- This is Power.
- [Narrator] Getting super powers in a comic book is easy.
Just find the right spider.
It's even easier when your next superpower is a pill away
like in "Project Power", but is it even possible?
What would mere humans need
to suddenly have superhuman powers?
The scientists we talked to agreed,
in most cases it would take a huge leap
in our knowledge of biology and technology,
but they still gave us their best guess
on the path to get to each of four superpowers.
(dramatic music)
Whether you're a cop on a beat
or just someone who has the uncanny ability
to find himself in a shootout,
bulletproof skin is a handy power
to have on the streets of New Orleans,
because as numbers and movie fight scenes remind us,
the human body isn't great at handling bullets.
The sources are all over the place,
but a bullet only needs to travel somewhere
between 148 and 197 feet per second to break skin.
If it clocks in at 203, there's tissue damage.
That might sound fast,
but even bullets fired up in the air
in celebration can come down at speeds
of over 600 feet per second.
So for something like this,
our skin needs to be tougher.
That may not be possible with keratin,
the protein currently responsible
for the toughness of our skin, fingernails and hair,
but our experts saw possible replacement for it
in an unlikely source,
the ironclad beetle.
Its exoskeleton is so tough that it can shrug off a stomp.
You apparently have to drill a hole in one to display them
so it's probably good for hallway fights too.
And the fibrous material behind its power is called chitin.
It's like keratin, but much stronger,
boosted by magnesium, calcium, zinc,
and chitin is able to handle many, many times
its own weight, according to scientists.
But there are problems.
Maybe the biggest one is that humans don't produce any.
Technology does have an answer, but it's a strange one.
Scientists engineered goats that can produce milk
with spider silk in it,
and as if that wasn't enough,
they combined the resulting spider silk
with leftover skin from plastic surgery
to test bulletproof skin.
- That's cool, right?
- [Narrator] It could only stop bullets
at less than full speed
so we should probably keep working on that pill.
Some of you might be thinking,
isn't being a human torch already possible?
And it's true that there are occasionally suspected cases
of spontaneous combustion going all the way back
to the 1600s
It's usually when someone finds the burnt remains
of a person in an otherwise undamaged room
with no clear explanation of what caused the fire,
but there are no shortcuts to superpowers.
Scientists think many of those mysteries are explainable
via something called the wick effect.
Like a candle, clothing can soak up melted fat
and deliver it steadily to a flame
for a long controlled burn,
but you still need an outside source of fire
and probably an accelerant.
So to pull off flame,
our experts said it would take
an entire new matrix of capabilities.
First, you have to do something about the human body,
which is relatively hard to set on fire.
After all, we're full of water.
It takes two or more hours at 1600 degrees
to cremate one of us.
So we need some accelerant on our skin.
Weirdly enough, there's actually
a relatively common process called ketosis
brought on by everything from alcoholism to low-carb diets
that causes the formation
of a highly flammable chemical called acetone.
If you could divert the electrical charge
that your nervous system sends outside the body,
then perhaps.
But even if you somehow lit yourself on fire,
there are still real problems.
Humans might not easily light on fire,
but we don't handle heat well.
Things get bad at 104 degrees,
but internal temperatures of 120 degrees
can directly kill our cells.
The animal kingdom only has mixed solutions.
The echidna has been observed dropping its core temperature
up to 45 degrees to withstand the heat of forest fires.
But unfortunately for aspiring crime fighters,
they only do it by going into something called a torpor,
a kind of automatic shutdown mode.
Pain management through painkillers
would also be crucial.
On the end, our experts believe
that the most likely way to get to the human flame
is a combination of a suit that produces fire
and protects from heat, biotechnology and extensive training
in smoke avoidance.
Kind of like this stuntman.
- [Director] Three, two, one, go!
- [Narrator] Unlike some of the other powers,
changing into a giant maybe somewhat attainable,
but there are a few catches.
After all, gigantism
is a naturally-occurring phenomenon in animals.
In individual cases,
it's usually caused by a condition known as acromegaly
in which a malfunctioning pituitary gland
produces too much growth hormone
and whole species can have gigantism,
especially island species
that had no evolutionary pressure to be small.
But synthetic methods like human growth hormone
are already used to grow size and muscle mass,
manipulating proteins like follistatin and myostatin
could help muscles grow to superhuman size too.
But here comes the first problem.
HGH only increases bone length
if administered before growth plates in bones fuse.
In other words, before puberty.
So, according to our experts,
instantaneous morphing would be impossible
without some miraculous ability
to fuse and unfuse growth plates.
The second problem is that there's an inherent limit
on being a giant.
As size increases the relationship between
volume and surface area changes.
There's relatively more volume, less surface area.
That impacts the body in so many ways
from heat regulation to the amount legs can carry.
It's partly why real sufferers
of acromegaly face considerable health issues.
One way to get around it would be to reengineer the body,
playing with different materials
and proportions get thicker.
So the goal is attainable, but so far out of reach.
If humans wanna see the power of invisibility in action,
they only need to turn their gaze towards technology
and the animal kingdom.
At least one sort of invisibility cloak already exists.
It's composed of sheets of lenticular lenses
that refract light around a target and, yeah,
it seems to work.
And nature gives us
a few different avenues for invisibility.
Squid and octopus use a combination of pigment,
which has a fixed hue and light-reflecting cells
to blend into their surroundings.
But the chameleon relies solely
on the presence of nanocrystals in their skin cells.
By relaxing or contracting layers of their skin,
they rearrange those crystals changing
the way light reflects off of them and thus color.
So according to our experts,
for this to happen, instead of you just running around
in your underwear,
you need to borrow those ingenious adaptations.
Light-reflecting crystals in your skin cells,
plus the mechanic ability to move them somehow.
But chameleons change colors based on moods,
so experts also suggested the need
for specialized photo receptors
that can scan the environment and notify the skin.
So out of everything we've seen,
not being seen may be the closest to reality.
Invisibility, flame generation,
giant growth, bulletproof skin,
none are quite as easy as they may seem.
And given all the violence, chaos,
and explosions they cause in "Project Power",
it might be better to keep them safe
in our comics, movies, and imaginations.
- What's the most powerful animal on the planet?
- [Narrator] Art is right that a pistol shrimp,
which can create a high velocity jet of water
that's louder than a gunshot is recognized
as one of the world's deadliest creatures.
- But it hits so fast.
- [Narrator] But weirdly it's not the only shrimp
on that list.
The six-inch mantis shrimp
has the world's most powerful punch.
Accelerating at 10,000 times the force of gravity,
it's capable of shattering aquarium glass.
I call dibs on that power.