*Rock music*
Ladies and gentleman, what you have witnessed- *Rock music fades*
-here today is a flash mob of flashing Flashes flashing
Truly the comedic stylings of this show have hit a new low
*intro plays*
Hello internet! Welcome to Film theory!
The smartest, but definitely not the fastest of shows on YouTube
Unless you measure speed by the time it takes to make you cringe
in which case call me Usain Bolt!
Hey, you remember last year when Justice League came out?
No? No one? Well that's not that surprising because this thing earned less than Man of Steel!
which means that most of you watching probably didn't go out and see it
Don't worry, you didn't miss all that much
Here, I'm gonna catch you up on the best bits. Uh, by the way, spoiler alert?
I am the Flash
The Flash
You're the best, Flash!
Flash! Ahhh!
Yeah, basically The Flash stole the whole movie
Aquaman whined, Wonder Woman was the victim of oddly sexist jokes
And Batman just refused to act
You ever heard of Superman? He died fighting next to me
Oh yeah, and I guess Cyborg was there too
but even in writing that recap, I completely forgot that he was even a part of the team, so...you know
Nope! The Flash was the only useful one
My special skills include the viola, web design, fluent in sign language
Not only was he a well realized character
but he was also the only character to demonstrate truly useful powers in the movie's big fight scenes
The situation is so bad, that Batman, overwhelmed by feeling outclassed by the actual superheroes with actual super powers
attempts to commit suicide as a part of the final battle
I'm not even exaggerating when I say that! Every one else has to be like
"No Batman, you are useful to this team"
"Y-y-you're great! Y-you add so much...uh...so much...leadership to the team
Even though your decision to revive Superman almost gets us all killed"
Oh yeah, Superman gets himself reborn in record time midway through the movie
which is treated as this big reveal
Tada (In a Peter Griffin voice)
Except, you know, you can't reveal stuff that's already on the box art
He even gets himself some really neat CGI lips in the process
And then zombie Supes turns on the crew *punch*
Because, you know, because DC wanted another crack at the whole superhero v. superhero concept
because it went so well last time
And then he flies off to a corn field to sulk because the movie needed a reason to ensure that
the grossly overpowered character didn't save the day until the final battle
Fast forward to the ending, Stephanwolf is defeated, Batman choses the Justice League HQ
there's a Death Stroke Easter egg, Superman destroys all life on the planet earth, and end credits
Like I said, you didn't miss all that much
Ho-oh, I'm sorry
Were you wondering about that whole "Superman destroying all life on the planet Earth" bit?
Yeah...well...
You don't actually see it happen on screen
but it is definitely an unintended consequence of
Superman's actions throughout this movie
Based on what we see during the easter-egg ending of Justice League
I can prove for a scientific fact that Superman would decimate the Earth
that he had sworn, died, and was reborn to protect
To understand how that works, though, our story begins with the Flash
So, Barry Allen was a scientist who one night gets struck by lightning
Next thing you know, he can move at incredible speeds
As you do
That freak accident gives Barry the ability to tap into what's known as the Speed Force
An extra-dimensional source of energy that allows him to not only move fast
but fundamentally alter the way physics works around his body
In short, the Speed Force allows Barry to move at light speeds
No, no, no. Light speed is too slow.
We're gonna have to go right to...
...ludicrous speed!
[Collective gasps]
Ludicrous speeds, which, honestly, is probably a more accurate descriptor
Without having to worry about all the messy consequences that physics demands
would come with moving quickly
And let me assure you
Those consequences are definitely messy
You see, when you swim, the water in front of you has to move out of your way
And this is true for any fluid that you're moving through
Water, certainly, but it can also be things like pudding
if you pull a Guava Juice and fill your bathtub
with random liquids for those sweet, sweet, Youtube kids' views
But, more than anything else, the fluid we deal with
day to day is air
When we normally run through air
we pass through the air molecules pretty darn easily
because their velocity is so much higher than our own
The molecules just move out of the way
But when you start running at ludicrous speeds
the particles are forced together
They get trapped in front of you
becoming, in essence, a molecular traffic jam
because they can't get out of the way of each other
And as you can imagine
not only is weird stuff happening in front of you
but you're also leaving a path of chaos in your wake as well
As the Flash builds up these molecules in front of him
he's creating a mini vacuum behind himself
A low density area left in his wake
And as a result, air molecules
rush in to fill that space
like the Red Sea post Noah
But is this collection of air molecules
really that big of a deal?
Well, just how much damage all this would cause
would depend on the Flash's speed
Now, in the comics
the Flash has been shown to travel any speed he needs to
and he's been able to reach those ludicrous speeds
I keep mentioning
As just one example
in JLA number 48,
a series covering the adventures of the Justice League,
a nuclear warhead is launched towards North Korea,
threatening to kill over half a million people
To save all those lives, the Flash,
Wally West at this point,
rushes in and rescues each and every one of those
500 thousand people
carrying them all 35 miles away
But, here's the catch:
he rescues them after the bomb has already detonated
So he's rescuing 500 thousand people
in what the comics says is
0.00001 microseconds
That means he ran 35 miles there
and 35 miles back
at least 250 thousand times
since he could be carrying two people at a time
in 0.00000000001 seconds
Doing the math, that translates to him moving
9 trillion times the speed of light
but since that's an absurd number
and since I'm specifically interested in Justice League,
let's just stick to how the Flash behaves in the DCEU
If I'm being thorough, and I kind of gotta be
for anything involving comics, otherwise I get
inundated with really angry emails,
I should technically mention that we've seen the Flash
move faster than the speed of light
Back in Batman v. Superman,
Flash appeared to Bruce Wayne, telling him to
look into Lois
Well, some people have written this off as just
a part of Batman's nightmare, that would actually
make no sense. At this point in the movie,
Bruce has no idea that Superman is Clark Kent,
has never seen the Flash before,
and would only have known Lois Lane as a reporter
So this is the Flash reaching out to Bruce
by running faster than time itself!
But since that's just a theory I have,
let's look for something a bit more concrete
Luckily, Justice League gives me exactly what I need
While Flash is trying to outmaneuver
a newly resurrected Superman,
a dramatic moment reveals that Superman
is keeping his gaze looked on the Flash as he moves
This tells us one very important detail:
that the Flash is not moving faster than
the speed of light in this scene. In fact,
at this moment, Flash is moving slow enough
that Superman, from a few feet away mind you,
can keep a visual locked on him
Y'see, sight works when the eye takes in light
that's been reflected off of another object.
As a result, what you're seeing is
always slightly behind what's actually there
as it takes time for the light to travel between
the object and your eye, and then for your brain
to process that image
So, if you were to move faster than the speed of light,
well, weird things would happen because
relativity as we know it would start to break down,
but one thing other people certainly wouldn't be able to do is accurately track your movement
Superman may be super, but even he can't speed up
the rate at which light is travelling
And also, yeah, he may be tracking Flash using
some other method, but it seems like it's clearly
meant to be that Superman sees the Flash
So even though it's very possible that Barry Allen
is able to travel faster than the speed of light,
it's very possible that Superman is tracking the Flash's movements using some other method,
for our purposes today, let's just assume that Barry is travelling slightly slower
than the speed of light, allowing Superman to see him in this scene
Don't worry, it doesn't change the end results all that much
The speed of light is 671,000,000 mph
so let's put Barry slightly below that at 670,000,000 mph
Here's the problem: at speeds that high,
Barry would be walking around with a fusion bomb
going off on his chest, no joke!
Humans right now have a hard time achieving fusion
because of a little wrinkle called the Coulomb Barrier
For fusion to happen, particles have to get
really, really close together, about 10^-15m close
in order for the strong nuclear force that exists in atoms
to fuse the particles together
However, there's a problem with that
Just like magnets, two protons that are pushed together
repel each other due to their mutual positive charge
This is the Coulomb Barrier
Now, the Barrier can be overcome
by travelling really, really, really fast,
speeds that, under most normal circumstances,
are nearly impossible for humans to achieve
I'm talking 44,738,725 mph levels of fast
But superheroes don't operate under normal circumstances
Like I said, Barry is travelling at 670,000,000 mph
on a conservative estimate
That's nearly 15 times faster than what's needed
to overcome Coulomb's barrier
And so fusion reactions would be happening
over and over again in that dense cloud of molecules
that's building up in front of him
and each of those reactions would correspond to
a temperature of around 5,000,000,000°F
And that's not all!
According to work done at the University of California, San Diego,
these sorts of temperatures and energies would turn
little bits of air molecules into plasma! Left alone,
those small particles of plasma would
explode to the size of football fields in 0.1 milliseconds!
So, as he ran, Barry would lighting off
thousands of high-energy fusion reactions and
giant plasma explosions whenever he went
close to light speed!
Which is why, in Justice League
and the comics, it's so lucky that he has
access to the Speed Force,
which renders all of this a moot point
Remember, the Speed Force warps the physics
of the air around him so he doesn't overheat
and cause a plasma streak
and that would be the end except for one man
Superman
At the end of the movie, Flash and Supes
go in for a race
Superman! Stop! You're gonna kill us all!
Y'see, despite his ability to move incredibly fast,
Superman doesn't have access to the Speed Force
He's not what the DC Universe refers to
as a "speedster"
Superman travels fast because of
his strength and his muscles, not because
he has access to some extra-dimensional power
Sure, in the movies and comics, Superman has moved fast,
often multiple times faster than the speed of light,
but he has never once, in all the research that I did,
tap into that special Force
and that becomes a serious problem
because Superman is about to race Barry Allen around the world
and at least TRY to keep up
and thanks to this moment from Man of Steel,
we know based on the fire surrounding his body
that Superman actively collides with the atmosphere
and burns on re-entering at really fast speeds
Unlike Barry, though, there is no magical field
extending a millimeter away from his skin that can
magic away this problem
With no Speed Force to control the air molecules around him,
all of the awful things I said about Barry
absolutely apply to Superman
He's gonna ignite the air wherever he goes
and in a race of this magnitude, that definitely means
fusion-level reactions and plasma eruptions across
the globe happening in less than the blink of an eye
When Superman reaches even half of light speed,
he's already generating an incredible 9.8x10^19 joules of energy
That is roughly 40 times more powerful
than the strongest hydrogen bomb ever detonated
That is going to devastate the planet below him
wherever he goes, completing the job that Zod and Steppenwolf
couldn't do on their own
Earth's greatest threat was its greatest hero all along
Maybe Batman v. Superman was right:
"He has the power to wipe out the entire human race,
and if we believe there is even a 1% chance that he is our enemy,
we have to take it as an absolute certainty"
Ugh, I just feel dirty even SAYING that
But hey, that's just a theory!
A FILM THEORY!
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