Hey Vsauce I'm Jake and if you've played Injustice: Gods Among Us, you know how awesome it is
to be Superman and punch people into space. But what if he were to hit you in real life?
What would happen if someone who is able to lift 200 quintillion tons with one hand, power
the sun or, my favorite, punch dimensions apart...were to punch you?
And this brings up an interesting idea: Superman -- and really any fictional character -- is
only as powerful as the person writing them. He has gone from being able to leap tall buildings
in a single bound to moving faster than the speed of light. In this theory, no matter
how strong Superman is, there is one universal law of physics he can't break--that nothing
with mass can achieve--travelling the speed of light. So we will put him 1% below that
299,792,458 m/s limit at 99% the speed of light.
So you're, unfortunately, in a fight with the Man of Steel who, in this case, will not
restrain himself when hitting you. If his fist has an average mass of 300 grams and
it's moving at 99% the speed of light, it would have a total energy of about 190,000,000,000,000,000
joules. Which is equivalent to 45 Megatons of TNT or over 2,800 times more powerful than
the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Throwing just one punch at near the
speed of light with that much energy would burn around 45,400,000,000,000 calories or
almost 82 billion Big Macs.
Now you have one of the largest bombs ever, condensed into a fist, and aimed at your face. What
happens when Superman releases that punch?
This is when it gets incredibly cool...or incredibly hot since the energy being released
by Superman's fist would be around 80,000,000,000,000 Kelvin, which is 5 million times hotter than
the core of our sun.
It takes about 1 centisecond for the light that hits your retina to then be processed
by the brain, so since the punch is travelling at near the speed of light, it would only
take 3.4 Nanoseconds for the fist to get to you. So you literally wouldn't see it coming.
But what we can see is that from the fist's perspective, since it is moving at an amazing
296 million meters a second, all of time is practically frozen. The particles in the air,
the oxygen and nitrogen, are just suspended in time. And Superman's hand hits them with
such energy that it creates nuclear fusion. Gamma rays explode from every collision and
create an explosion unlike any the Earth has ever seen. A giant fireball engulfs the surrounding
area and a blast wave shoots out, shattering windows, structures and rips trees out of
the ground. There might be fictional characters with more powerful punches, but at this point,
when it comes to you still existing, it doesn't matter...
Superman wouldn't only knock the wind out of you, he would knock the atoms out of you.
His fist has pretty much become a particle beam. At 7,000,000,000 electron volts it is
more powerful than the Jefferson Labs Particle Accelerator in Virginia. The atoms that made
up you would be completely disintegrated, liquified at the atomic level. You'd turn
into fundamental particles and quark-gluon plasma which is what was created right after
the Big Bang. And from all of this energy, new particles and anti-particles would form.
So out of your unfortunate destruction, something new, something we might not have ever seen
before, could be created.
To visualize the explosion we can use Nuke Map to see what a 45 megaton bomb would look
like in terms of sheer damage, but what we can't really show is that the damage from Superman's
punch would look more like a traffic cone with a beam shooting out from where his fist
landed, destroying everything in its path and creating an explosion all around him.
It would leave a crater almost 1km in diameter and 221 meters deep.
So how close could you or I come to having 'Superman's strength'? My friends at AsapSCIENCE
breakdown strength muscle growth and how superhuman strength may be more attainable than ever
before.
Don't piss of Superman and as always, thanks for watching.