TypicalPowers For All

If I were to select the unreachable dream that most often enters my mind and proceeds to taunt me with the simple fact that it shall never be achieved, it would be the following: Would that I were able to teleport.

It's no big secret, really - I want super-powers. Ignoring the fact that I would most likely be studied by scientists long after I had died, I cannot describe to you how unbelievably cool my mind finds it. Or perhaps I can. I assume, of course, that everybody is just as enamoured of having a super-power as I am. I mean, who wouldn't want to be able to teleport, or fly, or turn invisible, or manipulate water, or cast magic missile, or...I shan't continue, though I assure you I could - after all, the list goes on ad infinitum, I'm sure.

There are two things that I really love about discussing super powers with people. The first of these is the fact that, in a given room, two people will very rarely have the exact same list of super-powers that they would pick from. I mean, sure, people may have the same "top" power, but when you get down to others (if they couldn't pick their top power, for some unknown reason) there is just so much variety. I've already said that I would love to be able to teleport, my ex-work colleague Shibby would love to be able to fly, Dezzles desires telekinesis, Chris would like super strength, and Alex believes that the ability to heal via physical contact would be rockin'.

The thing that I like most about discussing superpowers with people, however, is the fact that in order to keep things a bit grounded - sensible if you will - superpowers have to come with caveats. Teleportation, for instance, can be grounded in several ways. My personal favourite is the fact that, in order to teleport a certain distance, you must expend an equivalent amount of energy. This would make teleporting short distances fine, but it would mean that, the further you wished to travel, the more difficult it would become. Of course, this would also prevent you from cheating the system by teleporting many short distances, as you'd eventually become fatigued.

The only problem that I have with that limitation of teleportation is that the place I'd most want to transport myself to (Birmingham, England) is almost on the exact opposite side of the planet to us, so I'd most likely have to make a couple of layovers first.

The other thing that would worry me about teleportation is the fact that, if you were to teleport to somewhere you'd never been before (or a place that you do not have a clear view of) you run the risk of landing smack-bang in the middle of a solid object. It would be fairly unpleasant, I would imagine, if someone were to, say, rearrange the furniture in their house without telling you and you wound up with an end table for a torso.

The obvious way around this is what I'm calling the matter replacement principle. This is something that I've previously discussed with Andy, and the way we figured it would work is that when you teleport to your destination, any matter that was in the space that your body would occupy (and potentially a little bubble around it) would be transported to your starting location, and so all of your bits would theoretically replace all of their bits, and vice-versa. This would of course, lead to some very...disturbing circumstances if you were to teleport into the middle of another person.

So I finish today with a question for you - if you could have a superpower, what would it be? And, for an added challenge, what caveats would you introduce in order to make it a bit more realistic? Hopefully I get some really creative answers to this, and may a nice little discussion starts between the readers. That would rock. But not as much as being able to teleport myself.

The moral of today's story is that, according to the ABC series Sleek Geeks, everyone is a Super Human. I think, however, that this would cheapen the definition of "Super" to the point where "Super" becomes normal, leading us back to the generic conclusion that nobody is super, after all. If more than 50% of people can do something, it stops being super, and starts being average or typical. I guess, then, that if my dream is for everyone to have a superpower, would lead to them not being superpowers at all, but being...well...typicalpowers I guess...