scifi-and-realism

[scifi-and-realism]

Sources

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Alvarado, Sebastian. The Science of Marvel. Adams Media, 2019.

“Anatomy: Hand and Wrist.” Beth Israel Deconess Needham, Beth Israel Lahey Health, 2024, www.bidneedham.org/departments/orthopaedics/hand-program/anatomy-hand-and-wrist#:~:text=Thumb-,Bones,each%20of%20the%205%20digits.

Choi, Charles Q. “Gamma Rays: The Incredible, Hulking Reality.” NBCNews.Com, NBCUniversal News Group, 11 June 2008, www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna25099548.

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Fitzgerald, Barry W. “Could We Pause Our Lives for Hundreds of Years Just like Roundworms?.” BW Science, BW Science, 7 Aug. 2023, bwscience.com/could-we-pause-our-lives-for-hundreds-of-years-just-like-roundworms%EF%BF%BC/.

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Fitzgerald, Barry W. “Why Electromagnetic Radiation Won’t Give You Superpowers.” BW Science, BW Science, 4 Oct. 2022, bwscience.com/why-electromagnetic-radiation-wont-give-you-superpowers/.

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Hill, Kyle. “Superheroes Are Saving Us Wrong.” YouTube, Nerdist, 18 July 2019, youtu.be/K6NC_H970mg?si=mune2BmRoPt5FQc5.

Hill, Kyle. “Why You Don’t Want Super Speed.” YouTube, Nerdist, 19 Apr. 2018, youtu.be/FTEDZQaEIts?si=X0H-1DyHcnSwd8AE.

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[scifi-and-realism]

Like You Never Lost It

There are many individuals in comics that are amputees, Bucky Barnes, Roy Harper, Cyborg, and even Aquaman and Thor in some continuities. Yet they usually have a prosthetic limb (or in cyborg's case his almost entire body) that works just as well as the actual limb, like missing a limb isn't even an issue. In real life while there has been great strides in progress to make up for injuries, accidental, or genetic loss of limb, they are not anywhere near the level as fictional prosthetics. Let's explore how they differ.

Roy Harper, Green Arrow's past sidekick going by Arsenal, has a prosthetic arm that can turn into a variety of weapons in addition to a function as his arm/hand and seeing how guns or lasers could almost definitely be impossible to add to someone's prosthetic realistically, I am not going to touch on his or any other enhanced prosthetic. I am more so going to talk about the kind like the one above. Bucky Barnes (I would say spoiler but its likely you already read my Cryostasis post so you know he lives) fell down a mile deep ravine and most likely either broke his fall with his left arm, causing him to lose it complete up to the shoulder. Hydra wanting a weapon of war couldn't have an assassin with on arm, so they soldered (and I mean soldered) a new one onto him. As you can see in the gif the plates shift and move instead of muscles flexing and he can control it as much as it's his own hand.

Real life prosthetics are a different story, while lower limbs are easier to compensate for, as you just need to articulate an ankle and a knee, in arms you have the elbow a kin to the knee more you also have your hands, which consist of 27 bones. You have 8 carpals (bones in your wrist), five in your palm, and then the last 14 are in your fingers, all covered in tendons so you can have fine motor control. When losing an arm you lose all of that dexterity. With a prosthetic you can make something that looks like the limb you lost or you can have better functionality in something that looks much more mechanical, you sadly can't have both you need to compromise somewhere. Not to mention the more functional ones are still not much more than a claw or a few pincers for a hand and a pulley attached to the working shoulder to move the elbow and claw. There are more intensive ones that you can put sensors to pick up the electrical signals being sent out and measured to the real one to garner the desired reaction but most cases you have to set up a means to know what to do beforehand and program it that way you cannot simply tell it to move and it will. So, sadly despite all the innovations of getting closer to an on par prosthetic, there's no Hydra limbs

[scifi-and-realism]

Cracking Open a Cold One With The Boys

Cryostasis, when you freeze people, yet they live.

Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes are two individuals that have been cryogenically frozen. They both have the Super Soldier Serum, a substance that radically alters the individual down to their cells and DNA to work at superhuman levels of efficiency and endurance. One of the effects the serum has is they are able to survive temperatures that would kill a normal person. The image on the right depicts the Bucky in his cryogenic chamber that Hydra had him in off and on for 70 years. Steve’s ice trip to the future was brought on by Steve crashing Red Skull’s ship, the Valkyrie, into the Arctic ice as it was filled with bombs to be dropped on major US cities. Whether their frozen nap was interrupted or not, they both were defrosted and returned to a normal human core temperature with no decline in their functionality.

This story is not unheard of though, well the human aspect is, but not the rest of it. There was a study published in July of last year, stating that they discovered frozen samples of a new species of nematode, a roundworm specifically (shown below) back in 2018. Getting back to the lab they intended to study it, and they discovered it was still alive, despite being frozen. They did multiple tests and though radiocarbon dating they surmised that the roundworms were in the Siberian wilderness around 46,000 years ago and when the weather dropped below their tolerable level they essentially pressed pause on their metabolisms waiting for the weather to warm and the thing about Siberian permafrost is that it’s permanently frosty so the worms never experienced a temperature that would allow them to resume normal function until they were found by the scientists. They are able to produce a special specific sugar called trehalose. Without they would have just died. While we do not produce trehalose, the chief scientist says that it’s not unheard of to be able to apply the worms cryobiosis ability to humans somewhere in the distant future.

Speaking of humans, as far as we are able to preserve ourselves is only with small tissues or populations of cells, such as sperm or eggs, but they have to be carefully monitored to be far below -112 degrees Fahrenheit. Scaling up on what you freeze creates much difficulty as there is more that can change due to size and other factors. As much as we can do is very carefully freeze organs for 4-12 hours for transplantation before the organ is unusable. In the case of an entire body it is difficult to determine if one can resuscitate a one after it has been cooled 32 degrees for any period of time.

[scifi-and-realism]

The Flash’s disregard for Newton’s Laws of Motion

There have been many individuals that call themselves the Flash and the main four are: Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, Wally West, and Bart Allen.

If any of these speedsters were to accelerate without the Speed Force (basically an aura of plot armor) to their super speeds they would exert enough force on such a small area that they would snap their legs.

[scifi-and-realism]

Heroes aren’t actually saving people

Think of a movie scene where someone is falling. Do you have it?

They are falling and the hero luckily stops their decent feet from impact, perfectly unharmed. Yet, in reality, that heroic rush at the last second is the same fate as reaching the ground, only a few seconds earlier.

It's not the fall and velocity that kills you, it's the stop. It doesn't matter if it's the ground or a hero's arms, the

victim goes from dangerous speeds to no speed at all in less than a second. Newton's second law, F=MA, force equals mass times acceleration, dictates that the force that they will hit the ground with according to the speed and mass with which they are falling.

To truly save someone while they are falling, you must yourself decelerate so that you don't shock them with a change in acceleration, and then slow them down as quickly as possible without it being too jarring. The amount of time taken to slow them down reduces the force they feel with their change of speed, if it all happens too quickly then their brains and other organs will smash themselves in back of their skulls/body cavities.

[scifi-and-realism]

What radiation actually does, because it sure doesn’t give you superpowers

You have the Spider-Man, Hulk, and even Superman with radiation being a key part of their powers, yet in real life, they’d get mutations, and not the kind the X-Men have, the disease (and in some cases death) causing kind. 

We will start at the end of our list and work backward. 

In Superman canon, Clark Kent has many powers bestowed upon him by the way of being from the planet Krypton, one of these many powers being X-ray Vision. The way that his power works is a kin to the 3D glasses you’d get at a movie, as he engages a filter of sorts to change the way his eyes are receiving and processing inputs. He can see the world as if it was an X-ray image, yet in reality X-rays aren’t simply a filter or a snapshot. No, the process is much more complicated and hazardous. If he utilized X-rays the way that doctors do, he would be shooting radiation out of his eyes. X-rays are on the electromagnetic spectrum, energy in the form of waves categorized by energy and wavelength. X-rays are on the end that is categorized by higher frequency making it more penetrating than most other types.

X-ray imaging is when you go to the doctor and you are blasted by X-rays with a detector of X-rays behind you. As the rays pass through you, your bones and tissues absorb the X-rays, causing space on the detector that isn’t absorbed. The negative space is where your bones block the X-rays from going all the way through. The key component of the imaging is the detector, but if you are simply shooting the radiation out of your eyes, there's nothing to detect the rays making it not only useless to you, but extremely harmful to others. 

X-radiation is ionizing which denotes the ability to steal electrons away from their host atoms causing them to destabilize. This destabilization can cause mutations and cancer, which is why the X-ray technician leaves the room or has you put on a lead bib (if it is just a head X-ray) as they want to minimize exposure to X-rays as much as possible. 

The Hulk was a favorite of mine as a kid, as I thought it was fascinating how scientist Bruce Banner became the towering Hulk. How did he gain this ability in the first place? He was experimenting with gamma radiation for the army to weaponize them (in the MCU its in conjunction with the Super Soldier Serum trying to follow in the foot steps of Erskine, the serum’s creator) and one such experiment went wildly awry, and he was exposed to extremely dangerous levels of radiation. Like X-rays, gamma rays are on the more penetrative and dangerous end of the electromagnetic spectrum, only they have even highest energy and frequency in the spectrum. So Bruce was messing around with the most dangerous type of radiation and boy did he find out. 

An article written after doing calculations based on the Hulk, O’Connell and Cuthbert state that “A dose of 6 Gy is the maximum dose for which after death is expected. Bruce Banner experienced an absorbed dose of ~85 Gy, which would have likely resulted in immediate incapacitation and death, including severe hemorrhaging and central nervous system impairment.” A Gy is a thousand rads, which is the unit of measuring radiation, but regardless of notation, Bruce would have died 14 times over, such a lethality gives creed to why the army was having him research it.

[scifi-and-realism]

Human Torch? More like Human Torched

Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four has the ability to light himself on fire without external forces, and while humans have been able to do that... They've never survived their ignition. These instances are called spontaneous human combustion.

Before we talk about spontaneous human combustion, we first need to talk about the differences between Johnny's combustion and how the human body normally behaves.

Johnny can stay on fire for as long as he wants (as long as he has the energy), at whatever temperature he wants at least up till temps around a million degrees Fahrenheit.

In a paper written about cremation, Bohnert and his coauthors, state that "It was found that at temperatures between 1238 and 1490°F the body showed the 'pugilistic attitude' (an extremely flexed boxing stance) after about 10 minutes. After 20 minutes the calvaria was free from any soft tissue and fissures of the tabula externa could be noticed. The body cavities became visible after approximately 30 minutes, so that the organs were exposed.

Forty minutes after cremation had started, the internal organs were severely shrunken and showed a net-like or sponge-like structure. After about 50 minutes the extremities were destroyed to an extent leaving only the torso which broke apart after 1-1.5 hours. The complete incineration of a human body took about 2-3 hours." So the body at a fraction of the heat that Johnny can endure doesn't last as more than a few hours, and soon after introduction the body reacts to it. When talking about individuals still alive getting burned Death typically occurs when 54% of the total body surface area is burned, and if you have any preexisting conditions the percent drops to around 34%.

Most in the scientific community believe that true spontaneous human combustion is a myth as you can't have fire generated out of nothing (even Johnny metabolizes energy to produce his flames), you can have a series of events that cause a seemingly spontaneous reaction.

The end result is a body with significant damage or simply a limb or a head visibly charred with little to no damage to the surrounding area once again leading people to believe it's spontaneous as it is only centered around the body/parts. What leads to that, is any manner of things that initially ignites the victims clothes, could be a match, a spark, a cigarette, etc. once the clothes the clothes start burning the body does very soon after but with the body burning the clothes get soaked in melted fat from the body producing "the wick effect" essentially turning them into a human candle. This effect using the clothes to smoulder for hours also gives an explanation on how some of the limbs and surroundings relatively unharmed. So while there isn't true spontaneous human combustion like some still believe, or like Johnny's it can seem like it.