Honestly I’d love the power of being able to see any point in space and time. To witness the birth and death of stars and look around alien shores. To peek at the absurdity of the diversity of life eons before human history.
I’d probably go mad pretty fast but hey, it’d be pretty neat.
This is actually one of the things I would wish for if I had a magic lamp.
The ability to grant or take away perfect immortality to any living thing.
To be the most intelligent human to ever exist (so far)
The ability to see any point in space and time.
You’re right that it would likely have psychological ramifications (probably end up like Brandon Stark from GOT). But it would be fun for a couple thousand years.
Can you imagine how it would be like to see Theia about to hit proto-Earth just above you? Then “pause” the scene and look at it a few hundred kilometres away…
Or just peek inside the clouds of the gas giants…
Or the depths of frozen moon oceans…
Or stars being slingshot’ed near supermassive black holes …
Dang, it almost feels like a curse to know how big and vast the universe is while being confined inside a single body for a few decades…
In classic philosophy, this is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Gyges, in which Plato suggests that we’d be tempted to wrongdoing if we had the capacity to evade harmful consequences.
In 21st century moral philosophy, it’s more complicated than that. What we do with super-powers depends largely on our need. Normally, someone doesn’t steal resources when they have the means to attain them legitimately, but it’s our precarity or even poverty and hunger that drives us to steal, largely due to a society that recognizes property rights without assuring the safety and provisions of those who, well, don’t have any property. Precarity leads to renegade behavior, or as our states like to call it crime.^†^
So what happens when our ring-wearer finds themselves no longer in desperate need for stuff. This is the point of opportunity, where they can choose to use their power to rescue others from their misfortune, or they can isolate themselves from the squalor and bask in their own luxury.
One of the terrible secrets of moral philosophy is that no code of ethics, no religious commandment really matters. Most of us do what we feel like anyway, whether right and well meaning or wrongful and malicious. It just happens that we’re generally affable. That is, eons of evolution have instilled us with social values and the drive to engage peaceably when we’re not starving, and as such we allow total strangers to merge into our lane in traffic and try to telegraph our actions to keep other drivers at ease. When we’re well fed, healthy, warm, well rested and getting laid once in a while, we’re pretty easy to get along with. Keep a whole society in precarity, however, and it turns into social unrest and eventually civil war.
But then, when we’re driven by fear, we tend to think of others in antagonistic terms. Our billionaires have the capacity to improve society on a global scale. Musk or Bloomberg could adopt Haiti and drive the nation into industrial development, and have his statue in bronze adorn every state park countrywide. Not big on that opportunity? $30 Billion will feed the world (That is, all the humans in it) including processing and freight. Less than that could create a free high-speed WiFi internet infrastructure that covers all populated parts of the world (Including Mt. Everest, but not much of the Himalayas).
But none of them do. Not one billionaire is thinking about their legacy on this scale. Rather, they’re all very miserly with their charitable works, and then engage in them only for marketing and tax-haven purposes. Considering how consistent billionaires are about this, the Ring of Gyges may be that corrupting an influence after all.
Superhero narratives are typically about a desperate need and someone with the means to fulfill it in daring fashion. OSP noted The Scarlett Pimpernel who rescued aristocrats from the guillotine during the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. (Superheroes are not always on the side of aging well). When someone has super-powers and acts in a more immoral fashion, we regard them instead as monsters. Case in point, Count Dracula or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
SPIRIT: This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom
SCROOGE: Have they no refuge or resource?
SPIRIT:〈mocking Scrooge〉Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?
† I generally avoid using the word crime unless talking specifically about things that are illegal as decided by regional law. Many acts of wrongdoing are not criminal. Many crimes are not immoral. Same with sin which are proscriptions according to religious institutions.
“Let me tell you something about Hu-mons, nephew. They’re a wonderful, warm, sociable people. But take away their creature comforts, take away their food, their holosuites, and put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same warm, wonderful people…will become as nasty and vicious as the most bloodthirsty Klingon.”
Our open office of five desks and 3-5 people was on the second floor; right outside our office was a short hall of 3 individual offices, but the people in the offices were often out of the office. We'd mostly all worked together for years by then, got along well, and were pretty informal.
We had an absolutely wonderful (if slightly ditzy) girl named Chrissy join the office one summer, fresh out of high school. She liked to dress up very stylishly - not like office wear, but like a popular cheerleader might wear to class, if that makes sense?
Anyway, we're in the office one day, and Chrissy ducks out, then comes back in like one minute later, face absolutely flaming red. We ask what's wrong and she could only stammer in response. She eventually got herself under control and said:
She'd stepped out to run some papers downstairs and, as she left the office, she felt her pantyhose start to sag, so she quickly ducked into one of the side offices, pulled up her skirt, and pulled her hose back up to the top of her thighs. When she looked up, there was a window-washer hanging off the side of the building, slowly and calmly wiping his squeegee back and forth across the window, looking directly at her and smiling kindly. She stared at him, mouth open, while he continued his slow, calm, almost meditative squgeeing across the window. As soon as her mind processed "unexpected man outside second floor window", she bolted back to us.
It was literally like something directly out of a sitcom.
You would think so, but once you get used to it, you’d be like, ‘What’s the hurry? I can be there immediately’ and start traveling at the nick of the moment, and then eventually start showing up late, even with the superpower. If you were late to begin with, you’d be late all the way through. I know I would be.
There is so much that I would want to do that requires time to be “flowing” that the only things I could probably get done would be some cleaning, reading, and some rest.
Food doesn’t cook without time. Computers and other electronics need time to process inputs. If I want to get anywhere I’m walking.
The only immoral stuff might be some shoplifting, maybe. But even then I wouldn’t really be motivated if I could afford whatever it was otherwise.
There is so much that I would want to do that requires time to be “flowing”…
If we’re talking about physics-accurate superpowers, please add partial blindness - photons are frozen in place, they can’t reach your eyelids, unless you walk into them. And suffocation due to completely still air.
Photons move at the speed of light relative to the observer, regardless of the observer’s speed.
If we’re going physics-accurate, you wouldn’t be blind, though you’d probably be a black hole (for a very brief time, before you evaporated due to Hawking radiation).
I’d definitely fuck with people who were being shitty, not straight up evil, just mischievous:
Park in a bike lane? Oh no, all your valve stems have disappeared!
Attack someone? Your shoelaces are now tied to your belt, which is also now fastened around your arms.
Steal from a person? Your shoes are now hanging from a lamp post and the stuff you stole got unstolen.
Be a shady company that screws everyone over? Your infrastructure keeps breaking and funds keep disappearing, how weird!
Invade Ukraine and commit hundreds of war crimes? Oh no, you fell out of a window and also I have now been “recruited” by the CIA because they found out about my ability to pause time. Now I’m forced to do morally ambiguous things under the guise of national interests.
Oh shit, OP was right!
Also, hey Netflix: Hit me up if you wanna do a series, I know you’ll literally hire anyone. I do comedy too.
I was having lunch in the break room on the 23rd floor, vaguely watching the world go by. Two blocks away, a car drove up to the top level of a parking garage, a bunch of guys got out, and cut through the chain link fence separating the garage building from the roof of the building next door. “Well, that’s unusual behaviour “, I thought, and kept watching. When they moved over to that roof and started to break in to the rooftop door, I realised that it was the bank down the street. Called the cops and gave them a running commentary. Eventually when they showed up I got to see the tussle between the cops and the bad guys on the roof. Felt like a tv show.
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