- I like superpowers that are odd, but understandab--
I like superpowers that are odd, but understandable.
Take sound powers.
Some superheroes have the ability to speak so epically
that they can incapacitate enemies and destroy objects.
That at least makes sense,
we know that different orders of magnitude
of sound can have profound effects on objects like glass,
but how loud would a superhero have to be
to destroy something like a mountain?
The most famous superheroes with destructive voices
are Black Canary, Banshee, and Black Bolt,
though Black Bolt is arguably the most powerful.
The iconic king of Marvel's Inhumans,
his voice is so powerful that he chooses not to speak
because of what it would do.
One example that I want to focus on
is in this panel from Black Bolt Volume One,
Hard Time, where it said that a single word
from this character could shatter mountains.
How could sound possibly do this?
And if it could, how loud would it have to be?
First, though, let's precisely define what sound is.
If I were to yell right now,
what would you actually be hearing?
Well, when air leaves my lungs,
(shouts)
that air pushes on molecules in its way.
That pushing creates little bunches of air molecules,
and these bunches now have some energy.
That energy takes them through the air,
rolling along like waves on the surface of an ocean,
and once those waves reach something like
the shore of your ear, that energy vibrates your eardrum
that your brain interprets chemically and electrically
as the sensory experience that is sound.
(shouting) Wow, that is annoying.
I'm gonna keep doing it.
The most common measurement for sound that you will see
is probably decibel, or 1/10th of a bel,
named after smart boy Alexander Graham Bell.
It is a unit that relates power or pressure
as a ratio and puts that ratio
on a so-called logarithmic scale,
and logarithmic scales are basically just mathematical ways
to shrink and squeeze numbers.
We wanna do that because the human ear
is sensitive to an incredible range of sound.
Because of the math, an increase in 10 decibels
is an increase of an order of magnitude,
or a factor of 10, in the power or pressure ratio
of a sound.
So, for example, 100 decibels
isn't 10 times louder than 10 decibels,
it is
a billion times
louder.
The human ear is sensitive to sounds
that are trillions of times apart in power or pressure.
It's our most sensitive sense
And I guess,
I guess ASMR videos are somewhere around here.
So, a few decibels, oh.
But, what does this sound range sound like?
Well, the reference point for zero decibels
is the sound power that a mosquito puts out
if it were flying three meters a--
Ow, three meters away from you.
10 decibels is what a human breath sounds like.
(breathing)
60 decibels is the sound a hairdryer makes,
and 128 decibels is the loudest human scream ever recorded.
R.I.P. headphone users.
(inhales) Just kidding, but that's where the pain threshold
for sound starts.
At 153 decibels, the sound energy alone
is enough to vibrate your vocal cords in your throat
to make swallowing
difficult.
And at 200 decibels,
that's what a Saturn 5 launch sounds like,
and it's loud enough to kill you
with its sound energy alone,
but we'll get to that a little bit later,
and we're not even in Black Bolt territory.
(screams)
From sources of sound power come
what we actually feel, sound pressure.
At a little over 194 decibels,
the pressure waves from a sound
are at atmospheric pressure, and so any sound waves
above this value become distorted
and dangerous when traveling through Earth's atmosphere.
A blast wave.
Now, we're talking.
(shouts) For our purposes, the pressure waves that we need
are gonna come from massive explosions.
This one was called Cannikin
and it was the largest underground nuclear explosion
the U.S. ever tested.
When it detonated, the ground lifted six meters,
and then shook like it was experiencing a 7.0
earthquake, and it shattered the surrounding mountains.
Looks epic enough for Blackagar Boltagon,
his real name.
Explosions
like this are in the 250
decibel range.
So, if Black Bolt opened his mouth
and this kind of sound came out,
and all of that sound
went perfectly
into
the mountain, let's say he was almost close enough
to touch the mountain with his mouth,
then he would have a pretty good chance at cracking it,
just like the comics say.
But, sound power is dependent on time.
Even if a Saturn 5 rocket is loud enough to kill you,
if it only emitted that sound for a nanosecond,
you'd be fine standing right next to it.
So, if Black Bolt's mountain-shattering word
took one second to say,
crack,
then it would be a nuclear-bomb amount
of energy in total, like we said,
but what if he kept talking?
(shouts) If Black Bolt recited
my favorite scientifically-minded speech,
Carl Sagan's pale blue dot speech,
for a little over three and a half minutes,
then the total amount of energy leaving his face
would be the same amount that a hurricane puts out
in four seconds.
In 2016, according to
The Guinness Book of World Records, though,
Ashwin Sudani spoke nonstop
for over 75 hours,
and if he did that,
the amount of energy that Black Bolt would put out in total
would be on-par with the 2004 Indonesian earthquake,
and that shortened the Earth's day by milliseconds.
Up until this point, we've been assuming that Black Bolt
can channel all the sound power that he holds,
perfectly into the objects that he seeks to destroy,
but that doesn't really work unless he's close enough to,
(smooching) to kiss it. (laughs)
In reality, using a sound-based power
would be a lot more complicated.
When Black Bolt spoke, if he was on the ground,
what would come out wouldn't be a perfect beam.
It would be closer to an expanding hemisphere of sound,
and as this hemisphere expanded,
the sound pressure would decrease,
such that if you were only 200 meters away,
even if Black Bolt had the voice of a nuclear bomb,
you'd be fine.
I mean, your eardrums would rupture,
but you wouldn't immediately die.
And Black Bolt's superpowers can
be suppressed easier than you think.
That's because powerful sound waves
have a lot of trouble switching mediums,
like going from air to water, or from air to rock.
(shouts) That's why NASA puts 300,
yep, hundred thousand gallons
of water underneath large rocket launches.
The water acts to break up the sound waves
and absorb some of their energy.
If they didn't do this,
a large rocket would rip the launchpad apart
with sound alone, so in theory,
you could silence Black Bolt with water.
But, of course, it would have to be a lot of water
and it could--
That's enough.
Oh, I'm covered in water, oh.
Furthermore, mega sound power is one
of the least useful abilities for a guy
who frequens deep space and the moon.
Without a medium full of stuff
to transfer sound energy through,
like the Earth's atmosphere,
Black Bolt's sound energy wouldn't be able to propagate.
In space, as they say, no one can hear you
scream.
So, how does Black Bolt crack mountains with sound?
How do sound-based superheroes do any damage?
By magically, somehow, throwing so much air
so forcefully out of their mouths
that the resulting sound isn't really sound,
it's more like a blast wave that you'd find
in a large-scale explosion.
To do what we see him do in the comics,
Black Bolt would need
near-inside-a-nuclear-bomb-like pressures,
right behind his lips at all times,
and maybe even thousands of times more pressure than that,
given all the caveats that we mentioned.
Either way, catastrophe, right here.
I get why he stays silent.
Hey, do you know that you actually
do sound different in a recording?
Have you ever listened to yourself,
you hear yourself when you speak,
and have you ever heard yourself in a recording?
You're like, "Oh, do I sound like that?"
No, you actually don't.
So, when you speak,
what you are hearing is filtered
through a lot of other stuff.
Through the bones of your skull,
and your skin and all this nonsense,
and it changes the sound that is your voice that you hear.
But, on a recording, it doesn't get any of that filtering,
it is just your voice filtered through no skull of yours
with its certain shape and stuff.
So, you actually do sound different on a recording
and it is always worse.
Thank you so much for watching, Amanda.
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