You open up the newspaper one day and are shocked to read the headline: Superman kills
30!
Quickly scanning the article, you're shocked to discover that no, this wasn't some accident
that took place during the course of some super powered fight against a villain, but
rather that this was a deliberate act of mass murder.
Then the next day there's a news report on the tv, Superman has struck again, this time
killing another twenty people.
As an icy hand of fear clutches your heart as you realize that something must be done,
but what exactly could anyone do?
Welcome to another episode of The Infographics Show- today we're asking the question, what
if superman was a serial killer?
First we're going to discuss ways Superman could kill using each of his available powers,
then we'll discuss how Superman may be brought to justice by our modern technology.
No cheating with kryptonite lasers or anything of the sort, but rather we'll just be exploring
the question, can superman be realistically stopped?
If Superman was a serial killer, he'd definitely have a variety of powers to choose from with
which to perpetuate his mass murders.
We're assuming of course that Superman would be a bit more... well, super, than the garden
variety serial killer.
Why go for a body count of one or two at a time when you can shuffle dozens of souls
off this mortal coil at the same time?
So, just how could Superman achieve some high kill ratios with each of his powers?
Today's Forecast: Windy With A Chance of Death
One of superman's iconic powers is his incredible lungs, which lets him do everything from hold
his breath for hours to shoot blasts of high speed or even super chilled wind.
With such powerful lungs, how might superman look to use them for mass murder?
First is the most obvious solution, Superman could just cruise around the city looking
for people to Fus-Roh-Dah into oblivion like some wayward dragonborn.
While it would admittedly be absolutely hilarious to see people ragdolled halfway across the
city, it would be devastating for anyone caught in superman's super air blasts.
But why blow when you can suck?
As has been shown numerous times, Superman can inhale huge quantities of air, far in
excess of what his actual lung capacity should be able to hold.
Instead of shouting people to death, Superman could simply fly into densely crowded spaces
such as a subway or an office building, and suck all the air out of the room.
This would only work in a limited area, though in a small enough space the vacuum Superman
creates would instantly shred the lungs of anyone caught inside it.
Even when the air rushes back in this would lead to pretty quick asphyxiation as people's
shredded lungs are unable to transfer any oxygen into the bloodstream.
But Superman's breath can also chill, though the laws of physics have a thing or two to
say about that since high speed air would actually heat up to incredible temperatures.
However we're going to stick with canon and just say that his breath freezes, you can
leave your complaints to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the comments section below.
With his super chill breath Superman could score a pretty amazingly high kill count if
he used it at the right place.
The Three Gorges Dam for example is the world's largest dam that spans the length of the Yangtze
river in China.
Notorious for its devastating floods, the Yangtze has killed hundreds of thousands throughout
history, and is widely considered one of the most dangerous rivers in the world.
Yet the Three Gorges Dam helped tame this deadly river and bring power to millions.
But if the dam ever failed, the resulting flood is estimated to kill millions of helpless
Chinese who reside in the lowland areas the river frequently flooded.
The dam is capable of killing so many people that US military war planners have debated
targeting the dam with air strikes in the case of war, as the resulting casualties might
be the equivalent of having used a weapon of mass destruction.
For Superman this presents an amazing opportunity to score some super kill counts.
With his icy breath Superman could freeze the top of the Yangtze which is backed up
by the dam, adding millions of tons of weight pushing down on the damn as the frozen water
is prevented from flowing past the giant turbines.
When it eventually fails the torrent of water will wash millions of Chinese to an early
grave.
The Sky Is Falling
Superman's most obvious superpower is his super strength, and with so much strength
there's very little supes couldn't do to mass murder a bunch of people.
Sure, he could just fly up and rip an airplane out of the sky, then hurl that airplane into
a cruise ship full of people for double bonus points, but that's a lot of work for relatively
small body counts.
To really score high on the victim kill meter, Superman needs to turn to physics and take
a brief trip into space.
In the 30th of June 1908, the Tunguska forest in Russia was flatted in an area the size
of Washington DC.
While modern conspiracy theorists claim that the explosion was the result of a secret Nikola
Tesla weapon or some other such nonsense, the likely culprit was an air burst of an
asteroid or comet between 200 to 620 feet (60-190 meters) in diameter.
While the explosion is not thought to have killed any humans, it did absolutely flatten
770 square miles (2000 square km) of forest.
The Tunguska asteroid was not very big in astronomical standards, and its well known
that even larger asteroids and comets regularly whiz by the earth.
Yet even this shrimpy asteroid managed to release an energy equivalent of ten to fifteen
megatons of TNT.
Superman could take a page from history and simply fly up into space, turn the earth into
his own personal skeet range and simply bombard every major city center with asteroids.
Such an attack over Washington DC today would instantly kill over 700,000 people, and old
supes would be able to periodically send fiery rocks of death at every population center
with complete impunity.
But as much fun as turning the earth into his personal bowling alley would be, Superman
could do something far worse for all life on earth.
In one comic Superman and Wonder Woman are shown lifting The Spectre, a being which weighs
as much as all the conscious thoughts in all creation.
Which is a lot.
That means that moving an object such as the moon would be well within the bounds of what
Superman is capable of.
Moving the moon a bit closer to the earth would have devastating effects not seen since
many hundreds of millions of years ago.
Every year the moons moves about 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) away from the earth, but hundreds
of millions of years ago the moon was so close to the earth that the force of its gravity
created incredible tidal effects, making waves that reached up hundreds of feet and would
travel hundreds of miles inland.
Because the moon was far closer to the earth, it also orbited the planet quicker, meaning
that if Superman replaced the moon back in its baby orbit around the earth, we would
be scoured by titanic waves every eight hours or so.
Drive-by Death
Another of Superman's most iconic powers is his superspeed.
At times he is shown being as fast as The Flash himself, other times not.
For the sake of simplicity and because comic book writers literally have no sense of continuity,
we're just going to assume that Superman's top speed is the same as The Flash's in Justice
League of America #48.
In that issue The Flash rescues a city of half a million people in North Korea from
a nuclear detonation- AFTER the nuke has already gone off.
In less than a second he is able to grab 500,000 people, two at a time, and move them 35 miles
away.
Nevermind that he was basically just turning all those people into clouds of mist as their
bodies disintegrated from friction against the air they were rushing past.
This means that the Flash was moving about 13 million times the speed of light, or 8,718,016,177,000,000
miles per hour (14,030,287,026,356,766 kmh).
So now we've set a top speed for Superman.
What if Superman wanted to use his super speed to punch each and every person on the planet's
head clean off?
With 7.53 billion people on the earth, superman could achieve the feat in less than one second.
In the span of time it takes you to blink, Superman will already have punched your head
off, as well as your mom and dad's head off, and all of your living relatives.
But why punch heads off when you can just affect global climate by running in circles.
Moving at such incredible speeds would create so much friction that it would heat the air
to temperatures not seen since the Big Bang, which would immediately disintegrate the molecules
of all matter around Superman into their most basic elementary particles- particles that
physicists today keep discovering by smashing atoms into each other at the speed of light.
Many scientists would be grateful to superman for the chance to study what matter is really
made of, or they would be if approaching superman didn't instantly disintegrate them into a
bunch of up and down quarks.
If Superman went slower though, he could generate massive amounts of heat which would in turn
severely upset weather patterns around the world.
If he did this in the Arctic he could save us all the problem of trying to convince some
very ignorant politicians that global warming is in fact a real thing, by just completely
melting the ice caps.
A quick trip down to Antarctica and he could melt all the ice there too, flooding the world
and revealing the ancient cities of Lovecraft's Elder Things and the horrors hidden within.
Ok, so that's a lot of ways Superman could become an unstoppable serial killer, now we
move on to the next part of our show where we ask the question- how could we stop him?
The short answer is, we couldn't.
Our only real option to stop Superman would be to just kill ourselves before he gets a
chance to.
Serial killers notoriously prey on the fear and panic of their victims, and have historically
reacted very poorly when their victims simply weren't afraid or refused to show their fear.
If we all simply killed ourselves not only do we rob Superman of victims, but we would
take the joy of serial killing out of him in the same time, turning him from his evil
ways.
Sadly, there'd be nobody left to witness the newer, kinder superman because we'd all be
dead.
But if that's too fatalistic for you, then sure, we suppose that we could try nuclear
weapons, though as has so often been shown they have little if any effect on Superman.
Remember, this is a superhero so powerful that its creators had to invent an entire
alien crystal just to write stories that have any drama in them at all.
Without the invention of kryptonite every Superman comic would just be, Superman meets
villain, Superman punches villain into outer space.
Those would be no fun to read- although we would absolutely watch a feature length movie
of nothing but Superman punching random people into space.
Hollywood, if you're watching, take note.
Short of kryptonite, or magic, another of Superman's weaknesses, we simply couldn't
do anything to stop a rampaging, serial murdering Superman.
At least not with our real world technology.
Which brings us back to our original plan- everybody just kills themselves.
We can defeat superman by simply beating him to the punch, but short of that, there's no
stopping the big blue boyscout.
What other ways could Superman turn to mass murder?
How could we really stop him?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video Sueprman vs The Predator - Who Would Win!
Thanks for watching, and, as always, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe.
See you next time!