I look at it like this: if you've accumulated that much money AND have had time to use it to help others, and haven't? Glub glub time.
If you've suddenly stumbled into ludicrous wealth because a psychotic demigod drowned one of your forebears? Well, it'll take at least 48 hours for you to put that money to more philanthropic use. I figure we can give those folks at least that much of a grace period to decide to be better.
The next Superman can handle them if that's not enough to change their attitude.
And realistically, this would create so many power vacuums all at once that civilization would probably collapse overnight, but you can only get so realistic with superpower hypotheticals.
Possibly a world tour of grabbing billionaires and far right politicians, Bibi, Putin, Trump, Le Pen, Musk, Murdoch and all the likes, showing them the messes and human suffering they helped creating and hurling them into space or something.
That's a pretty good starting list. I don't know that I'd waste time trying to show them anything; just go straight to disposal.
I, too, was thinking "murder." It solves only a sort term problem though. Within a few years, you'd just have a new batch.
The system is broken. Capitalism as we practice it is broken; our political systems are broken (some more than others). That won't be fixed by DXing a bunch of oligarchs.
You'll need to make it very visible and very real to as many people as possible, and make it sound credible that "shit like this starts up again, and I'll be back, be excellent to each other or else"
Remember those found-footage style videos that were going around a decade or so ago, where there was this mysterious figure in black who just appeared and was offing criminals in fairly graphic ways? There was speculation that it was a viral ad for some anti-hero superhero movie, but it never materialized.
That's the way. Be mysterious. Be featureless. Don't talk. Give them no way to track you after it wears off: appear, do, disappear. Repeat for 48 hours, then disappear.
I still think it wouldn't last long. The temptations of power and wealth will override any fear; after year, it'll be back to business as usual. 5 years later, it'd be mostly forgotten.
Now, if you could parse out 48 hours in 2 hour chunks over 12 years, with a couple of "examples" every year at random times, that might have a lasting effect. Do it 4 years in a row, give it a break for 2 or 3 years and let people think it night be over and strike again... that would probably have a more lasting effect. But I still think, at some point after your powers run out a decade or two at most and the shenanigans would start again. Humans believe what they want to believe, and what they're best at deluding themselves and is "that can't happen to me."
After the first 12 hours, as chaos is setting in, release a video demanding that all heads of state sign an agreement to limit the wealth of legal entities worldwide, something similar to the existing agreement on minimum 15% tax for corporations. However, this is a wealth-based tax, not income based.
Set minimum limits, e.g.
No single individual may own or control more than 0.01% of the world's wealth (0.01% would currently equal around USD 40-50 billion).
No family may collectively own or control more than 0.05% of the world's wealth (think the Saudi Royal family).
Similarly no company's market capitalisation may exceed 0.05% of the world's wealth.
If their annual tax submission determines that they exceed those limits, they have 6-12 months to reduce their wealth. Companies can achieve this through splitting the company into smaller legal entities. Individuals may make charitable donations (anywhere in the world) but only to organisations that they can prove they and their family have no financial ties to. Also, the value of any non-profit organisations that they manage will count to wealth controlled by them/their families, to limit options for simply shuffling wealth around.
If they don't comply, the remainder is 100% taxable, with the tax collected globally based on the location of their wealth. I.e. if they have money sitting in 3 countries, each country can sieze their proportional share of the wealth in that country.
Any head of state that doesn't comply within 12 hours is added to the hit list. After the first few heads of state drop, the rest will comply quickly.
Most heads of state of western democracies do not have the authority to enact such measures, much less in so short a deadline. And their political opponents will simply drag their feet on any approval process and let you eliminate a rival. Most of the billionaires live in countries without a dictator (quite yet, anyway) who could comply, even if they wanted to.
You have Superman's powers. This is a fantasy world :p
Plus they don't know your powers will only last 48 hours. You could make a nice speech at the end about how you believe in democracy and don't want to have to get involved again, so you trust they will do a better job going forward.
Ultimately, the main point would be to get the public excited about a solution to the "you can't tax the rich too much because they'll just move to another country" issue. If every world leader has publicly announced their intention to join this agreement and then withdraws, one would hope for a public outcry, at least in democratic countries. It could be political suicide not to implement it.
For the non-democratic countries (I'm looking at you, Saudi Arabia), perhaps add a clause that says you will raise sanctions against countries that don't join. I don't know, I'd have to find some lawyers specialised in these things :D
I would create my own Groundhog Day set up. Start learning task A. After 47 hours, fly around the earth to rewind time. Learn for another 47 hours. Repeat process. Learn infinity tasks and become a master at everything. On the last loop win the heart of Andie MacDowell.
Stratosphere - blow all the CO2 out into space and fix global warming.
Schwarma after with friends.
Oh yeah, grab the great plastic pollution bomb in the pacific and hurl it into the sun then use fry-eyes to burn every plastic manufacturer on the planet.
In the OG movies he goes so fast that he goes faster than light and turns back time. At least I think that was the idea. So yeah, he could do FTL travel. Given that he accelerated to that point in about a minute, it's probably doable all within an hour.
No. The inner edge of the Oort Cloud is 10 light days away. The outer edge of 100 ld away.
The math looks like:
1 AU is the distance from the Sun to Earth.
The Earth is 8 light minutes from Sol
The inner edge of the Oort Cloud is (minimum) 2,000 AU ≈ 16,000 light-minutes, or 11 day light days.
The outer edge is about 100,000 AU away; that's about a year and a half to get from the inner edge to the outer edge, traveling at the speed of light.
The Oort Cloud is not only mind bogglingly far away, it's about 50x deeper than it is away from the sun.
Those are minimum estimates; some estimates have the inner cloud edge 28 AU away.
The original Superman wasn't a god, but it got hyperbolic over the years with one-upmanship until he was indistinguishable from a god. Canonically, beings regularly travel between star systems, so FTL is not uncommon in the DC universe. Heck, in Invincible (not DC), even relatively low-power beings travel FTL all over, all the time. Spacetime doesn't work the same in comics. So, Superman can travel FTL, and the Oort Cloud would be reachable. But he'd have to travel at least 20x the speed of light to get to the Cloud and back in a day, and thousands of times faster if he wants to explore it at all, or see the outer edge.
It's surprisingly far away! Shockingly far. It baffles me every time I stop to think about it; it's so incomprehensibly far, I am incapable of visualizing how far it is, no matter how many times I play with the scrollable solar system web page.
Stop wars non violently by disarming all parties involved. I know, they'll arm up again after the 48 hours but all I need to do to protect myself is get a haircut and fake glasses.
Couple of these here 50 states gotta go. I'm annexing them on behalf of Rhode Island. Try to fuckin stop me. Wait does anybody know my powers only work for 48 hours? Cuz otherwise I think I can bluff
If there was such a demihuman bike god, I would ride my bicycle more often. I just don't want to have to maintain it and waste time of my life again because some dumbass broke a beer bottle on the street.
Does having superpowers fix my executive dysfunction? Cause if so then like, I dunno, clean my house, catch up on admin, do everything I've been unable to do
Fly everywhere. I'm having breakfast in Paris, lunch in Cairo, and dinner in Kyoto, and checking out a bunch of other places in between. Also doing approximately all of the cocaine so I can stay awake for the whole thing.
That's just something he can do. Earth's yellow sun gives him super powers, one of which is the ability to turn time backwards by reversing the spin of the Earth's rotation!
I'm not a superman expert, but my understanding is that he only did that in one movie. If so, it is correct to say that it is canonically one of his powers, but that doesn't mean all versions of him have that power. If people talk about time traveling Superman they're talking about the one that can do that.
Get a little area where I would actually want to live.
Carve out mountains to channel water to more areas, basically accelerate what Egypt is doing to spread the green lush from the Nile River.
Make ideal spots for some cities, get a lot of gold out of the ground to prepare to buy the land
Pour all the foundations of the buildings, build lines of rails for public transit and trains. Make sewer system and areas to transport water
Just make it super easier for people to come and build/live there, and if I own it all I can avoid big corporations coming and pushing out growing businesses
First I would get myself paid. Then I would drop a big rock on DC and credit reporting companies. Probably take out a bunch of healthcare insurance companies. Spend a few hours looking up companies responsible for the most pollution/human rights violations and remove them. Drop a big rock on the Kremlin and CCCP headquarters, probably North Korea too. Lots of big rocks dropped from really high.
Figure out if I’d be more haunted by my actions as a temporary world superpower, and watching the status quo return very quickly afterward, or more haunted by all the things I could have done and didn’t. Sit pondering that for 48 hours.
Probably do some miracles on national tv and populated areas, then create a new book club. Create sanctuaries for book study groups. Assign leaders across the world from those who protect the people.
This time the book is written using formal logic so it’s impossible to misunderstand and pick and choose what you want to follow. It only provides a logic framework of being kind and empathetic to others, respecting their rights(and what rights are), and consent, etc. This time the book will be timeless with no contradictions.
Then kindly “convince” a couple of billionaires and world leaders to donate 99.9% of their wealth to the new cause. 48 hours are too short to change the world for good. But you can kickstart a brilliant process towards a great future.
Vanquish evil. There's quite the list at the moment.
There are about ~3000 billionaires. Or a billionaire every minute.
I mean if you have all of Superman's powers you could go one a second
With time to spare to have a wild time with Wonder Woman.
Some of y'all don't understand the type of shit this guy's on
not a single POW! ?
I can hear this in my head. Snoop is amazing
Try to fly through these god damn rings
Relocate anyone with a net worth of >$500 mil to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
You don't do anything about the wealth? Someone else will get hold of it in no time after your 48 hs are past
I look at it like this: if you've accumulated that much money AND have had time to use it to help others, and haven't? Glub glub time.
If you've suddenly stumbled into ludicrous wealth because a psychotic demigod drowned one of your forebears? Well, it'll take at least 48 hours for you to put that money to more philanthropic use. I figure we can give those folks at least that much of a grace period to decide to be better.
The next Superman can handle them if that's not enough to change their attitude.
And realistically, this would create so many power vacuums all at once that civilization would probably collapse overnight, but you can only get so realistic with superpower hypotheticals.
Possibly a world tour of grabbing billionaires and far right politicians, Bibi, Putin, Trump, Le Pen, Musk, Murdoch and all the likes, showing them the messes and human suffering they helped creating and hurling them into space or something.
That's a pretty good starting list. I don't know that I'd waste time trying to show them anything; just go straight to disposal.
I, too, was thinking "murder." It solves only a sort term problem though. Within a few years, you'd just have a new batch.
The system is broken. Capitalism as we practice it is broken; our political systems are broken (some more than others). That won't be fixed by DXing a bunch of oligarchs.
You'll need to make it very visible and very real to as many people as possible, and make it sound credible that "shit like this starts up again, and I'll be back, be excellent to each other or else"
Remember those found-footage style videos that were going around a decade or so ago, where there was this mysterious figure in black who just appeared and was offing criminals in fairly graphic ways? There was speculation that it was a viral ad for some anti-hero superhero movie, but it never materialized.
That's the way. Be mysterious. Be featureless. Don't talk. Give them no way to track you after it wears off: appear, do, disappear. Repeat for 48 hours, then disappear.
I still think it wouldn't last long. The temptations of power and wealth will override any fear; after year, it'll be back to business as usual. 5 years later, it'd be mostly forgotten.
Now, if you could parse out 48 hours in 2 hour chunks over 12 years, with a couple of "examples" every year at random times, that might have a lasting effect. Do it 4 years in a row, give it a break for 2 or 3 years and let people think it night be over and strike again... that would probably have a more lasting effect. But I still think, at some point after your powers run out a decade or two at most and the shenanigans would start again. Humans believe what they want to believe, and what they're best at deluding themselves and is "that can't happen to me."
Counterpoint: Superman is strong enough that he could raze the system to the ground.
He could certainly degrowth the planet. But, than, we're well on the way to doing that ourselves.
After the first 12 hours, as chaos is setting in, release a video demanding that all heads of state sign an agreement to limit the wealth of legal entities worldwide, something similar to the existing agreement on minimum 15% tax for corporations. However, this is a wealth-based tax, not income based.
Set minimum limits, e.g.
If their annual tax submission determines that they exceed those limits, they have 6-12 months to reduce their wealth. Companies can achieve this through splitting the company into smaller legal entities. Individuals may make charitable donations (anywhere in the world) but only to organisations that they can prove they and their family have no financial ties to. Also, the value of any non-profit organisations that they manage will count to wealth controlled by them/their families, to limit options for simply shuffling wealth around.
If they don't comply, the remainder is 100% taxable, with the tax collected globally based on the location of their wealth. I.e. if they have money sitting in 3 countries, each country can sieze their proportional share of the wealth in that country.
Any head of state that doesn't comply within 12 hours is added to the hit list. After the first few heads of state drop, the rest will comply quickly.
Most heads of state of western democracies do not have the authority to enact such measures, much less in so short a deadline. And their political opponents will simply drag their feet on any approval process and let you eliminate a rival. Most of the billionaires live in countries without a dictator (quite yet, anyway) who could comply, even if they wanted to.
You have Superman's powers. This is a fantasy world :p
Plus they don't know your powers will only last 48 hours. You could make a nice speech at the end about how you believe in democracy and don't want to have to get involved again, so you trust they will do a better job going forward.
Ultimately, the main point would be to get the public excited about a solution to the "you can't tax the rich too much because they'll just move to another country" issue. If every world leader has publicly announced their intention to join this agreement and then withdraws, one would hope for a public outcry, at least in democratic countries. It could be political suicide not to implement it.
For the non-democratic countries (I'm looking at you, Saudi Arabia), perhaps add a clause that says you will raise sanctions against countries that don't join. I don't know, I'd have to find some lawyers specialised in these things :D
You could show Musky what it's really like to live on Mars
Let's just say you won't have to worry about billionaires and healthcare profiteers anymore
Heyyyy, I was going to say that!
I would create my own Groundhog Day set up. Start learning task A. After 47 hours, fly around the earth to rewind time. Learn for another 47 hours. Repeat process. Learn infinity tasks and become a master at everything. On the last loop win the heart of Andie MacDowell.
I can't conceive of a better answer than this.
The fuck you would. Not much is stopping you from doing that now, just in a longer timeframe.
You'd be sat here with me and everyone else scrolling your phone for hours, before thinking "Oh yeah I was gonna do that thing...can't be arsed now".
If only I had a way to support myself for the next 60 years while I did this, and still be young enough to enjoy it when I'm done.
Maybe the timeframe matters.
Fair enough. Back to scrolling then, like the rest of us.
Damn, you win.
Does Superman not age?
Also, sounds kinda lonely
Lots of regimes will fall.
The Democrat/Republican one would be first on my list
DC...Trump to the moon to fix - Trump.
Stratosphere - blow all the CO2 out into space and fix global warming.
Schwarma after with friends.
Oh yeah, grab the great plastic pollution bomb in the pacific and hurl it into the sun then use fry-eyes to burn every plastic manufacturer on the planet.
That's actually a great subject for an XKCD What If - What if all of the CO2 was suddenly removed from the atmosphere, all at once?
Probably not good either. We kind of need the O2 in it and the C probably too. Just in other forms.
Every politician - Hmm, it turns out our path hasn't been dangerous at all! Let's do the same things but in overdrive!!
You would need to get rid of the other sycophants
Not sure if that's fast enough, but I would try to visit all the planets in our solar system. And then head out to see what's in the Oort cloud.
In the OG movies he goes so fast that he goes faster than light and turns back time. At least I think that was the idea. So yeah, he could do FTL travel. Given that he accelerated to that point in about a minute, it's probably doable all within an hour.
Considering it takes around 8 minutes for the sunlight to reach us, I think even a fraction of the speed of light would be enough.
No. The inner edge of the Oort Cloud is 10 light days away. The outer edge of 100 ld away.
The math looks like:
The Oort Cloud is not only mind bogglingly far away, it's about 50x deeper than it is away from the sun.
Those are minimum estimates; some estimates have the inner cloud edge 28 AU away.
The original Superman wasn't a god, but it got hyperbolic over the years with one-upmanship until he was indistinguishable from a god. Canonically, beings regularly travel between star systems, so FTL is not uncommon in the DC universe. Heck, in Invincible (not DC), even relatively low-power beings travel FTL all over, all the time. Spacetime doesn't work the same in comics. So, Superman can travel FTL, and the Oort Cloud would be reachable. But he'd have to travel at least 20x the speed of light to get to the Cloud and back in a day, and thousands of times faster if he wants to explore it at all, or see the outer edge.
I wasn't aware the cloud was that far away. Thanks!
It's surprisingly far away! Shockingly far. It baffles me every time I stop to think about it; it's so incomprehensibly far, I am incapable of visualizing how far it is, no matter how many times I play with the scrollable solar system web page.
Oh! This one jar that is freakin stuck super bad.
Stop wars non violently by disarming all parties involved. I know, they'll arm up again after the 48 hours but all I need to do to protect myself is get a haircut and fake glasses.
Lasering arms off is pretty violent
Lol
Couple of these here 50 states gotta go. I'm annexing them on behalf of Rhode Island. Try to fuckin stop me. Wait does anybody know my powers only work for 48 hours? Cuz otherwise I think I can bluff
Naw, giant lava trenches sound like a good idea.
Destroy every factory making glue traps, every fur farm, Palantir, NGO group and the like and maybe tunneling through K Street in DC at high speed
I'd repair the bikes of people with broken bikes who need their bike fixed so they can get on their repaired bikes and cycle off on their bike.
Bike
Republicans would be in trouble, and so would certain evil leaders.
If there was such a demihuman bike god, I would ride my bicycle more often. I just don't want to have to maintain it and waste time of my life again because some dumbass broke a beer bottle on the street.
Does having superpowers fix my executive dysfunction? Cause if so then like, I dunno, clean my house, catch up on admin, do everything I've been unable to do
Fly everywhere. I'm having breakfast in Paris, lunch in Cairo, and dinner in Kyoto, and checking out a bunch of other places in between. Also doing approximately all of the cocaine so I can stay awake for the whole thing.
Can you do the trick from the movie and turn back time?
You can, but you turn back time to before you were Superman, but still moving that speed, so you just atomize.
That still has a lot of possibilities :). Just rinse and repeat til you get everything right. A groundhog Day with superman powers hmmm.
Probably I don't notice the whole time and go along with my standard routine.
Fly into space and reverse the Earth’s rotation. This way we travel back in time. I will the use my knowledge of the future to become like Lex Luthor.
Use your Lex Luthor wealth to eliminate inequality, right? insert padme face
you destroy earth.. spend the next 47 hours desperately trying to figure out how to actually time travel with your powers
No no, that is actually canonically one of Superman's powers.
yhea, that movie ending was strange
Reference.
I know the reference, but ever since they movie came out, we were all wondering how nonsensical it is
That's just something he can do. Earth's yellow sun gives him super powers, one of which is the ability to turn time backwards by reversing the spin of the Earth's rotation!
I thought that the earth rotated in reverse because from his perspective that is what time did, run in reverse?
My puny human mind cannot comprehend what happened because I'm not from Krypton.
lets face it, turning back time makes all of his other powers unnecessary.
zod attacks? hi back to yesterday and tell louis to put some kryptonite in their exact landing site and let the local law police take care of them.
A volcano blows up a city, go a week in the past and tell them to evacuate...
I'm not a superman expert, but my understanding is that he only did that in one movie. If so, it is correct to say that it is canonically one of his powers, but that doesn't mean all versions of him have that power. If people talk about time traveling Superman they're talking about the one that can do that.
those movies had strange superpowers.
memory erasing kisses.
Expanding superman cellophane sign.
...
Enact land reform and nationalisation of resources in countries that want it.
Help with infra development.
If super intellect is available, then fusion, vaccines and similar stuff. Also setting up some cheap manufacturing of medicines.
Destroy all nukes, Luigi the system of money and power annnnnnnnnnd speed build a train system in the US.
Bring my family to safety, destroy every US or proxy owned oilfield, report to marshal kim jong un for further instructions
Making the mother of all power vacuums Jack, can't fret over each billionaire!
Lemmy has some good ideas.
Get a little area where I would actually want to live.
Carve out mountains to channel water to more areas, basically accelerate what Egypt is doing to spread the green lush from the Nile River.
Make ideal spots for some cities, get a lot of gold out of the ground to prepare to buy the land
Pour all the foundations of the buildings, build lines of rails for public transit and trains. Make sewer system and areas to transport water
Just make it super easier for people to come and build/live there, and if I own it all I can avoid big corporations coming and pushing out growing businesses
Won’t be specific, but certain parts of Washington DC and Florida would be a crater.
You know that one scene in season 1 of invincible where Omni man is on that alien planet? Basically that.
Probably watch a bunch of tv shows and fall asleep, if it lands on a weekend.
First I would get myself paid. Then I would drop a big rock on DC and credit reporting companies. Probably take out a bunch of healthcare insurance companies. Spend a few hours looking up companies responsible for the most pollution/human rights violations and remove them. Drop a big rock on the Kremlin and CCCP headquarters, probably North Korea too. Lots of big rocks dropped from really high.
None on le WhiteHome and NATO folk?
Hollywood adaptation with realistic plotline tho
I have some rewrites I'd like to make to the US constitution.
Oh, bless your heart. Thinking that the Constitution has any sway whatsoever in 2025.
That's where I'll need to flex my con artist muscles.
Step 1 - Immediately relocate all Israelis to their country of origin (within prisons) and bring Palestinians back to their land.
Step 2 - Remove the infrastructure maintaining the puppet occupation of Korea.
Step 3 - Remove all weapons from the US/EU and deliver them to communist governments and natives.
Step 4 - Do the same with industrial/technological capacity.
Step 5 - Translate/Copy theory and deliver it to everyone on earth.
Step 6 - Build a bunch of Renewable Energy plants all over the world.
Step 7 - Destroy the Oil industry.
Step 8 - Nap in the sun but lose track of time and lose my powers so I disintegrate.
Question. When you say communist governments, who do you refer to?
Cuba, Vietnam, China, DPRK, Laos.
Some major parties that don't hold full governmental power yet such as the KKE(Greece), SACP (South Africa) and CPI(ML)*(India).
*I'll have to look into which one is the most based Communist Party of India, I always forget, I'll have plenty of time with my superpowers.
Vietnam is hardly communist. It's a cool place but not run that well
Figure out if I’d be more haunted by my actions as a temporary world superpower, and watching the status quo return very quickly afterward, or more haunted by all the things I could have done and didn’t. Sit pondering that for 48 hours.
Have to be honest here throwing right wingers into the sun I'll sleep well
I'm already going to a kid amusement park tomorrow, so I guess I would just be the coolest dad there.
Probably do some miracles on national tv and populated areas, then create a new book club. Create sanctuaries for book study groups. Assign leaders across the world from those who protect the people.
This time the book is written using formal logic so it’s impossible to misunderstand and pick and choose what you want to follow. It only provides a logic framework of being kind and empathetic to others, respecting their rights(and what rights are), and consent, etc. This time the book will be timeless with no contradictions.
Then kindly “convince” a couple of billionaires and world leaders to donate 99.9% of their wealth to the new cause. 48 hours are too short to change the world for good. But you can kickstart a brilliant process towards a great future.
I'd sleep the two days, nobody would mess with me.
Wipe the DC legislature off the map. Excepting aoc of course
Bang Lois Lane and order some pizza afterwards, obviously.
I'll finish my house, clear out the old tree debris, and complete all the physical work I've planned for years to come.
Hurl mar-a-lardo, NYC, and Delaware into the sun. After that probably break the hotdog eating world record.
Please don't throw one of the only cities in the country with a semi-functional public transit system into the sun :(