Gotta love the movies where someone is falling only to be caught by a superhero who has accelerated to ludicrous speeds to catch the fallen and intercepts their trajectory at 90° just before hitting the ground. So the victims goes from 150mph down to some crazy speed at a 90° vector to their original path after being slammed into by superhero.
They’re so dead.
But the superhero Suspension of Disbelief Field extends to secondary characters in the story.
You’re not wrong but there is one thing: hitting the ground is an instantaneous impact with a hard surface. Being swooped in some direction is a relatively slower process - the swooper is softer than concrete, and the change in velocity is spread over a longer period of time (even if it’s still “instantaneous” to the casual observer, it can be an “instant” 100 times longer than ground impact).
It’s like landing on a mattress vs a hard floor - from a high enough height both are deadly, but I’d still pick the mattress.
I also assumed the swooper still decelerates you a little even if not by much. If you’re falling at 50m/s as you are trying to slow your fall by taking a skydiver pose, and a superhero caches you midair, you could decelerate over half a second and stop moving within 12 meters while still only experiencing 10g.
12m is pretty tall but not insane in a superhero style piece of fiction where people may be dropped out the sky or from tall buildings. If you want to increase that g-force to the maximum survivable limit of near 100g (in theory), you’d only need to go from terminal velocity to 0m/s in 1.5 meters. Being reasonable, being caught 5 meters above the ground would be enough for most people to survive without major reprocussions, and is always better than hitting the ground.
You ever ran into someone before?
Flesh is still a lot softer than concrete
Unless it’s Superman.
Yeah, he’s a man of steel
With balls of steel
So is water but it’ll still kill you if you’re falling at terminal velocity.
Until you hit the bones
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Are we talking superman bones or regular bones? Because I don’t think super man bones will break.
Transformer movies were awful with this. Human falling hundreds of feet to the pavement. But wait! They’ll hit a giant steel hand instead! Much better. Soft.
I guess technically this could work if the robot lowers the hand at the same speed they were falling and then decelerates gently, but I bet that’s not what happens in these movies.
Isn’t this the story of the original Gwen Stacy? Spiderman tries to save her, but does exactly this and the force on her body kills her anyway.
It’s been a long, long time since I have read the comics but iirc, it was a defining point in the spiderman canon.
It wasn’t originally. It was essentially the scene from the first Spider Man movie where Goblin makes Spidey swoop in to save her, but she was already dead.
They retconned it later to make it so Spidey killed her, which is a better story.
It’s the other way around, actually.
In The Amazing Spider-Man #125 (Oct. 1973), Marvel Comics editor Roy Thomas wrote in the letters column that “it saddens us to have to say that the whiplash effect she underwent when Spidey’s webbing stopped her so suddenly was, in fact, what killed her. In short, it was impossible for Peter to save her. He couldn’t have swung down in time; the action he did take resulted in her death; if he had done nothing, she still would certainly have perished. There was no way out.” Source
The comic (#121) is ambiguous though. There is really no way for the reader to know whether she was dead before her neck was snapped, Green Goblin certainly seems to think so (but he is hardly a reliable source). But snapping her neck certainly would have killed her anyway.
I didn’t think it was ambiguous at all. The word “snap” is printed at her neck when it happens.
If you read my comment, I said it’s ambiguous if she was already dead when her neck was snapped, not that her neck was in fact snapped.
I’m disagreeing. The ambiguity was retconned later because Marvel didn’t want to commit to Spider-Man “causing” her death.
In the original comic, she is alive and looks like she’s in a state of shock according to Peter. Goblin even threatens to kill her, further confirming she is alive. She gets pushed over the edge of the bridge, and he neck is snapped when the web stops her fall. The clear intent in the story telling is that she is alive until the snap. You even quote Roy Thomas stating as such in print a few episodes later.
OK, now I understand what you’re getting at and I don’t disagree actually. I also think that the original intent was that she died of a broken neck but the ambiguity is there, whether by design or accident, which makes other theories and later retconning possible. I personally suspect they made it a bit ambiguous to give themselves a bit of a back door in case the public would react too harshly to Spidey accidentally kiling his girlfriend. One has to remember how unexpected and grim this was at the time, it was a huge risk to take for the writers (Stan Lee even said later that he was tricked into OKing it while he was packing for a trip…not sure I believe that though).
It would have been easy to make her perhaps say something or make a sound when she’s lying on the edge of the bridge, or make Peter feel her pulse to confirm she was alive before the fall. As the scene unfolds now, and the way she is drawn when lying on the edge (she looks dead), I feel its unlikely that wasn’t intentional. But this is ultimately a matter of interpretation.
He used his web to grab her from above. I think her neck snaps from the whiplash?
I just rewatched the scene on YT, and he’s actually just a bit too late, and her head slams into the ground with full force.
I was thinking of the comic, but I guess it makes sense tocdo it that way in a movie meant for kids. A neck snapping might be a bit grim
And whipping a skull into concrete isn’t grim?
I don’t experience it myself, so I couldn’t say why it is the case, but I’ve known people who felt more freaked out or unsettled by things like death via necks snapping. If I were to try and guess, maybe it is easier to process direct impact causing lethal trauma than something that seems less… sonething? Idk. Maybe someone who has experienced this can explain.
This is correct.
If we are talking emma stone, she is specifically shown hitting her head during the whiplash which is what kills her
I was referring to the original version in the comic. I haven’t followed all the revisions and alternate universes to know the variations.
I guess it wasn’t quite her tempo?
J. Jonah Jameson? How did you end up with a drumstick?
Did you go through a portal? Was it a spirit portal?
He just clicked his heels and transported from Oz.
I mean, when a person suddenly falls, there’s really just no way to save them, is there?
There is. You just need to spread out the deceleration from a few centimeters to a few meters in the falling direction, and make sure the force is being applied all over their body, not just a few spots (think bouncy castle vs rebar).
There is a video of someone jumping from a plane with no parachute into cardboard boxes
I’m the wrong guy to ask, I haven’t a clue about comic character lore and canon.
Generally when people postike this, on an open forum, they’re asking readers in general. It wasn’t directed specifically at you, but was a response to what you said.
That’s exactly what I thought when I was watching that scene with that superfast dude in X Men where he saves a bunch of people by carrying them away from an explosion. They must accelerate from 1 to 1000 km/h in a mere second.
The scene is still awesome, but I don’t think anyone would be alive after that.
He would have created his own explosions just getting there either from the friction of moving all that air out of his way so he didn’t collide with the atoms, or from the nuclear forces involved in colliding his atoms with the air’s (and still creating a lot of friction in the process).
It would be like that light speed baseball pitch question and answer that ends up killing everyone in the stadium with a nuclear blast.
And Xavier would have done one of those himself in X2 when he freezes time at the mall… Maybe, actually I’m not clear if his ability is a time stop or if he did a mind control on everyone and made them stand still. There’s another one like that in Logan, though Logan is able to fight through it, which kinda makes it even less clear exactly what he’s doing. Powers!
The final paragraph is amazing.
Yeah, Xavier can’t stop time, he can just mind control people into standing still.
Yeah, with the Flash, there’s the “speedforce” excuse, but quicksilver has never had that kind of effect given as part of his power set.
I hate the flash as a superhero… The dude is literally unbeatable, but he just chooses to like, not really bother.
Have you never been so lazy you watch yourself get punched at a snails pace?
Man’s literally the least lazy person alive…
He just can’t care anymore. Life is suffering.
It’s like one of the opening scenes from The Boys.
splat
Sorry Lois Lane, superman just made you into a bony pink mist.
Was thinking of the Airplane Rescue, as Homelander breaks down why everyone’s fucked no matter what they do.
God, I know people love that show, but I really hate that.
Why? Wasn’t he saying you couldn’t lift an airplane with something so small as hands?
“What am I going to push my feet against, air?” is a good line, even if its a bit factious in the setting.
“Rescue”
I mean, for the first minute it looked like things were going well.
Isn’t it well known that if you’re near Superman you"get" some of his powers. So him coming in to save you like this would be ok because you’d have some of his invincibility.
You’re saying if I have an unconscious superman, and I wear him as a backpack, I can rob banks?
Only one way to find out! Now, how do I knock Superman unconscious?
Kyrptonite and chloroform
Kryptoform
You don’t need to be superman to rob a bank tho
True, but it would be much easier if you were.
Canonically Superman s 6’3” tall and weighs 235 lbs, so if you’re able to wear able to wear that as a backpack, hats off to you bud.
I get some of his powers when he’s close to me, so it’ll be easier to carry him.
The cleanest explanation was that he’s Superman because his powers give a psychokinetic field around his body that can absorb kinetic and other energy. It’s what makes him invulnerable except for kryptonite that can just bypass and negate that field. It can also extend over other people so they can lift along and it can absorb the energy from the fall.
Alright, that’s enough nerding out.
The best part of the theory is it really does answer quite a lot of problems with his power set.
It’s hand waving comic nonsense in the end still, but in a better way than “because Speed Force”
I believe there is the unified theory of Superman’s powers where he actually has the ability to manipulate molecular structure of the object he touches.
He is shown picking up cruise ships and the ship doesn’t split in two, that’s because he’s strengthening the structure and making it lighter as he lifts it.
He causes the air around him to thicken and squeeze him through the sky.
He causes the air touching his eye balls to turn into hot laser beams.
So when Supes catches a falling human, he instantly makes them invulnerable to the sudden stop
All this is done unconsciously on his part.
The most famous (and internally consistent) version is control over inertia, not molecular structure.
I don’t agree with it because inertia alone can’t explain everything, but I think it’s the right track, in the form of some kind of general control over universal forces that manifests in a way he intuitively understands (unless we want to argue that all energy has inertia just as all mass does, in which case okay fair enough)
His varying power levels are both dependent on how much energy he has stored from the sun, because it is a specific EM wavelength that he can absorb and store, and how much control over the forces he can deliberately or intuitively exert.
This implies that his most powerful form is not the one that punches the hardest, but the one that realizes he doesn’t need to punch at all.
I always thought it would be neat if his super strength also meant very fine control, so he could do stuff like decelerate a plane with his bare hands, even if that’d be equal to an ant catching a paper mache egg filled with lead. Maybe when he catches someone, he manually decelerates each piece of them bit by bit, controlling where the waves of force go until they all cancel out and have zero inertia.
Also why he not immediately naked when going to superspeed in the outfit. It’s protected by the force bubble around him.
Cool Meaney (O’Brien) reversed the polarity on the inertial dampener.
Hope that was just a typo. “Colm”, lol.
Autowrong fixed my “typo…”
It is like the trope of the explosion behind the hero.
I mean if you catch the person like you catch an american football ball, it should greatly reduce the effect of the impact.
Moments before
What’s the name of this comic and/or the artist. I recognize it from the fortune teller “I see you alone in an apartment with a lot of X… Jesus that’s a lot of X” meme.
Thank your for sharing that!! I absolutely love their sense of humor! Darrrrrrrrk but it’s really funny stuff!
In that case, you’ll probably enjoy the Perry Bible Fellowship as well.
Thank you! I remember the food fight one but I never knew where that came from. So many talented cartoonists lol
I disagree, the difference in deceleration from hitting concrete vs being caught could make a difference.
If Superman (or whoever) uses the remaining distance between you and the ground to reduce the impulse on your body. But they also have to be careful about their speed coming in to grab you, because they could easily substitute your impact with the ground for an impact with them.
Superman could do it. Spiderman could not.
Spiderman could web the falling person from above like a bungee cord, or even catch them in a safety net style web.
Tell that to Gwen Stacy.
That was a bit of a deep cut for me, but TIL.
But he’d have to do this before she is 2 feet above the gound.
Eh, Spiderman is both insanely fast and strong compared to a normal person, still. He can canonically catch cars and punch concrete and the like. Not sure how much spidey sense plays a role, but he’s nigh impossible to shoot, too. He’d likely be capable of the feat just with his strength and speed, let alone his other options.
Superman is still waaaay stronger and faster but he’s pretty much cheating even for a super hero. lol
I think their thought was if Spider-Man came swinging in for the catch, at that point it’s basically out of his control how hard he hits. But he could potentially save the person via other spidey means
Ahhh yea, the cliche swing and nab IS a pretty tough one. Not sure he’d be accelerating anyone slowly enough mid-air! At least Superman can just kinda’ will himself what ever direction, or how ever his flying works.
Can Superman rip off his own head?
Can god heat a burrito so hot even he can’t eat it ?
Asking the hard hitting questions!
See, that’s how you know people here have never touched grass. Otherwise they’d know how big of a difference it makes to fall on grass vs concrete. All over a few mm of yield.
Also anecdotally I’ve seen videos of people catching falling children (back in the day in/r/DadReflexes). It works, empirically.
Penny: Yes, I know men can’t fly.
Sheldon: No, no let’s assume that they can. Lois Lane is falling, accelerating at an initial rate of 32ft per second, per second. Superman swoops down to save her by reaching out two arms of steel. Ms. Lane, who is now traveling at approximately 120 miles per hour, hits them, and is immediately sliced into three equal pieces.
Leonard: Unless Superman matches her speed and decelerates.
Sheldon: In what space, sir, in what space? She’s two feet above the ground. Frankly, if he really loved her, he’d let her hit the pavement. It would be a more merciful death.
Superman should just fly completely under Lois, grab her and instantly match her speed, and crash through the concrete and the layers below (protecting her with his Super Bod), decelerating slowly enough that Lois is saved without harm.
Yeah, she still dies. He would have to actively dig that concrete away, in quite a high speed.
Couldn’t he just fly in the direction while protecting her from the ground he’s currently going through? I don’t think he needs to actually dig with his hands to go through anything
Superman just needs to push the earth away from Lois, duh
I agree with you. He can fly down through the rock, slowing himself slowly.
Also, Superman is not real. Other things in that world may also be different.
Your forgetting about his Tactile Telekinesis.
My favorite thing like this, even though I love the movie, is The Iron Giant. His hand is fucking metal and he caught them like 6 ft before they hit the ground anyways.
I recall that scene. Didn’t he lower his hand as they fell into it so it slows them? I remember appreciating that detail when I saw it
Yes he does but… still. Like two stories onto metal lol.
Just a broken spine yo
I’ve had worse on a good night on the town 🤷
The sheer amount of cardio in panel 2
This is why Gwen Stacy’s death was so confusing to some people
Well in Spiderman’s case Gwen would’ve survived if she was caught before. Spidey’s web is stretchable so it would have decelerated her fall. It even stretched on catching her but she was too close to the floor and hit her head.
Is that in the movie? This is the image I have in my mind but I forgot that she hit her head. I think that’s not the case in the comics IIRC. Instead it’s unclear whether her neck was already snapped before she fell, or the late web catch caused the snap.
I read a fan theory somewhere that Superman’s actual powers are matter manipulation, able to change things like densities, speed, and energy with just a touch. It was interesting to think about.
How does the light from a different star give him all those powers? The original story is that the gamma rays from our star feed his cells, giving him super strength and speed. His power creep over the decades has truly become ridiculous.
Spiderman knows this all to well
What if he redirects the momentum by doing a cool flip
He needs to roll him. Redirect that energy by 90°
This is why all super heroes have inertial dampeners.
And so does the guy catching him
Incorrect. There are additional lateral acceleration forces due to SuperDude flying at the speed of sound to catch him. At least the sidewalk doesn’t need to be cleaned.
Also Billy now have two arms less than before.
This begs the question for me - at terminal falling speed, what’s the fastest you can decelerate to 0 and not sustain injury? And given that, how much more distance would you need to move?
Maybe a superhero can catch you, decelerate you to 0 over 3 inches and that’s good enough?
Human terminal velocity is roughly 56 m/s. Let’s say our superhero wants to decelerate the person at 10G, which should be survivable for a short period. That would be 0.6 seconds of deceleration over 48 m. That’s a short time but quite a long distance, let’s slow down faster:
20G -> 0.28 seconds, 24 m.
30G -> 0.19 seconds, 16 m.
50G -> 0.11 seconds, 9.6 m.
100G -> 0.057 seconds, 4.79 m.
200G -> 0.029 seconds, 2.45 m.
5000G -> 0.0011 seconds, 3.6 inches.
A 40 mph car crash in a modern car into a solid wall gives around 15G.
F1 driver David Purley survived a 180G crash in 1977.
In short, I don’t recommend catching someone with 3 inches to spare.
Something is wrong with your distance formula by a factor of 4 (you should have D=1/2 * V_0^2 / a) . Not that it changes anything in your conclusions.
Wow. Good math. Thanks!
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