How tall?
A person's raw strength primarily has to do with his size and mass. A fifty foot tall person would easily be able to pick up or turn over a car...whereas a normal 6 foot person could not.
So, my question is....how tall or big would a normal human being have to be to possess the same physical strength of Superman...who's strength is in the quintillions.
By the time you reach the size where your muscles were that powerful your body would weight too much to move. Basically you couldn't be a normal person at that point, your muscles would have to be far more efficient than a human being's.
But if you wish I'm pretty sure that if you assume your strength doubles every time your height triples you'd get a rough estimate of how big you'd have to be in a comic.
Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
By the time you reach the size where your muscles were that powerful your body would weight too much to move. Basically you couldn't be a normal person at that point, your muscles would have to be far more efficient than a human being's.But if you wish I'm pretty sure that if you assume your strength doubles every time your height triples you'd get a rough estimate of how big you'd have to be in a comic.
Yeah, I tried doing the math by like you are suggesting....but, you get to a point..that to pick up over a quintillion tons....your size would be to the point that the Earth would just be just spec of dust compared to your height...and since the Earth weighs over...I think a sextillion tons...it creates a paradox when doing the math..lol. If the Earth weighs that much and you dwarf it in size...then you should be able to move the planet without any problems....yet, by doing the math and doubling my strength...I still wouldn't be able to move the Earth even though it is just a dust particle compared to me..lol
So, I don't know..lol
...think you're missing the point there rebel. As size increases, the stress on your muscles increases exponentially. Eventually you'd just collapse from the burden, or would have to be ever-stronger to compensate for the added size. But while strength would increase in a normal human being as they grew, the stress of their mass would increase at a greater rate. Therefore, after a certain point (probably 15-20 ft) you would actually become less and less able to perform feats of strength, because it would be put toward simply maintaining the body's structure.
So it would literally be impossible under your initial stipulations. Your car-lifting example is probably about the upper limit that a normal human being could achieve if they continued to grow.
Originally posted by Southern_Rebel
Yeah, I tried doing the math by like you are suggesting....but, you get to a point..that to pick up over a quintillion tons....your size would be to the point that the Earth would just be just spec of dust compared to your height...and since the Earth weighs over...I think a sextillion tons...it creates a paradox when doing the math..lol. If the Earth weighs that much and you dwarf it in size...then you should be able to move the planet without any problems....yet, by doing the math and doubling my strength...I still wouldn't be able to move the Earth even though it is just a dust particle compared to me..lol
That's because of the measure of realism in the calculation, you aren't getting stronger fast enough. To calculate the way it would work in comics without any attempt at realism you can just make strength directly proportional to size.
If an average person is about 6 feet tall and lift 20lb with one hand without too much trouble in a purely comicbook setting he would have to be in the neighborhood of 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 feet tall (that 4*10^25). Or something like that. He could move it at a much smaller level but at the size I gave you moving the planet would be simple.
Of course none of this accounts for the fact that because it's suspended in space the Earth has no weight at all.
If you double a human or animal's height/length and everything stays proportionately the same, their weight increases by a factor of eight. An 8 foot tall guy is 8 times heavier than a 4 foot guy of similar proportions. But our strength only increases by about a factor of 4. So each time we double the height we become 1/2 as strong (although the total work (force X distance) we can goes up by 8X, since we move through twice the distance, so 2 times the distance X 4 times as strong = 8 times as much work. You may or not want to apply this to some form of comic physics if you choose.
When I was working on Bigfoot (Pym/Moonstone/Sasquatch) to enter into a previous high meta amalgam tourney I went onto a science forum to get some equations to find the strength of a person relative to their mass if a person could increase their height by will (I wrapped it up in some story that I wanted to know for a Sci-Fi story I was writing) but at the end of the day above a certain point, (50-60 feet) you're strength is less than you need to support your weight ... therefore if you grew above that height you wouldn't be able to even stand up.
Good thing my amalgam had control over gravity to compensate for that shortcoming.
🙂