Superhuman Strength With Normal Weight.... Plausible or Pure Fantasy?

[Spacescifi]

 

Seen in scifi and superhero films many times, here we can discuss it's plausibility or lack thereof.

I dunno how close or far I am to correct on this subject, but I do think it to be related to the limitations of rocketry.

1. Want more thrust? Burn more fuel per second (convert more food into energy). 

2. Not sure if there is any correlation to burning fuel at hotter temperatures to use it longer as it relates to strength (unless you're trading strength for endurance). Yet perhaps there is! If a scifi humanoid's body could run hotter before overheating maybe they could do superhuman feats without gorging massive amounts of food. Although their clothing may catch fire though... so there is that downside. And they will likely be glowing too, long before they actually start vaping away to cool down. Which would do little good. They would be better off taking a swim to cool off.

 

3. Higher Gravity World: This has been used in scifi before, notably the Orville, yet it has diminishing returns the longer a person stays away from the high g homeworld.

 

Conclusion: Discuss. But what I really want to know is, how can a humanoid of normal weight be much stronger (superhuman) than a normal human? Since muscle has weight to it, so the common and easiest way would be for the superhuman to be much more heavy than your average human, which would kind of negate much of his strength anyway unless his homeworld was like 7g or something.

Discuss.

Edited October 24, 2019 by Spacescifi

[StrandedonEarth]

We are much stronger than we realize. The human body generally limits output to what the components can withstand. In extreme situations (the classic mother lifting a car off her child) the body can perform incredible feats of strength, but there is usually a price to pay in terms of injury. 
So to get superhuman strength, the tendons and ligaments need to be stronger, along with the attachments to the bones

[Spacescifi]

7 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

We are much stronger than we realize. The human body generally limits output to what the components can withstand. In extreme situations (the classic mother lifting a car off her child) the body can perform incredible feats of strength, but there is usually a price to pay in terms of injury. 
So to get superhuman strength, the tendons and ligaments need to be stronger, along with the attachments to the bones

 

I see, but there must be a price to be paid I imagine.

If nothing else, much longer pregnancies due to having children who are superhumanly strong with super strong tendons and ligaments.

The only thing that would make it worth it is a fast regeneration rate, as anytime humans pull superhuman strength stunts they come off injured.

To not come off injured would require superhuman healing.

Perhaps they sleep longer too?

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

More efforts to conceive.

 

[Spacescifi]

24 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

  Reveal hidden contents

More efforts to conceive.

 

 

 Well... that would be preferable to extra months of pregnancy at least!

 

Not related, but I read somewhere that anytime the body does something faster than the usual it heats up. Which makes sense, after all we heat up when we run and thus sweat.

 

So the catch? Anytime you see characters in movies who regenerate wounds in seconds should be sweating beads of sweat. They should be soaked like you dumped a bucket on them.

Same goes for superhuman feats, only more so. In addition the body would want extra oxygen for these superhuman feats, likely more than our atmosphere provides naturally.

I do not favor changing the atmosphere as that causes more problems than it solves.

I am not opposed to providing an auxiallary pair of organs though that stored high concentrations of oxygen that could be used when super strength/healing was required. Perhaps a pair of skin wings like elephant ears, not to fly but merely a place the body stores excess oxygen for superhuman strength. When the excess oxygen ran out they would need to ressuply it again or go without the superpower fir a while.

Perhaps they have foods with liquid oxygen in it and they can eat thay stuff?

 

EDIT: Cannot drink liquid oxygen... it freezes organic tissue.

I guess the only way to make it work would be to dip the wings in natural liquid oxygen sources (dangerouns alien flora with copious amounts of liquid oxygen?).

Dip them at the ends and the rest of the,wing can still move and swing about as needed.

Once oxygen is depleted, the  wing ends would thaw out again.

Edited October 24, 2019 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

All known lifeforms, including the human, use ATP as a recyclable ISRU-made fuel.
According to ru&en wiki, a human body produces ~40..75 kg of fuel per day, but its fuel tank is tiny, just 0.1.. 0.25 kg in total.

So, unless a superhuman has absolutely another biochemistry, its batteries would discharge in seconds.

[Spacescifi]

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

All known lifeforms, including the human, use ATP as a recyclable ISRU-made fuel.
According to ru&en wiki, a human body produces ~40..75 kg of fuel per day, but its fuel tank is tiny, just 0.1.. 0.25 kg in total.

So, unless a superhuman has absolutely another biochemistry, its batteries would discharge in seconds.

 

So a different biochemistry then... what that is I have no clue, but for what it's worth, they are humanoid and as written... differently colored, as blood is purple among other things. Guess that would explain it.

[KSK]

Short answer - yes, it is entirely possible for a humanoid to be substantially stronger than a normal human. I would say that the great apes count as humanoid and they're (on average) much stronger than humans. Animals - including humans - with defective myostatin expression have increased muscle mass and are consequentially stronger.

I fail to see the connection between strength and gestation time - gorillas, for example, have a gestation period of about 8.5 months. 

In general, to use your rocket analogy, muscle output is limited by propellant flow rate and ISP rather than combustion temperature. Muscles have a limited amount of stored fuel in the form of glycogen. Once that's used up, they're dependent on glucose transported by the blood.

Different muscle fibres are also set up to metabolise their 'fuel' in different ways. Broadly speaking, fast twitch (high output, short duration of output) fibres rely more on anaerobic (without oxygen) respiration for their energy which is quick but inefficient. It results in lactic acid buildup in the muscles which (if I remember rightly) is what is happening when you get a stitch. Slow twitch fibres (lower output but much longer duration of output) rely more on aerobic (oxygen using) respiration, which is way more efficient but also slower.

Oxygen supply can be improved by improving oxygen transport. This is why athletes will take EPO (erythropoietin) - it stimulates red blood cell production. More red blood cells, more haemoglobin in the blood, better oxygen transport. It's also why certain athletes will train at altitude - their bodies respond to the lack of external oxygen by producing more EPO naturally, in order to increase oxygen transport through the blood.

TL:DR.  Strength is a function of muscle mass. Muscle mass can be increased through training or by pharmaceutical intervention (anabolic steroids, myostatin blockers) and, with proper training, the human body can make proper use of that increased muscle mass. The great apes demonstrate that 'superhuman' (if 5-6 times stronger counts as superhuman) strength is possible within normal metabolic and physiological parameters. Beyond that, we're moving into sci-fi territory - more on that later.

 

[Streetwind]

If we're talking about actual "superhuman" strength - that is, a level of muscle power that's definitely well above what the human body should physically be capable of - then your body mass limits you in various ways. Having more weight is actually an advantage, and often required to make super strength work at all.

• Throwing punches and kicks has less to do with strength and more to do with body mass than you think. True, you can just accelerate your fist to ever higher speeds... but there's a limit to that, based on how quickly your muscles can contract and extend. You have super strength, after all, not super speed! Though those two would not be entirely unrelated... Anyway. The reason we have weight classes in boxing and similar sports is because the physical mass of the arm or leg you throw at your opponent makes such a huge difference in the impact energy that it becomes completely unfair to let a lighter opponent fight against a heavier one. Actual strength is a secondary consideration. So if you had super strength but normal weight, your ability to make use of that strength in unarmed combat would be severely diminished. In fact, you'd probably want to skip punching and kicking styles entirely in favor of wrestling styles, where you go in and grapple/pin your opponent, or perhaps throw them. That would let you make use of more strength, in ways that are harder to counter.
• Using melee weapons also lets you use your full strength, since you can just pick up a really heavy one! ...Or can you? Hmmm. What happens if you pick up something really heavy and hold it away from your body? Your center of mass shifts forward. If the object is heavy enough, or held far enough away from you, then it doesn't matter if you can effortlessly lift it... you will simply tilt and fall over! The heavier your weapon gets, the closer you must hold it to your body in order to stay on your feet, which becomes an issue when you realize that you actually want to guard against your opponent's attacks, or swing in their direction. Now, if you were really heavy, then you would not have that problem... but the question was super strength at normal weight. And that definitely has this problem.
• It doesn't stop here, either. Because when you do swing such a weapon, you get into another physics concept that super strength cannot counter without having matching body mass: inertia. Swing your giant buster sword like Cloud from Final Fantasy 7? You have strength enough, but the sheer inertia of the swing will yank you clean off your feet. Your own body has too little inertia of its own, and your soles do not have the grip on the ground they would need to counter that force. Grip is another thing that increases with body mass. If you continue upsizing your strength and weapon without upsizing your weight, you will eventually encounter a point where trying to swing your weapon will leave the weapon stationary while your body swings in the opposite direction instead.

There's an interesting trick you can pull off with super strength, though. And that is making yourself heavier by carrying more stuff. Try a super-heavy suit of armor that weighs several times as much as you do. No normal person could wear this, but you can. And suddenly, your weight multiplies. Your heavily armored limbs have a huge mass, and you can throw devastating punches and kicks. Your center of mass is harder to shift away from you, so you can hold heavy weapons comfortably. You have significant inertia and downforce, so you can swing heavy weapons without worrying about becoming unbalanced. All while also enjoying the protection that super-heavy armor would give you.

As for energy output and heat: yes, that would also be an issue. It is in fact an issue in nature all around us, one that life has had to tackle wherever it exists. Any given creature has a given number of cells, each giving off a certain amount of heat. The creature also has a surface area, which rejects heat. As the creature gets larger, the amount of cells (and thus heat produces) scales up far more quickly than the surface area, resulting in ever-increasing difficulty to stop overheating. To combat this, the metabolism of a creature runs more slowly the larger it grows, in order to produce less heat per cell. There can also be additional tricks employed to reject more heat, such as panting, sweating, or specializing for cold environments, but the rule of the thumb is that your own cell's heat output is tuned for your body size.

Ergo, your human body has a metabolism rate that is tuned for your human body size and mass. If you wanted to put out a lot more energy than a typical human though, in order to have super strength, then you would not be able to reject that waste heat. The more strength you have, the quicker you'll overheat. If you had more body mass, this would help keep you in the fight longer, because your surface area increases slightly, and your temperature increases more slowly due to simply having more raw matter to heat up.

 

Edited October 24, 2019 by Streetwind

[KSK]

Muscle structure. 

Muscle cells have a highly organised system of parallel protein fibres. There are two kinds, actin and myosin and they’re interleaved.

Actin is essentially a straight fibre, myosin is studded with protrusions. Think of three golf clubs in a bundle, shafts aligned, heads pointing outwards, 120 degrees apart. Now take a whole lot of bundles and arrange them end to end. That’s a (very) rough picture of a myosin fibre.

When a muscle cell contracts, the actin and myosin filaments slide together, thus shortening and thickening the cell. Each myosin head grabs onto the nearest actin filament, moves it a short distance, and let’s go. The cooperative effect of many many myosin heads working together, many times a second, causes that sliding movement mentioned above.

Crucially, that sliding movement is one way only - the actin/myosin system works like a molecular ratchet. Put another way, a muscle cell can contract but cannot relax unaided. So muscles need to work in pairs.

That’s the science part but knowing how muscle works, we can speculate on ways that it could be made to work better, thus leading to stronger muscle fibres that can generate more force per unit cross sectional area.

Perhaps engineering the myosin filaments to have a greater number of heads per unit length would be a way. Maybe the shape of those heads could be changed to give them more of a lever effect, thereby producing more muscle contraction per cycle. Maybe we could have a completely different system for generating movement. Think of a rubber band for example - the more you twist it, the shorter it gets. You could imagine a muscle cell based on twisting fibres rather than sliding fibres.

That’s the fiction part but I think it’s at least fiction with plausible sounding technobabble.

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Using melee weapons also lets you use your full strength, since you can just pick up a really heavy one!

Spoiler

 

 

[Spacescifi]

7 hours ago, Streetwind said:

If we're talking about actual "superhuman" strength - that is, a level of muscle power that's definitely well above what the human body should physically be capable of - then your body mass limits you in various ways. Having more weight is actually an advantage, and often required to make super strength work at all.

• Throwing punches and kicks has less to do with strength and more to do with body mass than you think. True, you can just accelerate your fist to ever higher speeds... but there's a limit to that, based on how quickly your muscles can contract and extend. You have super strength, after all, not super speed! Though those two would not be entirely unrelated... Anyway. The reason we have weight classes in boxing and similar sports is because the physical mass of the arm or leg you throw at your opponent makes such a huge difference in the impact energy that it becomes completely unfair to let a lighter opponent fight against a heavier one. Actual strength is a secondary consideration. So if you had super strength but normal weight, your ability to make use of that strength in unarmed combat would be severely diminished. In fact, you'd probably want to skip punching and kicking styles entirely in favor of wrestling styles, where you go in and grapple/pin your opponent, or perhaps throw them. That would let you make use of more strength, in ways that are harder to counter.
• Using melee weapons also lets you use your full strength, since you can just pick up a really heavy one! ...Or can you? Hmmm. What happens if you pick up something really heavy and hold it away from your body? Your center of mass shifts forward. If the object is heavy enough, or held far enough away from you, then it doesn't matter if you can effortlessly lift it... you will simply tilt and fall over! The heavier your weapon gets, the closer you must hold it to your body in order to stay on your feet, which becomes an issue when you realize that you actually want to guard against your opponent's attacks, or swing in their direction. Now, if you were really heavy, then you would not have that problem... but the question was super strength at normal weight. And that definitely has this problem.
• It doesn't stop here, either. Because when you do swing such a weapon, you get into another physics concept that super strength cannot counter without having matching body mass: inertia. Swing your giant buster sword like Cloud from Final Fantasy 7? You have strength enough, but the sheer inertia of the swing will yank you clean off your feet. Your own body has too little inertia of its own, and your soles do not have the grip on the ground they would need to counter that force. Grip is another thing that increases with body mass. If you continue upsizing your strength and weapon without upsizing your weight, you will eventually encounter a point where trying to swing your weapon will leave the weapon stationary while your body swings in the opposite direction instead.

There's an interesting trick you can pull off with super strength, though. And that is making yourself heavier by carrying more stuff. Try a super-heavy suit of armor that weighs several times as much as you do. No normal person could wear this, but you can. And suddenly, your weight multiplies. Your heavily armored limbs have a huge mass, and you can throw devastating punches and kicks. Your center of mass is harder to shift away from you, so you can hold heavy weapons comfortably. You have significant inertia and downforce, so you can swing heavy weapons without worrying about becoming unbalanced. All while also enjoying the protection that super-heavy armor would give you.

As for energy output and heat: yes, that would also be an issue. It is in fact an issue in nature all around us, one that life has had to tackle wherever it exists. Any given creature has a given number of cells, each giving off a certain amount of heat. The creature also has a surface area, which rejects heat. As the creature gets larger, the amount of cells (and thus heat produces) scales up far more quickly than the surface area, resulting in ever-increasing difficulty to stop overheating. To combat this, the metabolism of a creature runs more slowly the larger it grows, in order to produce less heat per cell. There can also be additional tricks employed to reject more heat, such as panting, sweating, or specializing for cold environments, but the rule of the thumb is that your own cell's heat output is tuned for your body size.

Ergo, your human body has a metabolism rate that is tuned for your human body size and mass. If you wanted to put out a lot more energy than a typical human though, in order to have super strength, then you would not be able to reject that waste heat. The more strength you have, the quicker you'll overheat. If you had more body mass, this would help keep you in the fight longer, because your surface area increases slightly, and your temperature increases more slowly due to simply having more raw matter to heat up.

 

 

Wow. So super strength without the extra weight to support it is illlogical. Not plausible.

It's like putting a a tiny missile up in orbit with a closed cycle NTR engine minus the radiators. Then running it to the max. It will go,  but not for long before the core melts and you have a glowing orbital satellite.

Thanks for killing the fantasies of superheroes and superhuman humanoids.... using science.

 

 

 

[Terwin]

You could also change the materials involved.

Calcium is hardly the strongest material bones could be made of, just one that is bio-available.

Titanium could be both stronger and lighter for example.

Human structure is also far from optimal depending on your purposes.

I have a scissor-jack in my car that is smaller than my arm but can easily lift my car.

 

An average dirt-bike(off-road motorcycle) weighs 215 lbs(98 kilos) and can go ~100mph(160kph), which is far faster than any human on foot(as far as I am aware).

 

You could also go with light-weight electric motors with high torque.

 

If you are willing to let go of 'looks like a human' you can have a great deal of capability concentrated in a similar size/mass factor just using things available today.

[Spacescifi]

32 minutes ago, Terwin said:

You could also change the materials involved.

Calcium is hardly the strongest material bones could be made of, just one that is bio-available.

Titanium could be both stronger and lighter for example.

Human structure is also far from optimal depending on your purposes.

I have a scissor-jack in my car that is smaller than my arm but can easily lift my car.

 

An average dirt-bike(off-road motorcycle) weighs 215 lbs(98 kilos) and can go ~100mph(160kph), which is far faster than any human on foot(as far as I am aware).

 

You could also go with light-weight electric motors with high torque.

 

If you are willing to let go of 'looks like a human' you can have a great deal of capability concentrated in a similar size/mass factor just using things available today.

 

For every pro there is con though.

Titanium may be strong, but I am not sure it can bend as well as bone can (bending rather than breaking is really important).

The scissor jack is heavier than your arm and relies on hydralics rather than muscle.

Indeed, there are plenty of ways to get extra strength without muscle, but that in nature is found in exoskeketal gears that planthoppers discard after wearing them out, growing new ones to use fore more hopping.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/relay.nationalgeographic.com/proxy/distribution/public/amp/news/2013/9/130912-planthopper-gear-wheel-insect-legs-science

[KSK]

46 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Wow. So super strength without the extra weight to support it is illlogical. Not plausible.

It's like putting a a tiny missile up in orbit with a closed cycle NTR engine minus the radiators. Then running it to the max. It will go,  but not for long before the core melts and you have a glowing orbital satellite.

Thanks for killing the fantasies of superheroes and superhuman humanoids.... using science.

No - you 'just' need more efficient muscles that generate more useful work from the same amount of energy used or to find some other way of dissipating waste heat other than by having a bigger heat sink (more body mass) Or accept the fact that you can have super-strength but only in short bursts before you overheat. 

Some real-world figures pulled from Wikipedia (feel free to provide counterexamples - this is a debate after all).

Chimpanzee. Adult males weigh between 40-60kg. Stated to be around 50% stronger than humans due to different muscle composition.
Humans. Average weight for a 20 year old US male is about 89kg.
Gorilla. Adult males weigh around 136-195 kg presumably depending on species. It seems that gorillas are between 4 and 9 times as strong as humans.

So chimps manage to be both significantly lighter (60%) and significantly stronger (50%) than humans. Male gorillas can be over double the weight of a human male but can also be at least 4 and up to 9 times stronger. 

Assuming that those figures are even somewhat reliable, extra strength without extra weight is more than plausible - it's demonstrated. Also strength doesn't seem to scale linearly with body mass. I don't know what you had in mind by 'super strength' but (assuming it works like this), I would definitely settle for 'gorilla strength' i.e. quadrupling my body strength with the same body mass!

TL: DR. Strength is complicated, it's affected by many factors, and conclusions drawn from an analysis that's heavily based on only one of those factors might not be reliable.

With all that said, if you're looking for 'leaps tall buildings in a single bound' super strength then yeah, I'd say you're out of luck. Biology is amazing but it can only do so much.

 

[Spacescifi]

23 minutes ago, KSK said:

No - you 'just' need more efficient muscles that generate more useful work from the same amount of energy used or to find some other way of dissipating waste heat other than by having a bigger heat sink (more body mass) Or accept the fact that you can have super-strength but only in short bursts before you overheat. 

Some real-world figures pulled from Wikipedia (feel free to provide counterexamples - this is a debate after all).

Chimpanzee. Adult males weigh between 40-60kg. Stated to be around 50% stronger than humans due to different muscle composition.
Humans. Average weight for a 20 year old US male is about 89kg.
Gorilla. Adult males weigh around 136-195 kg presumably depending on species. It seems that gorillas are between 4 and 9 times as strong as humans.

So chimps manage to be both significantly lighter (60%) and significantly stronger (50%) than humans. Male gorillas can be over double the weight of a human male but can also be at least 4 and up to 9 times stronger. 

Assuming that those figures are even somewhat reliable, extra strength without extra weight is more than plausible - it's demonstrated. Also strength doesn't seem to scale linearly with body mass. I don't know what you had in mind by 'super strength' but (assuming it works like this), I would definitely settle for 'gorilla strength' i.e. quadrupling my body strength with the same body mass!

TL: DR. Strength is complicated, it's affected by many factors, and conclusions drawn from an analysis that's heavily based on only one of those factors might not be reliable.

With all that said, if you're looking for 'leaps tall buildings in a single bound' super strength then yeah, I'd say you're out of luck. Biology is amazing but it can only do so much.

 

 

Haha thanks! Really I was just trying hard to give my scifi humanoids some physical upgrade to make them different that was actually useful. As they are now they have colors that are different, but that is all. I thought about octopus hand sucker plates for better grip and the ability to taste via touch via the suckers, but that is not as much as an advantage as one may think and in some cases would be bad (bathroom time would be bad). Unless they can toggle the taste ability off and on.

My humanoids do not look exactly like this, but you get the picture, virtually human in all but name only:

 

As for chimps, being I read somewhere that they may be stronger but lack endurance. Indeed, humans beat most creatures on the planet when it comes to work endurance. Even if we can't lift much, we work in teams and work far longer.

 

 

Edited October 24, 2019 by Spacescifi

[Terwin]

16 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

 

For every pro there is con though.

Titanium may be strong, but I am not sure it can bend as well as bone can (bending rather than breaking is really important).

Depends on the alloy generally

16 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

The scissor jack is heavier than your arm and relies on hydralics rather than muscle.

Actually, it just has a single long screw that is rotated by the lever.  Similar to this one.

The one in the link is 6 lbs and can lift a ton for all of $15.  It only weighs 6 lbs because it is extra rugged, so you could probably get by with less.

 

I was just trying to point out that the form-factor is a primary limiting characteristic in this scenario.

Also, don't some spiders use hydraulics to move?  No reason your super-person could not do the same...

21 minutes ago, KSK said:

With all that said, if you're looking for 'leaps tall buildings in a single bound' super strength then yeah, I'd say you're out of luck. Biology is amazing but it can only do so much.

Birds do it all the time, bats too.  I suspect many types of insect probably could, but I doubt they do so with any frequency(too many birds and bats up there)

[PositronLance001]

If you're willing to give up biology, you could use compressed air for pistons

! 

[Codraroll]

Actually using superhuman strength with a human body has its limitations too. As @Streetwind said, lifting heavy things becomes complicated, because your puny body can only span a rather limited area of ground. If your center of mass moves outside the area spanned by your feet, you will fall over regardless of strength, unless your foot is somehow gripping the ground. And since you only have two feet, that area would always be long and narrow. No good if you're trying to lift, say, a concert piano without crawling underneath it first. To lift something big, you'd have to find its center of mass, get a handhold right underneath it, and lift straight up. Otherwise, you'd be throwing yourself off balance and falling over.

But your grip on the object in question is a difficult matter too. Not all materials are rigid enough that they are practical to lift as they scale up. Imagine trying to lift a beached whale, for instance: You can lift up a small corner of blubber if you find a good handhold, but the rest of the whale would still sag and rest firmly on the ground. And if you tried to drag the poor whale by gripping its tail fin and pulling with your super strength, you'd be more likely to tear off a hand-sized chunk of the fin than to move the whale anywhere. Actually, due to the grip issue not even that would happen - you'd simply pull yourself towards the whale instead, as it is a lot more firmly anchored to the ground than you are. Now, not all heavy objects are whales, but even seemingly rigid objects behave somewhat like them on a larger scale. Try lifting a car by its side mirror, for instance, you'd just tear it off. Try pulling a Superman and lifting a plane with your bare hands - the plane's hull would just buckle around them. And lifting a building would be completely out of the question. Your average flimsy LEGO building is much, much more rigid relative to its size than a real-life building is. No matter how you gripped it, without carefully placed supporting structures you'd just tear off a chunk. If you try to lift very heavy things, you have to ensure that the piece you're gripping is solid enough to carry the entire weight of the object.

A secondary ability that would be required for practical super strength is also super durability. For instance, say that you try to lift one of those cartoon weights of one ton lying on the floor in front of you. You'd probably tear your arms off before you got the weight off the ground. Pulling a tree out of the ground? Same story. That tree is a lot more firmly anchored to the ground than your arm is to your shoulder. You can't win that tug-of-war by strength alone. Of course, this assumes you manage to brace against something, otherwise you'd just pull yourself towards the object instead.

Then for really heavy objects, you'd run into problems with the ground itself. If you somehow were to find the center of mass of an airliner, had a convenient and sturdy handhold to grip, and you were solid enough to handle the load, you still wouldn't be able to lift it over your head and walk down the road with it. Then the entire mass of that airliner would rest on your foot, which would be similar to balancing your entire weight on the point of a knife. You'd step right through the pavement and sink into the ground until the airliner came to rest on the surface.

 

So yeah, with super strength you could probably be better at throwing things (although the recoil would knock you off your feet) and doing slightly more heavy taks than a regular human, but physics would limit how much your ability would scale up. Don't expect anybody to be able to hold back a jumbojet from taking off or lifting trucks over their head with one hand or anything like that.

[wumpus]

4 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

As for chimps, being I read somewhere that they may be stronger but lack endurance. Indeed, humans beat most creatures on the planet when it comes to work endurance. Even if we can't lift much, we work in teams and work far longer.

Humans (and wolves) favor persistence hunting (simply running the prey to exhaustion, and then easily taking it down).  I'm not sure what the wolves use, but humans have great endurance thanks to sweat glands.  I suspect that slow-twitch muscle fiber also plays a role (and is far less present in gorillas and similar).

It is unclear how this could evolve on its own (especially since it appears likely that the reverse happened, we used to be much more similar to chimpanzees and presumably had similar strength).  "Super strength" isn't what pushed humans to the top of the food chain, and I'd be surprised if neanderthals weren't considerably stronger than us.  Perhaps some sexual selection system where jocks would have much greater reproductive success than anybody else (presumably great hunters always had such advantages, but shear strength was never the main key).

A quick look at the results of a powerlifting championship (or perhaps watching some  [American] football) would show that there are those with "superstrength" (or multiple times normal human strength) walking among us.  It doesn't seem to have dramatic life changes outside of athletic competition.

[Guest]

Do note that "super strength" in those cases comes with greatly increased muscle mass. If you can pull an 18-wheeler, you're probably built like one yourself.  For better strength to weight ratio, more efficient muscles are an option, but this won't take you much further than having a really mean punch (and without weight to put behind it, even that will be a modest effect).

[wumpus]

53 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Do note that "super strength" in those cases comes with greatly increased muscle mass. If you can pull an 18-wheeler, you're probably built like one yourself.  For better strength to weight ratio, more efficient muscles are an option, but this won't take you much further than having a really mean punch (and without weight to put behind it, even that will be a modest effect).

True, but I had to ask myself "how would your life change with super strength?".  And the answer would be "as much as it would had I been a competitive weight lifter or similar".

One exception might be those who live on a low-gravity (or possibly with a very dense atmosphere) planet and flying (via some sort of wings attached to your arms) was a common means of travel.  Even then, it seems like something that would just add color to your sci-fi (think RAH's "The Menace from Earth").

[Guest]

True, but without all the effort required to build and maintain such musculature.  So I'd say, your life would change a lot less, actually. One nice thing about super strength is that you (usually) don't need to work out and adhere to a special diet in order to keep it.

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, wumpus said:

True, but I had to ask myself "how would your life change with super strength?"

I would need a titanium keyboard.

[wumpus]

On 10/25/2019 at 12:57 AM, kerbiloid said:

I would need a titanium keyboard.

I'd recommend cast iron or steel.  With titanium always the danger of shattering the keyboard, and with super strength you wouldn't care how heavy it is.

And super strength had better come with "super indestructibility", or you'd have all the injury issues of your typical 7 foot NBA prospect, although I think we've covered this above.