Super Strength possible?

[gamer]

I noticed super strength is fairly standard power amongst super heroes but I was wondering for super strength to ever be possible in real-life or in the future (nano-enhanced muscles?) what kind of hurdles would you have to get passed. I know I'm making alot of super power threads but I'm just curious.

[Imperial528]

Well it would depend on what you mean by "super strength". Are we talking 'can bend pieces of metal with significant effort using bare hands' or 'effortlessly throwing around MBTs'?

The former I believe could be possible with cybernetics and bone fortification, and even then, it's not like this person will do it on a regular basis; the latter, I'm not so sure if you could define such a creature as human. Maybe a brain in an android, but that would be one big android.

[Eulogy]

When you lift something, it's not just the arm doing the lifting; your legs and spine have to deal with the load. The arms need to be attached to someting after all.

You're looking at upgrading effectively the entire body with regards to increasing raw power. You need to be able to do those kind of feats without destroying your back or shattering your legs.

[Guardsman Bass]

You would also need some way to distribute the reaction force of whatever you're pushing against, particularly if it's much more massive than you are. The woman in the picture looks like she masses about 45-55 kilograms, versus a giant pillar made of marble(?) that probably masses a couple thousand kilograms. Even assuming your body can somehow distribute that, it's still going to show up as some serious ground pressure from your feat (if it's not made of a strong material, you might easily sink into it, or at least crack it).

[Panzersharkcat]

It's why it's hypothesized that Superman doesn't actually have super-strength and invulnerability. His body just projects a telekinetic field to assist him in moving stuff and deflect bullets.

[Simon_Jester]

When you lift something, it's not just the arm doing the lifting; your legs and spine have to deal with the load. The arms need to be attached to someting after all.

You're looking at upgrading effectively the entire body with regards to increasing raw power. You need to be able to do those kind of feats without destroying your back or shattering your legs.

However, the magnitude of enhancement is going to be fairly uniform- if I reinforce my arms to the point where i can lift a car, and then apply the same reinforcement technique to my legs, my legs will now be strong enough to handle the load.

The real problem is, yes, conservation of momentum and torque.

Guys chatting on this- I assume most of you can handle a 25 kg weight without too much trouble. How many of you have needed help moving a 25 pound piece of furniture, though, because when you pick up one end you don't have enough leverage to get the other end off the ground? This is a problem for picking up any object significantly larger than a human being- you can't distribute the load evenly, and the object will tend to torque around the point where you hold onto it and fall out of your hands, even if it's very lightweight.

[RecklessPrudence]

Plus, although this isn't a problem with super-strength per se, just with portrayals of it, no matter how strong you are, you're not going to be able to lift a car by the bumper, or a tank by the barrel, or a plane by the tail. They're just not built that way, and the main part of the item will simply rip off from the part you are holding.

[Rekkon]

[Connor MacLeod]

there's also things like dealing with ground pressure if you were lifting truly massive objects, balance and center of gravity, etc.

In general though to pull off something like in that image you need what amounts to magic to pull it off.


Super strength is also a bit misleading, since 'strength' in people isn't usually so generalized. You can talk about upper body and lower body strength for example, or the different muscle groups. Hell I'm pretty sure both a weightlifter and a olympic athlete can be 'strong' in different ways and perform differently. Bear in mind that there's also consequences - strain on the body (Damage to it), increased energy usage (which must be dealt with) and so on - things like that don't always get dealt with (eg 40K Space MArines, which literally require magic to function.)

It's kind of like a discussion of what qualifies as 'superhuman' or 'peak human' - Spacebattles has had a few of those in recent months here and here. SDN also had at least one 'Super Soldier' discussion thread here within the past few months.

[cadbrowser]

What about adrenaline that sometimes happens where a person momentarily experiences superhuman strength?

The key would be to find a way to augment that system to react at a person's will; but I would imagine a lot of the same issues (sinking in the ground, center of gravity, structural integrity of target, etc) would still come into play.

Hmmmm...Trying to find documented cases (not just "stories") of the adrenaline rush scenario and not finding anything substancial on google. Are these then just urban myths?

[TheFeniX]

You would also need some way to distribute the reaction force of whatever you're pushing against, particularly if it's much more massive than you are. The woman in the picture looks like she masses about 45-55 kilograms, versus a giant pillar made of marble(?) that probably masses a couple thousand kilograms. Even assuming your body can somehow distribute that, it's still going to show up as some serious ground pressure from your feat (if it's not made of a strong material, you might easily sink into it, or at least crack it).

There's also the issue that, with her weight, she couldn't actually pick it up. She's just lift herself up (think poledancing). If she were to hold it in the position it was in the picture, she'd also end up with nothing but a handfull of marble if she were to anchor herself or would just end up doing a hand-stand on a marble pillar as it falls to the ground and takes her with it.

What about adrenaline that sometimes happens where a person momentarily experiences superhuman strength?

You body has certain built in avoidances for stopping you from damaging it. Almost anyone can punch through bricks, but few people can master the technique to not break your hand/wrist but also overcome your body's natural instinct to not punch bricks with your bare hand. It's actually the lack of follow-through that hurts many amateur showmen like this, rather than the hardness of what they are punching.

There's been stories (note: stories) of people on PCP or other drugs performing extreme feats of physical strength. But we don't even need to go that far to see the damaging effects of taking the body to extremes: torn ACLs, pulled groins, and other ripped tendons/ligaments are common injuries among athletes. From my understanding, the muscles themselves are much harder to damage rather than just tearing them off the bone they're connected to. You might have the strength to flip over a small car, but you also have a great chance to damage something severely while doing so.

So, being strong means you have to be pretty tough to boot. Anyone can break their hand/wrist punching something. But if we're talking about someone who can lift cars, that person could literally smash their hand (and likely arm) into mush by punching something harder than they are.

[MrDakka]

Also two significant points that haven't been mentioned: power generation and heat management.

Where the hell does the energy needed to lift something like a cruise ship come from? Where is it stored? In addition all work generates heat, you're gonna need vastly better heat distribution systems to manage all that heat.

Just my two cents.

Also for the OP's benefit. Enjoy
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4c87bf18e89ff
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4bfe37c9056f6

Mind you, the OA universe is in the far future, but with a relatively hard scifi setting.

[Formless]

Also for the OP's benefit. Enjoy
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4c87bf18e89ff
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4bfe37c9056f6

Mind you, the OA universe is in the far future, but with a relatively hard scifi setting.

Oh this is rich.

Ultimate muscle is nanostructured electromechanical motor material, made primarily of carbon, boron, and nitrogen. In appearance, it is a dull black, and typically formed into threads, cables, sheets, or cylinders. Upon application of a voltage, the ultimate muscle will either contract or expand, depending on the variety (some ultimate muscle types only contract under voltage, some expand, and some can do either).

Okay, stop. Reality check:

Several allotropes of boron exist: amorphous boron is a brown powder and crystalline boron is black, extremely hard (about 9.5 on Mohs' scale), and a poor conductor at room temperature. Elemental boron is used as a dopant in the semiconductor industry.

And what does that mean? That boron is used to make other materials less conductive.

But for more hilarity, did you even read the thread?

Biological muscle can exert a maximum of about 0.4 MPa under optimal conditions. Compared to the 20 GPa of Ultimate Muscle, an Ultimate Muscle user might be expected to be 50,000 times stronger than an equivalently shaped human. However, this is somewhat misleading - Ultimate Muscle can exert pressures close to the yield strength of the strongest materials (about 40 to 50 GPa). Compare this to the pressure of muscle (less than 0.4 MPa) and the tensile strength of tendon (about 50 MPa), and it can be shown that the ultimate muscle user would need disproportionately thicker tendons and bones in proportion to its muscles.

Read that last part again. Yes, they note the exact same problem with their wank muscle as I would, and most of the people here would. Do they explain how they get the bones strong enough to avoid shattering from all that pressure? Of course not. They just say "needs to be thicker" as if that actually solves the problem. Not "needs to be x times as thick", not "needs to be made out of fucking titanium" like even a moderately sane soft sci-fi writer would do. Just "needs to be thicker", and leave it at that.

In fact, pointing out the problems of super-strength and then failing to address them (because this is teh ULTIMATE muscle, don't you know? ) seems to be a theme all through the article. They even mention the part about breaking the floor beneath you. Just remember that one when we get to their statements about jumping, oh yes.

Running at high speeds is essentially a series of low jumps, so it can be considered using the same values for jumping, above.

You don't have to be a biologist to know that running and jumping use the legs in an entirely different manner. You just have to be a human being and actually run and jump to know they use entirely different body kinematics. When running, your legs swing under yourself like a pendulum. Just like walking. When jumping, you are either starting from a position of rest-- in which case they coil up like a spring and then release-- or you have a running start and can simply give yourself a small push upward and forward with your ankle.

I guess OA nerds need to literally get off their asses some day and try actually moving something besides their fingers and wrists.

...Potential energy increases linearly with height, so since the U-muscle user can do 10,000 times as much work, it can jump 10,000 times as high. Similarly, it can also jump 10,000 times as far. This analysis neglects aerodynamic drag, which would significantly reduce this distance. Since very athletic bionts can jump several meters high, a U-muscle user would be able to reach altitudes of tens of kilometres in vacuum under one standard earth gravity. ...

... [insert the above bullshit about how walking being the same as jumping]

...Again, this neglects aerodynamic drag, but it can be seen that the U-muscle user would be running about as fast as a high power bullet.

So after doing some bullshit math based on assumptions a child could figure out are wrong, we get this claim. Apparently they seriously think that nano-wank muscles can propel a human being to over 800 m/s (the same velocity as a .30-06 Springfield rifle round). Do I have to tell you how fucking stupid this is?

Yes, they forgot to factor fucking mass into their calculations of velocity. They just assumed that, hey, if its 10,000 times as much work being done by the muscle, that must mean 10,000 times as much velocity, right? Which brings us to another problem, namely that no one in the OA community knows how to do math, a problem that has been documented by members of this forum many times in the past. Anyone with a highschool physics class under their belt can tell you at this point that whoever wrote this has no fucking clue what they are writing. And lets not get into the issue of acceleration and your brain smooshing itself against your super-titanium skull. I guess the OA universe has come up with a way of making brains out of metallic hydrogen. It honestly wouldn't surprise me given everything I know about the setting.

Also your second link starts by calling itself fucking Clarktech and gives no other explanation for how it works. That right there invalidates all claims that OA is hard sci-fi. Period. They literally just call stuff Clarketech, say that its SCIENCE from THE FUTURE! You know, just like the Death Star! wait...

I have seen comedy anime with harder science than this shit.

[Guardsman Bass]

There's also the issue that, with her weight, she couldn't actually pick it up. She's just lift herself up (think poledancing). If she were to hold it in the position it was in the picture, she'd also end up with nothing but a handfull of marble if she were to anchor herself or would just end up doing a hand-stand on a marble pillar as it falls to the ground and takes her with it.

I agree. My example only works if she was holding it directly overhead, and had some way to distribute the force she's exerting on the pillar across its entire surface. Holding it like she does in the picture would just break part of it off, as you said. If she tried to push on it, the force pushing back would either send her flying or (more likely) she'd pulverize the part of the pillar she's pressing on.

So, if you did have a Magic Body with that kind of Magic Strength, you wouldn't exactly have super-lifting - but you could do damage by punching holes in stuff. If you tried to do a Super-Jump, you'd just drive your legs deep into the ground beneath you.

Also your second link starts by calling itself fucking Clarktech and gives no other explanation for how it works. That right there invalidates all claims that OA is hard sci-fi. Period. They literally just call stuff Clarketech, say that its SCIENCE from THE FUTURE! You know, just like the Death Star! wait...

I've heard about that as well. It's pretty lame that they make such a big deal about being "hard" vis a vis physics (as if a setting with wormholes is hard), then blatantly violate it with Clarketech because Mega-Genius AI's can apparently violate physics in the form of the usual Space Opera "black box" technology.

[Ahriman238]

Yeah, picking apart OA isn't really funny anymore. Though the ultimate muscle/super sophont stuff is one area where I tend to cut them slack for having a fun/cool idea. Also, they make brains out of computronium not metallic hydrogen in OA. Get your facts straight.

With cybernetics, provided you really understood what you were doing and where to reinforce, it should be possible to multiply your physical strength a couple times, but there will doubtless be issues and tradeoffs, most of them covered just slightly upthread.

Actually, there's a niggling thought since OA was brought up. Most Su in OA are about twice as strong as ordinary humans, because their muscles were designed by AI gods to be considerably more effcient. Anyone have an idea if that would be possible, or just more of the super sophont?

My personal understanding of the adrenaline super strength thing is: that muscle tissue at a minimum has the strength to tear itself apart. Normally, your body automatically governs itself, not letting you lift something if doing so would cause serious injury to your arm. But in some occasions, under suffcient duress, one can overcome this limit and perform feats of strength at serious risk of self injury.

At least, that's how a college professor explained it to me several years ago. He could have been talking out his ass, or it could be invalidated by subsequent research. But that's how I understand it.

[Agent Sorchus]

Oh the muscles themselves can be quite a bit stronger in terms that the OA guys think of (going for burst strength like a fair number of rl predators and most the rest of the apes), but the big thing is that human muscles (and more importantly musculature) is very much on the peak end of nature for endurance strength. Also the smaller the creature the easier it is to give it more proportional strength. Of course making such a creature able to survive in Earths biosphere would be kinda hard.

One of the big things that limits strength is the fluid dynamics of the heart and the rate you can oxygenate the blood and deliver atp (at least if I am remembering my basic bio). to get more strength enlarging the heart is the first thing I would go to, but this all just becomes mass that must be moved around. It is actually easier to keep the same sized heart and a slightly better density of brain matter and shrink the rest of the organism and put it in a high oxygen high pressure environment (so long as you stay mamilian.

And all this will get is a smaller creature with great strength (twice average human wouldn't be a bad guess) but with very little endurance. The better question than if this is possible to engineer is if there is a place in this in a natural enviroment (also why would you want such a creature to engineer? It isn't like humans are finding themselves too weak, and the future is likely to continue in this path of sedentariness until we hit peak resources and our artificial enviroment collapses and then the endurance is likely to be more important.)

[Simon_Jester]

There's also the issue that, with her weight, she couldn't actually pick it up. She's just lift herself up (think poledancing). If she were to hold it in the position it was in the picture, she'd also end up with nothing but a handfull of marble if she were to anchor herself or would just end up doing a hand-stand on a marble pillar as it falls to the ground and takes her with it.

I agree. My example only works if she was holding it directly overhead, and had some way to distribute the force she's exerting on the pillar across its entire surface. Holding it like she does in the picture would just break part of it off, as you said.

it depends on the area. The crush-resistance of stone is pretty high- to take a simple example, concrete might have a compressive strength of 20 or 30 MPa, which means that you could potentially take something like a 25 ton concrete block and rest it on the palms of a (superheroically strong) man's hands and not have his hands crush their way into the concrete. This does become a problem for anything much heavier than that, though.

It would help to devise some kind of harness or sling or something to distribute the weight a little better.

If you tried to do a Super-Jump, you'd just drive your legs deep into the ground beneath you.

This I am not so sure of. Remember, what does structural damage to a surface is that you're exerting forces on it and it has no other place to go. If you try to jump off a surface, then action-reaction applies- if you're exerting nearly enough force to "drive your legs into the ground beneath you," you are exerting more than enough force to catapult yourself high into the air.

It's when you land that you'll get a big hole in the ground...

[gamer]

I read the Orion's Arm article and wow, that was funny, I do wonder why do they call themselves hard scifi? Maybe they are using a different definition of hard.

I heard chimps have muscles about 7 times stronger than humans (this makes sense a man and woman almost died fighting a chimp the results were messy the woman lost her face and the man several fingers (the chimp snatched his fingers off his hand)) and gorillas around 30 times stronger (I heard a story where a man was torn in two during a gorilla attack with both halves seperated from each other by about 100ft) so looking into biology could be helpful.

I think Prototype handles super strength pretty good, the infected and Alex Mercer are far denser and heavier than humans with Mercer being so heavy he can elbowdrop tanks and just by simply running his foot shatters solid concrete and asphalt with every step, his body temp is also far hotter than that of a regular human, and to power his shapeshifting and super strength he eats a few thousand humans in only a few weeks.

[Sky Captain]

What if humans were rised in gradually increasing gravity, suppose in O neil cylinder that is spun faster and faster. A human who has grown up in say 2 G environment would naturally be stronger than human grown under normal gravity. It wouldn't be super strength like in comic books, but such human should be capable of beating human from normal G in strength and endurance. How much higher gravity could be pushed during several human generations 3G, 4G?

[RecklessPrudence]

As a tangent, I know we're up near the top end of land-based mammalian endurance, but don't some aquatic mammals and some birds bear even us?

There's five things I'd be interested in genegineering for, if I was doing it - and yes, I know this may have been more useful in the super-soldier topic we had awhile back: even higher endurance, wider environmental and hazard tolerance (oxygen deprivation would be a big one, which would also help with the next one), better able to handle physical trauma, able to handle more of the strength that our muscles have in reserve without damage (That college professor's story of yours is what I've heard too, Ahriman) - but without going insance about it, and able to retain physical fitness with much less work.

Idunno, that's just what occurs to me.

[Broomstick]

What about adrenaline that sometimes happens where a person momentarily experiences superhuman strength?

When you exert your muscles in normal life the cells don't all fire at once, only a percentage of them do. This is what gives your muscles endurance - you have groups of cells firing in sequence, so while some are exerting effort some are "recharging" so they can take over the next cycle.

During an adrenaline rush a much higher percentage, a majority, of muscle cells all fire at once allowing for much greater exertion than normal. However, it can not be sustained. It's burst strength, not long endurance.

The key would be to find a way to augment that system to react at a person's will; but I would imagine a lot of the same issues (sinking in the ground, center of gravity, structural integrity of target, etc) would still come into play.

You're forgetting that such bursts of strength can also cause structural damage to the body, such as torn ligaments, as the joints and bones are subjected to much greater forces than usual.

Hmmmm...Trying to find documented cases (not just "stories") of the adrenaline rush scenario and not finding anything substancial on google. Are these then just urban myths?

No, not urban myths. I do recall reading cases back when I had access to real medical literature, but that was also back before the days everything was expected to be on the internet. You just have to dig further.

Another instance of "hysterical strength" is during a grand mal seizure - the convulsions are caused by the nervous system causing a lot of the muscles to fire at once. The literature is littered with cases of muscle power during a seizure causing problems/damage to the body.

If you beef up the muscles you'll have to likewise do something about the joints, bones, ligaments, tendons...

[Formless]

I read the Orion's Arm article and wow, that was funny, I do wonder why do they call themselves hard scifi? Maybe they are using a different definition of hard.

Yes. It seems to be "the harder it makes me just thinking about it, the harder teh SCIENCE! must be in this wiki article!" That's why you see so many instances of words like "ultimate" and "super" in their writing. Its just scientistic masturbation.

What if humans were rised in gradually increasing gravity, suppose in O neil cylinder that is spun faster and faster. A human who has grown up in say 2 G environment would naturally be stronger than human grown under normal gravity.

No, your human would just have cardiovascular problems. Resistance training is one thing (and is based on increasing the work your muscles are doing by increasing the mass of the weights, not the acceleration due to gravity), but just putting someone into an alien environment doesn't change the limits of their biology that's coded into their genes. And if you are going to change the genes, you don't need high gravity to get super strength.

[Simon_Jester]

This seems likely.

There's virtually no data I'm aware of on how human development would go in a high-gravity environment, and it's hard to create one artificially for long enough for organisms to grow to maturity. But it seems awfully convenient and 'too good to be true' that we'd actually become a lot stronger there.

[MrDakka]

Yes. It seems to be "the harder it makes me just thinking about it, the harder teh SCIENCE! must be in this wiki article!" That's why you see so many instances of words like "ultimate" and "super" in their writing. Its just scientistic masturbation.

Yeah the OA wank is just that, science wank. I think the author was inspired by this: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/nanomuscle/ and had way too much fun with it.

However more on point, wouldn't growing up on a high-g environment also stunt your growth?

[Sky Captain]

This seems likely.

There's virtually no data I'm aware of on how human development would go in a high-gravity environment, and it's hard to create one artificially for long enough for organisms to grow to maturity. But it seems awfully convenient and 'too good to be true' that we'd actually become a lot stronger there.

Aren't there any experiments with fast growing animals too? It shouldn't be hard to grow several generations of mice in a centrifuge with gradually increased rpm to test what happens.