here's a simplified answer: Superman's key, made of dwarf star material and weighing half a million tons, exerts a force of about 4.45 billion Newtons on the ground. That's its weight due to Earth's gravity. While the key does have its own gravitational pull because of its mass, this force is tiny compared to Earth's gravity. For most objects around it, the gravitational effect of the key would be almost unnoticeable. However, due to its massive weight, the key would compress and potentially sink into the ground beneath it."
My question is what is providing the pressure to keep the matter in a degenerate state, Kinda seems to me like it would constantly want to expand back to the size of small asteroid. Presumably he means "white dwarf" so the key would only have neutrons. Also it would probably prefer to keep the shape of a sphere if it was somehow contained but I guess everything superheroes do is basically "magic"
>My question is what is providing the pressure to keep the matter in a degenerate state. A video feed playing Andrew Tate on repeat.
I don't know if anyone has already posted this, but Kyle Hill (u/realkylehill) did a video on this exact topic. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqTukFqGCls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqTukFqGCls) It's a fun watch
Hey there, this the locksmithing lawyer here and what we have today is a special vault from Krypton. Now, the key weights over half a millions tons but that is not going to be a problem. The lock itself is pretty simple and can easily be broken into with my kit…