Debunking the Flash: The Dangers of Super-Speed
Everyone has at some point thought of how it would feel to have super speed. It seems like the perfect superpower, right? You could arrange your room like a timelapse, travel hundreds of miles in mere seconds, or even speed up enough to travel back in time. This is the idealized version of super speed that characters like the Flash have popularized, one that can bypass the consequences of going past speeds allowable by real-life physics. However, unlike his comics where the magical Speed Force exists to protect speedsters like himself from the repercussions of super speed, you would not want to have super speed in real life.
Super speed isn’t just being able to reach very high speeds; you could do that using a car or a plane. The concept of super speed is not only being able to achieve the speed of sound, but also accelerate very quickly. This means being able to go from resting to the monstrous speeds that are associated with super speed in a very short amount of time. This can be shown in the formula for acceleration: change in velocity over time.
1. Force
This super acceleration introduces a myriad of issues. Without the Speed Force or some other added power to protect you from all the acceleration, this leads you to the first problem: the force problem.
Your body simply cannot withstand the forces that drive your super acceleration. If you tried to run faster, your legs would snap due to the extreme force applied to them, or if you tried to save someone from a deadly fall by carrying them with your crazy speed, you could just rip their limb off or run straight through them (e.g. A-Train can be seen doing this in the show “The Boys”). Oh yeah, your clothes would also be flying off at super speeds, which is not the best look.
On top of accelerating to those speeds, turning becomes impossible as well. If you are accelerating in a certain direction, you gain momentum only in that direction. Switching to a direction will require an equivalent amount of force, and that force will break you apart at super speeds.
2. Perception
The second problem is perception. Running at super speed is useless if you cannot think and perceive at super speed. If a baseball player threw a ball past you, it would have seemed pretty blurry due to how your brain only had about a tenth of a second to register and process the motion. If you were running at Flash-like speeds, the world around you would seem even blurrier, and by extension much more dangerous. You would probably not just be bumping, but smashing into anything and everything. Without enhanced perception and thinking speed to pair with your super-acceleration, you would be reduced to accelerating and then immediately stopping over and over again to process what is happening around you.
3. Heat
Assuming you were granted all these powers, surely you would be able to be the Flash now right? The biggest problem has yet to show up – the heat problem. When you run at super speed, you experience a phenomenon called adiabatic compression. An example of this is when you pump air into an air pump really fast, heating it up. As the gas inside is compressed without being able to expand, more energy is being pumped into a smaller volume, generating heat because the heat has no time to escape into the environment. This is also the phenomenon asteroids and meteors experience when they enter the atmosphere. As they accelerate towards the ground, they create a “plug” of air directly in front of them, compressing it as it has no time to move out of the way. This heats up the air, which then heats up the object, ultimately destroying the object. In the same way, as you run at speeds exceeding the speed of sound, the air in front of you has no time to move, so it gets compressed. As you start running through the atmosphere, you would heat up like a meteor and burn up, vaporizing yourself as you run. As you run at the speed of sound, the compressed air also generates shockwaves called sonic booms, making sure your fiery exit isn’t quiet at all.
A meteor burning up in the atmosphere due to adiabatically compressing air.
4. Bugs
As a bonus problem, if the heat or bumping into things won’t kill you, the bugs will. The formula for force is mass times acceleration, and it doesn’t matter how light something may be. If an object is accelerating fast enough, it will still output a lot of force upon impact. Bugs are everywhere, so if you hit even one housefly at super speed, it would leave fly-sized bullet holes everywhere in your body, turning you into Swiss cheese.
Now that you’ve seen the problems with super speed in real life, it doesn’t seem all that great anymore right? If you run at super speed, you would most likely end up a shattered, burning, naked, mess by the end of your (very short) run. It simply cannot exist without having other superpowers working with it to protect the person running at super speed. Instead, you might want super perception and thinking, which allows you to notice and process information at crazy speeds and is undoubtedly much more useful in everyday life. So next time you think you want super speed, think again. Perhaps invisibility would be more interesting?
Sources:
Why You Don't Want Super Speed
https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/whats-the-maximum-speed-a-human-can-withstand
https://www.toppr.com/guides/physics-formulas/acceleration-formula/
