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Reed Richards Is Useless
alt title(s): Useless Super Science
"Stardust, whose vast knowledge of interplanetary science has made him the most remarkable man that ever lived, devotes his abilities to crime-busting..."
— Stardust the Super Wizard, Fantastic Comics #14

The observation that in some genres, characters can have fantastic technology far beyond our own, yet this technology only gets used to solve equally fantastic problems.

A person who controls weather will never make it rain in a place famous for drought. A person who can control fire will never stop brush fires or get a job at a power station. And a supergenius (such as Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four) who can whip up anti-alien parasite vaccines on command will never take a weekend to cure cancer (or even five minutes to find out what causes piss shivers) or release his inventions that could solve a variety of real-world problems. All potential solutions to real-life problems will only be done in novel (fictional) situations - useless. Status Quo Is God, and the status quo of the real world even more so. It's the same reason you can't stop Hitler from starting World War II.

There are several typical motivations for this:

  1. To keep the world similar to the real world. This is particularly common in an Urban Fantasy, superhero, or other series whose setting is superficially similar to the real world; unlike, say, Star Trek or Lord Of The Rings, one of the key draws of the series is that it could take place right outside the reader's window, which is lost if you make the fictional world too fantastic in comparison. This is particularly common in comic books, where major modifications to the world are only done to fictional locations, and often only to current levels of technology. However, that still doesn't explain why Marvel and DC have to shift all the way too one side of "suspension of disbelief" Take a look at Watchmen where the world-altering ramifications of superheroes (free clean energy, America winning the Vietnam war, AIDS being heavily implied to have been prevented) are explored while containing a world that readers can relate to all too well. Furthermore, continuities such as the Ultimate Marvel Universe (i.e. NASA being far ahead of its real world counterpart, Earth still recovering from the mass destruction of Ultimatium) and Justice League Unlimited occasionally diverge from the world outside your windows while still looking plenty similar to the readers own world.

  2. To ensure that there's some level of drama in the story. If the super science or magic can literally do anything, then the heroes can just use the super science to get them out of any jam. Goodbye potential conflict. Look at the Flash, somebody who can run at super-sonic speed should have absolutely NO problem fighting a normal speed villain who throws boomerangs or wields an ice gun. Even in the case of Star Trek, there were tons of things the replicators and transporters should have been able to do which would have ruined the plot of half the episodes, necessitating a lot of Holding Back The Phlebotinum to maintain drama. As well, it could very easily be that the technology itself has some limitations, as "It can do anything you can imagine" is quite a bold statement for anyone to make. Other times, the Disposable Superhero Maker is disposable in the first place to avoid flooding the setting with superheroes.

  3. To avoid trivializing real-life problems. If Mr. Fantastic actually does discover, say, a cure for cancer in the Marvel Universe, there are going to be plenty of real-world sufferers still suffering from it when they finish the comic. It may feel wrong to have something that's a heavy burden in real life be casually ignored in fiction. However, continuities awash in superscience such as Star Trek, Judge Dredd, the Wildstorm universe and so forth still have plenty of dramatic interest and tragedy.

This trope is often associated with Fantastic Aesop, where the moral is that these are problems with no easy solution in the real world, and as is common for Fantastic Aesop, the moral doesn't fit very well into the fictional world. However, as superhero comics especially have begun to explore the ramifications of their characters on real-world settings more closely over the years, this question has been raised (and addressed) more frequently. It is sometimes lampshade hung as making people "too dependent" on superheroes. It's a good thing Louis Pasteur and Jonas Salk didn't feel this way. You would think comic book citizens are already dependent on superheroes to defend them from supervillains, but apparently not.

Newly-created Super Hero universes tend to avert this, especially if the writer is trying to make a geopolitical statement. Stories set in the far future may also be exempt from the second version. Similar with alternate universes (i.e. What If?, Elseworlds).

Oddly enough, this doesn't apply to supervillains.

See Plausible Deniability for aversions.

Examples

Anime
  • Magic in Mahou Sensei Negima is also kept hidden behind the usual Masquerade, preventing mages from exposing their identities and openly using magic to help people. Starting with the Tournament Arc, one character leads the Mahora scientist faction in a coup to expose magic to the world and thus force the mages' hand. The idea of being able to freely use magic to help people proves quite seductive to some characters; mages do work to help humanity, but there's only so much they can do when they also have to maintain the masquerade. Even Negi has quite a bit of trouble justifying his opposition.
  • Averted in Shin Mazinger. Kouji's grandpa, a scientist, has a huge number of patents and uses the money to fund even more research. He's also made major breakthroughs in robotics and renewable energy.
    • Similarly, Professor Saotome in Getter Robo was planning on using the Getter machines for space exploration before the defense of the planet took a forefront.
  • Averted in Baccano!, where some of the remaining alchemists use their pseudoscientific knowledge for mundane, semi-commercial (although rarely legal) purposes. For example, the Runorata mafia has an one on their payroll for the purposes of synthesizing new drugs for release on the black market.
  • Another aversion in GunslingerGirl, where one of the government's justifications for all the experiments, brainwashing, cybernetics, and other unpleasantness to which the main characters are subjected is advancing medical science. For example, in Volume 9, there is a boy playing soccer with the aid of a prosthetic leg that was developed by the Social Welfare Agency, then Angelica dies about 30 pages later due to complications from her cybernetic implants and mental conditioning.
  • Averted hard in the Ghost Inthe Shell series in that while robo-prosthetic bodies are commercially viable and most if not all civilians poses some kind of cyberbrain and/or implants, a full body prosthetic is still rather expensive to the point where mostly the wealthy and/or those serving the state (Section 9) or whose jobs can foot the bill for the required job can provide. Oh, and two words: Cyberbrain sclerosis.

Comic Books
  • With regard to the trope's namesake, in recent years Marvel have attempted to justify Reed Richards by making it a matter of cost — Reed invents machines and solutions too costly to recreate. Mr. Fantastic is only smart enough to build a flying car, but not quite smart enough (or too busy) to make it run on anything less complicated than comet gas or the pain of damned souls or whatever. Another frequent justification is that Reed could invent some of this stuff, but his mind works at such an advanced level that no one else would fully understand the equations and formulas he comes up with (or even comprehend them at all), so it would be near-impossible - or even dangerous - for anyone else to duplicate it anyway.
    • The Ultimate Reed Richards is even smarter, and consequently more useless. When he fights the Ultimate Sub-Mariner, he's invented a helmet that turns his every thought into concrete reality (yet still manages to lose!). Surely, even a scrap of such a device's technology could be put to immeasurable practical use.
      • The implicit rationale for this specific story is provided when Reed has to draw a massive amount of power from the city grid to power his holograms.
      • The rationale/Hand Wave behind this is that everything he does is financed by the army, and most of his discoveries are consequently classified or reserved solely for their use, and he's mostly only allowed to work on projects that they request (or his own pet projects like holographic baby versions of Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America). Tony Stark, on the other hand, apparently invented the mp3, and is presumably funding lots of research on cancer, since he has an inoperable brain tumor.
      • Which is still a retarded explanation. Tell me of one administration who would not want to declare "Under our leadership the army developed a cure for AIDS/Cancer". Instant re-election guaranteed.
      • Another factor to consider as to why this technology hasn't been released to the public is safety. During Grant Morrisson's Animal Man run, it was established that private teleportation was illegal after teenagers hacked into government teleporter tubes and failed to reassemble.
      • In Ultimate Human, both Tony Stark and Bruce Banner discuss the possibility of using Stark's nanotechnology to help humans colonize outer space.
    • In a recent plotline, Doom travels back in time to stop Reed from changing the world. The future-Four follow him, and Doom is forced to admit that the future is a paradise, and the only reason he wants to stop Reed is so that he can do it. Reed sends him to a alternate universe where all the heroes are dead, leaving future-Doom as the only superpowered being.
    • Hand Waved somewhat during the Mark Waid run on Fantastic Four, when one issue revealed that Reed does indeed make money from some of his patents... by taking money from other corporations to delay releasing advanced products that would revolutionize whole industries overnight and likely destroy the world economy by putting millions out of work. For instance, he takes money from Sony not to release a portable super-computer he has developed, which would presumably pose a significant risk to Sony's current market share and operational procedures (and those of other computer manufacturers as well). He presumably does this with other advanced technologies, but it is not specified which ones; a later issue mentions him selling a cure for acne to Revlon.
    • Also explored in 4 #1 where the Fantastic Four goes bankrupt. The Thing looks for a job as a construction worker. One construction foreman turns Thing down saying that the Thing's super-strength would do the work of too many workers. Thus, the foreman would have to lay off a good deal of the workforce if the Thing was hired.
    • Doctor Doom has a healing ray machine that can regenerate full-body third-degree-burn patients to full health in a day. Being the bad guy, he hasn't released it. But Reed hasn't even tried to duplicate or reverse-engineer that project... and anything Doom can do Reed can do, and vice versa.  *
      • Doom uses it for his nation only, when he takes over the world he tends to use all his tech to fix the world's problems
      • And note that Latveria is a peaceful utopia....
    • Even if the machine would be prohibitively expensive for the common person, there are probably dozens of watered-down consumer spin-off technologies that could be produced that would be affordable to the common person.
    • Similar with the Floronic Man in the DC Universe, no explanation has been given as to why the superheroes or any scientists have bothered to or able/unable to duplicate the Floronic Man's spray-on skin.
    • The biggest examples of this trope in DC, or even comics in general, have to be Johnny Thunder and his successor, Jakeem. Here are two guys who had a Literal Genie at their command, with no limitations on the number of wishes, and they only ever used it to fight crime? How about wishing for world peace? A cure for every disease? At least for eliminating crime?
      • The bigger the scope of the wish, the more dangerous it is to try to get it from a Literal Genie.
      • Furthermore, the benefits of the wish could come with a major cost. For example, wishing for a certain disease to be cured might create a "cure" that is deadlier than the disease itself. Wishing for a piece of barren land to become fertile could drain away the fertility from nearby land.
    • One of the more glaring examples is when Jakeem Thunder hears about a massive apocalyptic super villain attack near the courthouse, and tells the genie to take him there yesterday (a figure of speech meaning quickly). When the Thunderbolt actually does take him to the courthouse one day in the past, he just yells at the genie and tells him to send them to the present. He does not even take a few seconds to call his team and warn them.
    • And on the non-canon side, the premise of Steve Engelhart's Fantastic Four: Big Town is basically "What If Reed Richards wasn't useless?"
      • The supposed rationale suggested as to why Marvel 616 Reed Richards has not imitated his Big Town counterpart is that people would not accept change so sudden. However, that doesn't explain why Reed could be more careful in the rate in which he released his inventions. Be glad that Thomas Edison didn't let this barrier hinder him.
    • A Running Gag in the 80s John Byrne run was that various characters would ask Reed why he hasn't cured cancer/created a super cleanser/perfected cold fusion/etc. His usual response was "What makes you think I haven't tried," followed by a short burst of technobabble explaining why he hadn't succeeded.
    • This troper remembers coming across a "what-if" comic involving the death of Susan Storm. A case of Break The CutieBreak The Scientist causing Reed Richard to lose it, and using all his mental ability to go after those responsible, dealing with them in some rather cold and horrible ways. Furthermore, he sees no more value in science and decides to delete his vast library of scientific discoveries. Be glad he's useless.
    • I've heard it said either here or in Something Awful's comic book threads that Richards and other scientific and magical geniuses would've been unable to save someone from, say, a gunshot wound because it's not a fantastic science or magic problem.
      • Doctor Strange did once claim that magic can't do things that science can, which contradicts pretty much every issue of every comic involving magic ever written and has long been rendered Dis Continuity.
  • There is technology higher than the real world's available in the Marvel Universe- everything from ray guns to cybernetics to jet packs and more; it's just too expensive for the average person. This is the very reason for the existence of companies such as Tony "Iron Man" Stark's, which provides wealthy organizations like SHIELD with their equipment. Sometimes it even filters down to less rich people, for example if stolen. Of course, why the process for making it all cheaper hasn't been invented is a good question.
    • A process for making all this super-tech was apparently achieved in the Fantastic Four: Bigtown mini-series.
    • Not if you know modern tech like, well, aerospace in general. Manned space flight is solely practiced by NASA; which is both A). a research agency more interested in building new tech instead of streamlining the old - so it all remains expensive fifty freaking years after it was developed. and B). a regulatory agency, making it the only business in the US that is permitted to deny licensing to their competitors, meaning nobody else gets to try. A less soul-crushing example is supersonic flight - the Concorde wasn't advanced enough to be efficient and therefore wasn't profitable. The new SSBJs (Super Sonic Business Jets) are a more reasonable attempt at developing a market for the technology. Stark and Richards probably have prototype wondertech up the wazoo but no market to develop it into commercially viable products - The Government isn't going to let their contractors provide protesters with Powered Armor and Flying Cars.
    • Even though space travel still remains largely unavailable to the public, numerous consumer applications have resulted from space exploration (i.e. GPS, temper padding, cordless vacuum cleaners, more efficient solar cells, just google NASA spinoff to find more). It's logical to expect dozens of consumer spin-offs to result from just ONE superscience discovery.
      • While NASA did launch the first American artificial satellites, geostationary commsats were hardly their doing. AT&T Bell Labs and a few other private companies were primarily responsible for Telstar, the first communications satellite. NASA was only involved because they had to be involved with every domestic space launch.
    • Richards' second, less prominent archenemy, the Wizard, has variously claimed he could "reverse global warming if I felt like it" and that he discovered how to achieve perpetual motion long ago, but he still operates as one of the Hood's goons. Hell, before that the best he could manage was "successful businessman" and "Internet celebrity".
  • Marvel Comics's New Universe, published in the late 1980s, was possibly one of the first aversions, including such things as military use of supers and the complete and utter (accidental) destruction of Pittsburgh by a "hero" who was trying to get rid of his own powers. Interestingly, though, it started out as "The World Outside Your Window", trying to be more like the real world than the established universes.
    • In the 2005 remake of the New Universe line (Universal), the world was already significantly different from our own, with the Soviet Union still being in power and China's space program way ahead of its real world counterpart.
  • In JSA 60, Dr. Mid-nite was reflecting on how his mother was treated with pharmaceuticals that were deliberately diluted by the manufacturer to increase profits. If the company made the drugs stronger, Dr. Mid-nite's mother would of had her life prolonged.
  • In the Marvel 2099 line, advancements such as atmospheric clean-up devices (which would eliminate the need for anti-pollution pharmaceuticals) and a cancer vaccine (which as a single treatment, is less profitable than the seven consecutive treatments that they already had marketed) were withheld form the public for fear of losing profits.
  • This trope was completely averted in the graphic novel Watchmen, where superheroes have been changing history for thirty years before the story starts. The plot revolves around the big changes (like America winning the Vietnam War, and Nixon halfway through his fifth term as President in 1986, electric cars), but there are literally hundreds of smaller and more subtle ones (prevalence of pirate comics), some of them only found hidden in the background of a single panel.
    • Both used and averted in Alan Moore's other work The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: by 1958, Earth has been invaded by Martians, there was a huge scale Air-War in Europe prior to World War I, and Britain was controlled by IngSoc from 1945 through 1953, yet absolutely none of this has had any effect on the Cold War, World War II, or, in fact, anything regarding the general course of history. Of course, this is what happens when you combine all of fiction into one universe.
    • Similar to the Wildstorm universe, where both the United States and Soviet Union had entire enemies of super-soldiers (often duplicating the whole Marvel Universe). Again, this seemed to have NO effect on history in general until it was revealed in the present day during Mark Millar's writing of the Authority.
    • Superman in general has often wrestled with the fact that he can't use his superpowers to simply force away wide-ranged problems plaguing humanity. Attempts to bring about world peace by disposing of nuclear weapons didn't fare too well in the fourth Superman movie or the premiere of Justice League. His attempt to cure starvation in third-world countries is detailed in the graphic novel "Peace On Earth". This results in An Aesop being that these are things that will only be solved when all of humanity chooses to solve them. There are often short-lived Alternate Universe depictions of him going too far in forcing humanity to follow his ideals to solve these problems, thus becoming a Knight Templar.
    • The beginning of the animated movie Superman: Doomsday lampshades this, as it shows Supes unsuccessfully trying to cure cancer; he comments how odd it is that, even with all of Kryptonian technology at his disposal and all of the unbelievable things he's done, he's never been able to help Earth beyond "being its resident strong man". Of course, his immediate reaction to every threat the movie throws at him after that is "hit it with my fists until it stops moving", so maybe that's his own fault.
      • Not exactly true. The actual Superman (as opposed to his clone) has two problems to address, Doomsday and his impostor. Doomsday he does address with force (really the only way he can address it.) But the second problem requires some intelligence as his body has not fully recovered and recharged from his Doomsday battle while his impostor is operating at full power. He even waits as long as possible to come back so that he can recharge, waiting until the impostor forces his hand by turning against law enforcement.
      • Contrast to Lex, who sells such cures them in a Reed manner (not that Reed would do that kind of thing, mind you).
    • In Brian Azzarello's "For Tommorrow" storyline, one of Superman's friends who has cancer asks Superman if he can curre him. Superman says he's never tried to cure cancer and he won't. "If I did, then people would expect me to..." before Superman can finish his words, he is interrupted.
    • Averted completely in the classic for all the wrong reasons Imaginary Story "Superman Red and Superman Blue", in which Superman is duplicated into two identical Supermen. Not only does this provide a handy solution to the Silver Age "Lois or Lana" Love Triangle, but the extra free time and the fact that two Supermen are working together allows them to solve all of humanity's problems, by among other things building a device that eliminates evil. The issue of free will is never brought up.
      • Well, to be fair, each of the two Supermen was ten times as smart as the original Superman who was already superintelligent . . . So Yeah. Like, totally justified.
      • Back in the 1960's, it was revealed that Superman allowed the US military to test nuclear weapons on him to save up nuclear wasteland space. In that same issue, it also showed Superman single-handedly cleaning up some derelict neighborhood to make room for cheap, affordable housing.
    • Another Superman story from the 1960's involved Superman thinking that he was going to die. He used his Kryptonian technology to perform a number of technological mirrors for humanity, such as building canals in the Sahara and having the polar ice caps melt (what irony from today's viewpoint) to help humanity cope with its impending water shortage. Predictably, this story was ignored after the issue was over.
    • Explored in the series Superman: For Tomorrow, where at one stage Superman intervenes in a nameless Third World country, in the throes of civil war. Using his super speed etc, he flies in and removes all the weapons etc from either sides armies. There's a Dramatic Pause as the people register their shock and realisation of this... and then pick up rocks and continue fighting. "Hate will find a way", seems to be the message.
      • That plot is lifted directly from Captain Atom #22 and #23, published in 1988, in which Cap intervenes in a Central American civil war by disarming both the Soviet-backed Communist government and the American-backed rebels. Needless to say, they continue fighting with rocks, sticks, shovels, kitchen implements, etc. Lampshaded when Nightshade (Nightshaded?) tells Cap "Guns don't kill people—people do!"
      • Both above examples conveniently ignored the fact that armies without weapons are far less dangerous to local innocent bystanders, even if they do keep throwing rocks at each other. In real life, taking away all those AK-47s would have been a huge accomplishment, but no, this is comics, gotta remind everyone that Status Quo Is God.
      • Armies without weapons are less dangerous to innocent bystanders if they are modern Western armies who aim for the other side's soldiers. Third world armies have a habit of killing civilians on purpose. Many of the 800000 killed in the Rwandan genocide were killed with machetes.
      • The whole point of the Rwandan Genocide was mass murder more than anything else.
      • There's also the problem that the side that's better at using rocks may not be the side that's better at using high tech weapons (especially if one side is bigger but lower tech), and taking away the guns will not only not stop the war, it can help one side to win. Better hope you helped the right side.
      • In the Ultimates 2 maxi-series, the Ultimates and SHIELD seek to overthrow a hostile Middle Eastern dictatorship. A bunch of superhumans known as the Liberators, backed by China and Russia, grow upset at superhuman political intervention and conquer the United States.
      • This issue was also explored in Specter 13 (3rd series). The Spectre intervenes in the nation of Vlatava, engrossed in a gruesome civil war. Spectre tries to punish the guilty side, but given the complicated history of persecution on both sides, he decides that both sides are equally guilty. Thus, Spectre kills everyone in Vlatava minus the leaders, granting them control of their nation (now a barren wasteland) as "punishment"
      • The point isn't practical, it's symbolic. In the Superman example, he's already going through a Heroic BSOD and this is just one more thing that is making him more depressed and beginning to lose his faith in humanity.
    • One seems to recall, that only time Supes has succeeded in making an utopia out of the world, was in Superman:Red Son... A communist utopia at that.
      • Warning: Communist Superman Utopia may contain lobotomies. Do not take if you are sensitive to thought police.
      • And the Utopia is achieved with the help of Brainiac...
    • One recent storyline had him simulate what the world would be like without him. It turns out to be identical to ours, right up to the point where some guy writes a comic about a guy in tights called "Superman".
    • Batman is at least partly an aversion, as Bruce Wayne regularly pours his millions into charity and humanitarian causes, but this troper has read at least one excellent fanfic pointing out that Bruce's obsession with dressing as a bat and beating up the criminals infesting Gotham may have distracted him from using his family fortune and extensive business empire to save Gotham City through social and economic reforms.
      • Addressed by the movie Batman Begins, where Bruce's parents were doing just that, but failed because of the influence of the mob, leading Bruce to the conclusion that social and economic reform wouldn't be enough to break the stranglehold of organized crime.
      • A bodyguard might, just might, have been enough, though. Seriously, multi-billionaires walking through dark back-alleys all by themselves? Bunch of dumbasses.
      • Furthermore, his parents might have pulled it off the Big Bad hadn't arranged their deaths. A Big Bad which only Bats can defeat, of course. But then Batman proves to be useless in the sequel when it's his fault everyone turns to the Joker.
      • Explored briefly in one of the recent comic arcs, Bruce learns that Kord Industries, which he had been using to develop his equipment, was bought out by European investors who fired Bruce from the board of directors. Bruce explained to Alfred that while he has enough supplies for a while, it means that the equipment stored at Kord will either be released in the public sector, or kept in the hands of government agencies and whatever less-than-noble person who can get access. There's a good reason that Batman doesn't put his stuff out for sale.
      • Except, not. He creates top of the line nonlethal armaments. He could make a difference in the world marketing some of this stuff.
      • Most of those nonlethal armaments take years of Batman-level training to use effectively. They wouldn't be much good as a mass-market item.
      • In one dream sequence at the end of the Anarky mini-series (1997), Anarky unleashes his device that makes everyone realize the goodness of the individual and induces mass honesty. Bruce Wayne then diverts all Waynecorp weapons manufacturing towards civilian applications, such as using Mr. Freeze's technology to advance space exploration and Poison Ivy's botanical knowledge to help find a cure for cancer.
    • This trope is used to justify Barbara "Batgirl/Oracle" Gordon remaining wheelchair-bound despite the ready availability of possible cures in The DCU: she doesn't want to receive special treatment and therefore dishonor public servants who were disabled in the line of duty; either a cure becomes available for everyone, or she stays in the chair.
      • There's also that some cures that have worked for other characters (Ravan, Gangbuster, etc.) won't work on her, as her spinal damage was more extensive than theirs. Some other possible cures, such as Green Lantern rings, have been retconned to be only temporary in effect.
      • The real reason for it is because it would be a slap to the face for the handicapped everywhere, implying "you can't save the world if your legs don't work." Plus she's been Oracle longer than she's been Batgirl; it would be like Dick going back to being Robin.
      • But why isn't it a slap in the face to undo death in the DC Universe [[SPOILERS: Jason Todd, Stephanie Brown]]
      • However, it wouldn't be an insult for Barbara to regain some mobility in her legs. Sounds like a fair balance between "suspension of disbelief" and having the DC Earth look unrecognizable to our own.
      • While the above reason makes sense (in an Honor Before Reason sort of sense), some of the stories verged on the ridiculous. In JLA the Martian Manhunter remarks "The League is capable of building a watchtower on the moon, surely we could engineer a prothesis for your legs" and Oracle declines on the grounds that she's "worked hard to treat what happened to me as an opportunity, not a handicap". Okay, fair enough. But she also says she misses her mobility "more than words can express" and that she "dream[s] of the medical breakthroughs that might someday restore it." So, what, a JLA-engineered prosthetic device doesn't count as a "medical breakthrough"?
    • On one occasion, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner gets phenomenal cosmic powers. Among the things he does with them is help him draw his comic strip better. Oh, and hand out customized food packets to starving people in Africa.
      • In the process of solving most of the humanitarian problems, however, Superman points out the increasing number of cults and Misaimed Fandoms that have sprung up around Kyle as a savior, relying upon him to solve -all- their problems no matter how small.
  • Lampshade hung, and almost subverted in James Robinson's Starman, where the original Starman (the title character's father) dedicated his later years to turning his cosmic rod into a more general energy source that would revolutionise the world. Although a visitor from the future claimed his success led to him becoming a scientific hero on the level of Einstein, it never actually happened in The DCU.
    • Robinson's series ended with Ted Knight having finished all the research necessary to use his cosmic energy powerplants for commercial applications just before he died, and leaving all his notes with his son Jack with instructions to license the patents. Predictably, every writer since in the DCU has completely forgotten this ever happened.
    • The visitor from the Future said that it would take centuries for people to understand Ted Knight's notes. However, that begs the question, why didn't Ted Knight create intermediate technology that was not too advanced to duplicate?
  • Somewhat justified with the original Starman (Ted Knight) who helped the US government develop the Atom Bomb. After this, Ted spent a number of years in a mental institution and was understandably quite hesitant about sharing anymore of his knowledge with the public.
  • The graphic novel The Death of Captain Marvel (the Marvel Universe's Mar-Vell, not the better known Fawcett/DC one) hung a lampshade on this by claiming that every (mortal) sentient race has a disease similar to cancer, and that none of them have ever found a cure for it. Furthermore, when Rick Jones appeals to the superheroes who are scientists and doctors to find a cure for Mar-Vell's cancer, they find themselves uncomfortably realizing they could have made this kind of effort beforehand for others.
    • Which just raises questions on to how we've managed to cure certain types of cancers IRL...
    • In a What If based on this story, Mar-Vell got his cure. And it created a contagious form of cancer that nearly wiped out humanity. And the Kree, and the Skrulls, ending their war.
    • The scientific portion of that is at least justifiable. Cancer is a random mutation of a body cell into an undifferentiated, individual cell. Any organism that's made out of cells that can mutate has all the conditions needed for cancer.
      • In a world of magic and super-advanced nano-technology, this sounds kind of hollow. So what if the cancer is inoperable, just let a swarm of nanites break it down cell-by-cell. Cancer returns? Just do it again!
  • The fictional African nation of Wakanda in Marvel Comics is, due to a surreptitious abundance of Unobtainium as a natural resource, a first world nation. This does not extend to any other part of Africa we see, though this is probably why writers don't show that very much. Although to their credit from fairly early on they attempted to justify it by having the Wakandans have a policy of isolation that goes back centuries. Don't forget, the Wakandans have also cured cancer but are holding out on the rest of the world. Seriously. The UN effectively offered anything for the cure. Wakandans got offended at the notion and refused. When Mar-Vell was dying of cancer, the Wakandan King was there and said he could do nothing. Sorry, Mar-Vell!
    • Back when a good writer (Christopher Priest) was on the book, Wakanda only became super-advanced after Ulysses Klaw attacked Wakanda, killing hundreds, including King T'Chaka. The actual advancing was done by sending children to study in Europe and the U.S. and taking what they learned back home (kinda like what Japan and China did). It didn't hurt that the new King, young T'Challa (aka The Black Panther), was a genius up there with Reed Richard and Dr. Doom, and had a key role in making the country a technological marvel. This was later retconned to say that Wakanda had always been thousands of years more advanced than every other country, ever since the ice ages, and T'Challa actually hasn't invented anything, he just inherited lots of cool toys. Presumably someone thought it was a good idea to retcon away the title character's greatest accomplishment, modernizing a country into a world power, in order to have him inherit a utopia instead.
      • Hudlin: retroactively making Black Panther and the Wakandans not simply as useless as the other scientists, but a massive Jerkass!
  • Another subversion in yet another out-of-mainstream examination of the comic book hero: in the Squadron Supreme miniseries, resident genius Tom Thumb devises and sells effective personal force shields, 'rehabilitation' (read 'brainwashing') devices, limited-lethality stunning weapons and various other amazing devices as part of the 'Utopia Project' wherein he and his fellow Supremes try to create an ideal society. He was unable to find a cure for the cancer that was killing him, however, so instead he developed a form of suspended animation through which the terminally ill could be kept indefinitely until a cure is found. In the end, the Squadron realizes that all of these devices could prove horrifying in the wrong hands - the infrastructure created with them can only do good as long as good people are in charge, and they have no way of knowing that the coming generations will use them wisely.
    • Not only could the technology fall into the wrong hands, some of the Squadron members actually DID abuse the technology, as when the Green Arrow-spinoff used the personality-altering machine to make Lady Lark marry him.
  • Another Wildstorm example. In Wildcats 3.0, the leader of the title superhero team, sought to use the advanced extra-terrestrial technology that belonged to his creators to change the world. The limitless batteries alone caused quite a stir.
  • Yet another aversion, the comic Invincible has a character, Atom Eve, who was initially a part of a teenager superhero team, but later realize that it would be better to use her matter transmutation power in a more practical way, such as helping the people suffering from famine in Africa by turning their drought-ridden land into fertile fields.
  • Also averted in the Wild Cards Shared Universe novels, where the existence of Xenovirus Takis-A victims (especially the grotesquely deformed 'jokers' - superpowered 'aces' actually have less of an impact) radically alters the course of history in a variety of ways (but not quite to the point of being unrecognizable). On the other hand, the work of "Mechanic" type supers generally can't be duplicated by others, and are sometimes "dummy devices" powered by their creators.
  • Justified in the WildStorm comic Planetary, in which the villains are a thinly veiled version of the Fantastic Four, and the Reed analog purposely keeps their discoveries and inventions from the world for personal gain.
    • The real reason why the Fourth Man founded Planetary was because this really pissed him off. And in the last, soon released, issue, according to the script, Planetary uses their technology to turn world into Utopia.
  • In Stormwatch: Lighting Strikes, volume 2 TPB, it was revealed that Earth was briefly caught in an interdimensional war during the 1950's). If Earth received more notice, than they could of acquired interdimensional technology and launched into a technological golden age (although it's not like they didn't have any of that stuff already)
  • Examined by Warren Ellis in the "Change Or Die" storyline of the Image/WildStorm comic Stormwatch, in which a team of Captain Ersatz superhumans attempts to radically change the world with their trademark abilities; Superman The High shares his ideas on society developed over several decades with his super-brain, Doctor Strange The Doctor Breaks the Masquerade by teaching everyone magic, Iron Man The Engineer creates an oasis of Nanomachines in Nevada capable of producing food, energy, medicine, and nearly anything else people would need without limit, Deadman The Eidolon teaches the world of The Nothing After Death, Zatanna(?) Wish forcibly declassifies government secrets such as cancer cures, Jet Packs, Alien Abductions, etc. Of course, The Government Stormwatch's Big Bad Boss, Henry Bendix, sends assassins to kill them all, and hits the place with a chemical weapon to destroy the nanotech — because he wants to change the world his way, and that hippie crap's going to get in the way. And members of both sides try to make sure Jenny Sparks never hears a word about this, because she might either join the Changers or talk her old friend The High down. The Aesop: Reed Richards is Useless because he doesn't want to be executed, and because not even his friends agree on exactly what changing the world means.
    • Warren Ellis and his successors examined the trope further with Stormwatch's successor, The Authority, which was Jenny Sparks' attempt to fill the shoes of both Stormwatch and The High's group. One arc, Mark Millar's "The Nativity", explicitly asks the question "Why do super-people never go after the real bastards?" The Authority, like the Stormwatch superhumans, did devote their time to solving the problems of humanity; The Engineer in particular. She developed a cure for leukaemia and spent her spare time developing renewable energy. The Authority are also pretty thorough about addressing the crimes perpetrated by humans rather than superhumans - such as totalitarian regimes. However, this backfires: they are accused of presenting "unfair competition" for medical and industrial companies, and blamed for mass redundancies. Moreover, after the Coup D'Etat storyline The Authority become the unelected government of the USA, which, all things considered, was a tad hypocritical of them. Not that they were squeaky-clean heroes to begin with..
      • In the Authority: Relentless maxi-series, villain Henry Bendix revolutionized the American economy by setting up fuel stations at restaurants which served cooking grease to be used as automobile fuel. Furthermore, the Palestinian successor to the Doctor used his powers to inspire/force an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
  • Homage Comics' "Ultra" had the Cowgirl using her powers to build canals in Africa. On the other hand, the "fighting bad guys" aspect was less effective, as the heroes had to follow agency protocols.
  • Averted by the recent Thor relaunch, which has seen Thor helping a medical camp in Darfur and berating his fellow heroes for failing to do anything about Hurricane Katrina (while, as a storm god, feeling guilty about it himself even though he was dead at the time).
    • Let's be fair to Thor—the reason he was dead was that he'd begun using his powers to help out fishermen fallen on hard times and the like—and ended up becoming a brutal tyrant after the military nuked Asgard.
    • Virtue (Ethan Edwards) currently uses his healing powers to help the sick in Africa after its pointed out that he can help more people with this then by just being another superhero.
    • Albert Destine tried to use his healing powers to stop the Black Death, but was unable to do so.
  • Averted in the comic Invincible Iron Man v4 05, where Tony Stark buys a company that sells soft drinks solely because they have vending machines everywhere in Africa and he wants to use them to sell Retrovirals and later the AIDS vaccine.
    • In Iron Man 237, it was revealed that Tony Stark originally developed prototype outer space colonies. However, AIM infected the colonies with biological weaponry. Cleanup of the colonies was deemed cost-prohibitive.
  • In the first run of New Warriors, the title team decides to use their powers to resolve a civil war in 'Trans-Sabal.' They only manage to make matters worse and receive a resoundingly righteous ass-chewing from Henry Peter Gyrich upon their return.
    • Similar to Peter David's run on the Incredible Hulk where the title's character and the Pantheon intervene to ensure that this one fictional nation transitions towards democracy as promised. However, X-Factor intervenes against the Hulk and warns him that he is help creating a world where "might makes right"
  • Averted in the comic The Boys, where the government employs a group specifically to keep the 'capes' in line. Of course, Garth Ennis is a bloody-minded bastard and the supes get up to all kinds of mischief anyway.
    • The Boys is a weird one, as it turns out that superheroes really are useless. When The Seven try to avert the comics' version of 9/11, they fuck it up catastrophically. The message, of course, being that the military and other trained resque organizations are the real heroes.
  • Completely Averted in Miracleman by Alan Moore and then Neil Gaiman: After defeating the big bad, the super heroes do take over the world and make it a Utopia.
  • Justified in the case of the Atom's shrinking technology: Ray Palmer wanted to commercialize it, tried to commercialize it, and had to abandon the hope because everything exposed to the reducer exploded upon re-expansion. Only Ray himself could use it to both shrink and grow, owing to a unique energy within his body. Of course, making anything explode sounds exploitable...
    • As in Justice League The New Frontier, in which Ray's technology is useful precisely BECAUSE shrinking the Centre until it explodes is the only option left. Even if someone has to explain it to Dr. Will Magnus, who's apparently not smart enough to figure it out.
    • However, Arnold Cray (Atom II from Suicide Squad) and Jean Loring were later able to successfully shrink themselves with the Atom's technology
      • In the Power Of The Atom series Ray Palmer gained access to shrinking technology of a 6-inch tall alien race he lived among with, however he never bothered to make practical use of the technology.
  • Ex Machina plays with this trope. The main character is a former superhero who has the ability to talk to machines (so he could tell a train to stop itself, tell a computer to turn itself on, and tell a gun to jam itself). However, he hangs up his cape after he screws up a bit too much (plus the government specifically forbade him from doing any more superheroing while it was studying his gear). He only goes back to work on 9/11, where he's not quite fast enough to stop the first plane, so one tower is still demolished (he saves the other one). He then decides to run for mayor of New York City, figuring he'll do more good in that role. For the most part, he's correct.
    • In this one Amazing Spider-Man issue dealing with September 11th, Dr. Doom, Magneto, and Juggernaut were standing around the wreckage of the Twin Towers crying while not using their powers/science to clear the wreckage (they could of probably completed that in less than a day).
  • Subverted in Rising Stars. After a considerable amount of fighting, the people with superpowers (Specials) realize, what are their powers for, and use them to end drug trade, defeat organized crime, destroy nuclear weapons and so on.
  • Spider Man's webbing. Real life spider silk is, pound for pound, stronger than steel, tougher than Kevlar, as flexible as yarn, and incredibly lightweight. It's also prohibitively hard to manufacture, as spiders don't "farm" well. Peter Parker somehow has managed to manufacture spider silk (or a synthetic that's very close to the real thing) that's cost-effective enough for him to always be in supply, and yet he doesn't seem to feel the need to release the formula so it can be used as a revolutionary building material.
    • In the early Ditko-era comics Spidey actually did try to sell his webbing formula to an adhesive company. They didn't buy it because his webbing only lasts for an hour before dissolving, making it virtually useless as an adhesive much less as a building material. Also, Spider-Man knew that he could modify the webbing to better suit their purpose, but it would cost him a lot of money he didn't have.
    • Indeed, Peter's efforts to profit from his scientific creations were frequently thwarted by his desire to keep his Secret Identity. Once, he did find a buyer for his web formula but the deal fell through when they asked who to make the check out to and Peter realized he couldn't cash a check made out to Spider-Man. And even ignoring the negative opinion the general public has of Spider-Man thanks to The Daily Bugle and J. Jonah Jameson's editorials, no respectable company would hand Spider-Man a suitcase full of money as payment for his web formula nor would the government allow him to anonymously apply for the patents required to profit off of his creation.
      • One issue of Marvel Team-Up with Spider-Man and Wonder Man involved a businessman who wanted to get a sample of Spider-Man's web formula in order to make better billet-proof vests. The businessman hires the Mauler to steal some of Spider-Man's web formula but fails.
      • That same issue revealed that Wonder Man uses his super-endurance powers to test out bullet-proof vests for the same company.
      • Of course, that offers no reason why Peter Parker couldn't have done it himself, without even mentioning Spiderman. Even if you argue that it would have been suspicious that he'd developed it on his own, since he had access to university chemical research facilities, it's difficult to believe he couldn't have "discovered" it there.
      • Furthermore, when Peter Parker worked for Tony Stark, there was no reason why it wouldn't be hard to believe that Parker "discovered" it there.
      • Ultimate Spider-Man has been a bit more liberal with his scientific knowledge than his Earth-616 counterpart. He shared his DNA with Dr. Curt Connors who wanted to understand the self-replicating behavior of the strands. However, this led to the creation of Carnage, which killed Gwen Stacey, making Parker a lot more hesitant to share his powers with scientists.
    • The movie also kind of invokes this - Spiderman's web slinging skills is linked to his DNA.
  • Subverted in the Thunderbolts #130 where Norman Osborn does cure cancer with the intent of using it to kill Deadpool.
  • The DCU stories set during World War Two explained why the superheroes didn't just Blitzkrieg into Berlin and end the war: Adolf Hitler had acquired the Spear of Destiny, which he could use to control any superpowered being that entered the boundaries of the Reich. Later, Hitler's belief in the Spear's power was discussed in an episode of Justice League Unlimited.
  • In the comics that were published during the early days of World War II, it was not uncommon to see superheroes intervening in, if not outright stopping, conflicts that involved thinly veiled Nazi proxies. The story where Superman brings Hitler and Mussolini to justice is the most famous example of this trend. This changed when United States actually entered the conflict - many non-powered and low-powered heroes continued to fight the Nazis on the front lines, while the more powerful superheroes focused their efforts on fighting Nazi schemes at home. As stated above, the real reason for this was the writers didn't want to trivialize the war by having their imaginary heroes solve it in days, while thousands of real troops were dying. When the tide of war turned in the Allies' favor, the writers became more open to having more powerful heroes participate in battles, but even then, the heroes weren't allowed to completely defeat the Axis forces.
  • Subverted in, of all places, in the Hellraiser comic Pinhead vs. Marshal Law: Law in Hell, where a bunch of Captain Ersatz superheroes wind up inside Pinhead's memories of World War One. Their attempts to help fail spectacularly, with things like the guy in power armor sinking in the mud and the guy with eye beams choking on poison gas, while the hero made of rock who can shrug off bullets gets blown apart by much heavier artillery.
    Pinhead: Those idiots! What do they think they can achieve in a real war.
  • In the 'Marvel Knights' miniseries, 'Silver Surfer: Requiem.' the Surfer prepares to leave earth for good, and return home, having contracted 'super-cancer.' Before he leaves, he talks to Spider-man about how he might change the world: they review several previous examples, decide all of them are unusable and talk about other things. Later in the issue the Surfer grants the 'Power Cosmic' to MJ, giving her the power to fly in space, among other things. He then does the same thing (on a lesser scale: sans space travel.) to the rest of the planet: 'The world stopped for four seconds: no war, no violence, no hate.'
    • However, in one issue of the original Silver Surger series (1968) NASA did try to get Surfer to help them with their space technology. Whether or not Surfer helped them was not explained.
  • An obscure Golden Age example. In Target Comics "Calling 2R" feature, a benevolent scientist known only as Skipper transformed his estate into Boystate, a high-tech refuge for unwanted boys. Boystate residents a variety of high-speed aircaft (by 1940s standards), "force wall" forcefields, cosmic-ray-powered healing chambers, portable radio communicators and other nifty gadgetry. But while Skipper was very happy to share his technology with his charges, he went out of his way to make sure it never left Boystate's confines. The later stories averted it when World War II broke out and Skipper was ordered to develop high-tech weaponry for the army. He was happy to comply.
  • In What If Spider-Man Kept His Cosmic Powers, Spidey doesn't lose the powers of Captain Universe, and starts to feel responsible for the whole world. At one point, he asks Thor to make it rain in an area experiencing drought. When Thor tries to explain that this would cause drought somewhere else, Captain Spidey responds violently.
  • Usually played straight in Astro City, as the author believes that it's important that the stories take place in our world, but the superhero Samaritan was able to stop the Challenger disaster, and there's a story dealing with a lawyer who attempts to defend his client in a mundane case by citing superhuman events - he argues that yes, forty witnesses say that they saw his client commit the murder, but there was once a bank robbery seemingly committed by celebrities who turned out to be shapeshifters, the superheroes First Family were suspected of selling defense secrets, but it was their Alternate Universe counterparts, etc. It ends up actually getting his client off the hook.
  • In the New X-Men arc Too Much Information, David Alleyne convinces Emma Frost to remove the mental block on his power that prevents him from retaining the knowledge he telepathically gains from people nearby. Afterward he travels the world meeting famous figures from Bill Gates to Reed Richards, gaining their knowledge and becoming a super genius. He then uses his new-found omniscience to come up with, among other things, a cure for Aids and Cancer, and eventually becomes President of the United States. Unfortunately, he gets the cures by killing his teammate Elixir, and it is revealed his knowledge is corrupting him into a tyrannical ruler. in the end, his teammates try to stop him, and end up killing themselves in an attempt to destroy him. It is, of course, then revealed that all this was an illusion cooked up by Dani Moonstar to show David what he most feared, and he decides against removing the block until he feels he can handle the knowledge responsibly.
  • In Firestorm 77-79 (1982), Firestorm uses his powers to turn a drought-stricken region of Africa into a lush forest. However, this ecological transformation causes the warring sides to intensify their fighting for that region.
  • Back when Hulk regained his intelligence during Bill Mantlo's 1980's run, since Bruce Banner was no longer on the run from the authorities, he put his mind to work with the gammascope. The device was meant to gather gamma radiation throughout outer space for medical purposes.
    • In Peter David's Hulk, the Pantheon claimed that they were close to discovering a cure for AIDS. How far this puts Marvel Universe AIDS research ahead of the real world is uncertain.
    • When the Hulk's friend Jim Wilson was in his last bout with AIDS, Jim asked the Hulk for a blood transfusion. The Hulk refused, saying that he didn't want to risk turning Jim into a rampaging monster.
  • In Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, the title character contemplates using his powers to restore the ecologically damaged areas of the world. However Swamp Thing states that if he would heal all of man's wounds, man would further abuse the environment to maximize profit knowing full well that Swamp Thing was there to correct all the mistakes.
  • In Spectre 7 (third series) Madame Xanadu asks the Spectre why he doesn't cure his HIV-positive friend Amy Beiterman. The Spectre responds that if he cures Amy, then there is nowhere to draw the line in curing the millions of sick people worldwide. At that point, the Spectre asks "Where do you draw the line? Abolish death itself?"
    • In that same issue, Madame Xanadu steals the Spectre's power, with the intention of truly making the world a better place. However, the very nature of the Spectre's powers (vengeance), makes her overly preoccupied with punishing the guilty. She relinquishes the power at the end of the issue.
    • Marvel's superheroes did temporarily abolish death in Secret Wars II, only to find out that life lacked meaning without death.
    • In Spectre 22 (third series) the title character removes all the pollution that was created from him destroying the country of Vlatava and hurls it into outer space. Superman asks Spectre why he doesn't do that with all of Earth's pollution. Spectre responds that it is too dangerous for humanity to become too dependent on superhumans to solve their problems
      • Not to mention that this would involve being effectively a giant air filter flinging megatons of soot, ozone, and sulfur (95+% of all air pollution), as well as gigatons of sludge, garbage, and oils into the sky every day. YouFailBiologyForever. This would cause a rather nasty reduction in the biosphere. NiceJobBreakingItHero
  • In Dark Reign: The Hood, several of the Hood's operatives get to wondering just why they do like they do instead of what they could. "Chemistro. Centurious. Controller. A veritable think tank of geniuses. But why do we follow?" Yeah, you know things are messed up when Dr. Demonicus is the voice of reason.
  • In Justice League 1, Dr. Light II was going to propose towards the United Nations on how to use her science to farm the ocean floor.
  • Temporarily subverted in Giffen/Demmateis' writing of Justice League America where Booster Gold and Blue Beetle use Kilowog to build an island resort/casino in JUST a couple of hours. Furthermore, visitors arrive at the resort via teleporter tubes at the airport. How this got government approval so fast (or even if it got approval) remains unanswered.
  • This premise is partly explained by the Marvel Universe's Watchers intention not to interfere in the affairs of other races. They originally shared their scientific knowledge with a primitive alien race who used the newfound knowledge to become spacefaring. Eventually this alien race with abundant technological gains declared war on a race far more powerful than them and were obliterated as a result. This led the Watchers to being non-interventionists.
    • This was probably the reason why Hawkman refused to share Thangarian knowledge with the coroporate backers of the Chicago PD in the Hawkworld Armageddon 2001 annual. Nevertheless, Hawkman could of still shared benign Thangarian science that was at no risk to anyone.
  • In the House Of M reality (where Magneto was seemingly granted his every wish), mutants came open to the public in the 1950's. This made everyday science and history differ significantly from the real world. For example, NASA landed Captain America on the moon in the 1950's, the FBI routinely used psychics to foil crimes, and many other superscience advances were released to the public.
  • In "What If? Vision Conquered The World" there are two possibilities explored. One is in which the superheroes use their knowledge to solve the energy crisis, combat environmental destruction, end world hunger and send humanity to the stars. In the other possibility, the Vision's attempts at conquering the world led to global war and the eventualy Orwellian dictatorship led by the Vision and various supervillains.
  • Enginehead plays with this; After Enginehead saves a child from an oncoming truck, he sees the future and finds that because of the accident he caused by saving the kid, thousands will lose their jobs, dozens will be destroyed emotionally, and four people will commit suicide. Enginehead's entire purpose is to "fix" humanity by eliminating "flaws", so this revelation shakes him to the core and makes him question his lot in "life".
  • Examples of Reed Richards being useful or trying to be useful.
    • Way back in the 1960's, the Fantastic Four travelling back in time to bring back a cure for blindness to treat Alicia Masters. While bringing the cure back to the present, however, the time travel process renders the serum useless.
      • However, back in the 4 series, Invisible Woman offers to have Reed build some synthetic eyes to Alicia. Alicia turns down Reed's offer. Why Reed isn't doing this for other blind people hasn't been explained.
    • In recent storyline Reed choose to solve everything and join forces with whole society of his alternate counterparts, that desires to do the same thing in every dimension in The Multiverse, wich include turning whole planets into big fams that provides food for the rest of the Universe and lobotomizing multiple counterparts of Doctor Doom. Hoever chance for solving everything has a price - all his counterparts has to sacrifive their bounds with everyone close to them, because this work consume them completly. When Reed finds it out, he escapes.
      • However, Reed did not need to devote all of his life to revolutionizing humanity. He could of just release just one of his medical advances to the public. It doesn't need to be an "all or nothing" situation/
    • In Ultimate Fantastic Four, the Thing travelled back in time to prevent Ultimate Reed Richards teleportation experiment (which created the Ultimate Fantastic Four) from being sabotaged. As a result, Reed succeeds in making Earth an interstellar civilization. However, Earth eventually gets decimated by the Skrulls, leading Ben Grim to go back in time again to make sure that the teleportation experiment WAS sabotaged.
  • As for unstable molecules (which serve many of the functions of regular skin), the commerical and humanitarian purposes (i.e. the fashion industry, burn victim treatment, spacesuits etc.) are seemingly limitless. However, a fashion designer once reverse-engineered unstable molecules, causing the "lock" to come undone. As a result a major destructive wave was unleashed destroying all matter in its sight. Not surprisingly, Reed Richards found it to dangerous to unleash to the public. However, it hasn't been explained why Reed Richards is okay letting prisons use his technology to hold super-villains but not to construct surgical bandages.
    • Similar to Hank Pym, who leases his ant-man technology to prisons to shrink super-villains. Think of the wonders that could be done if that type to technology was leased to surgeons or astronauts.
  • Justified and double subverted in Irredeemable Plutonian once gave a small piece of alien technology to a sciencist and it ended with High Octane Nightmare Fuel incarnate.
  • Subverted in the Ulitmate Marvel Universe
    • Earth is still stuck from the damage left by Ultimatum (i.e. New York City devastated by floods, all of Eastern Europe frozen solid etc.)
    • In the first Ultimates maxi-series, it was revealed that NASA was developed from Skrull technology left over from World War II
    • Captain Marvel used his scientific knowledge to help develop NASA's Asis engine, which theoretically makes possible for humans to engage in interstellar transportation within a human lifespan).
  • At the end of David Hine's "Spawn: Armageddon" storyline, Spawn is recreating the universe after the cataclysmic battle between heaven and hell. When Spawn is asked if he wants to cure the common cold or end global warming, Spawn says no, for he has done enough for humanity and it is now time for them to solve their own problems.
  • Examples of where the DC Universe has subverted this trope and then reversed it.
    • From 2000 to 2004, Metropolis was upgraded to Braniac technology.
    • Lex Luthor was President of the United States from 2001 to 2005.
    • San Diego was submerged underwater, only to return to surface in 52: World War III.
    • Montevideo, Uruguay was obliterated in a nuclear attack during the DC: One Million mini-series. The ruins were then turned into a world heritage site.
    • Temporarily averted in the year-long Batman storyline, No Man's Land. In this story, an earthquake-ravaged Gotham was closed off from the rest of the United States by the US Government. DC promised HUGE changes in the Batman mythos following the end of the storyline. Other than one major death [[Spoiler: Sarah Gordon]] and a new Batgirl, Gotham City was restored to normal, more of Status Quo Is God.
  • Averted in the Justice League/Justice League Unlimited Cartoon
    • In the series premiere, NASA finally lands a man on Mars
    • It was revealed that Hawkman and Hawkgirl used Thangarian agroscience to transform ancient Egypt from a bunch of primitive hunter-gatherers to one of the world's most powerful civilizations.
  • Nightshade from the Suicide Squad has lent her ability to transport instantly through the dark dimension. This power could revolutionize space exploration but most people are scared senseless if not driven insane by passing through this dimension.
  • In What If Silver Surfer get Infinity Gaunlet Surfer becomes omnipotent and is trying to resape Universe into one big utopia, wich includes remaking Death into something more nice. He even wanted to turn Mephisto into more usefull beign, but killed him, when heard a refuse. Hoever, this trope was subverted, because at the end that level of power was driving him crazy.
  • In William Messener Loeb's writing of Impulse, the titular character had a foreigner friend who was a scientific genius (inventions including a matter duplicator, antigravity, and completely automating the service at his cousin's convenience store). However, the foreigner "claimed" that he couldn't find scientific employment because no company would recognize degrees from his country.
  • In the Justice maxi-series, the Legion of Doom uses [[spoilers: Braniac's nanotechnology]] to cure various human ailments along with Captain Cold and Poision Ivy's technology to rejuvenate barren land. This all turns out to be a ploy to enslave humanity. The Justice League foils the Legion of Doom, thus negating the cures. In the process, [[spoilers: all of Earth's nuclear weapons are destroyed]]. The Justice League boasts that this helps lead Earth with the possibility of finally turning Earth into a paradise (as suggested by the Legion of Super-Heroes analogy).
  • In "What If Mr. Fantastic's second child had lived?" Mr. Fantastic's daughter becomes a major counterculture figure who leads Americans into overthrowing polluters and war-mongers.

Film
  • In the Superman [[Film/Superman movie]] films our hero has an Arctic Fortress filled with 'the accumulated scientific knowledge of dozens of different worlds'. Rather than flying around stopping accidents and robberies, wouldn't he make a far greater contribution to mankind if he just used that technology, to, say, cure cancer? Looks like Luthor was right about him. 'Gods are selfish beings who fly around in capes don't share their power with mankind.'
  • In the Iron Man movie, Tony Stark's power cell is stated as being able to generate 3 gigajoules per second of energy - which is, of course, 3 gigawatts of power generation. This is about as much power as produced by the largest man-made nuclear reactor and about 15 times the power of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier (and two and a half times the power required to travel through time). He uses it for flying robots.
    • Earlier in the movie, the trope is averted: Stark mentions that his company produces crop-growing and medicinal technology.
    • He also says that he wants to get the company back on examining how to make the technology available to everyone, so it's not like he's literally holding out on them just so he can have his flying robot all to himself. He just wants some reasonable safety precautions to make sure that every terrorist in the world doesn't wind up with their own flying robot first, which the movie shows us is a pretty damn reasonable worry.
    • Also, before he builds the miniaturized generator, the only previous use of the technology was an enormous model that barely produced enough electricity to power the Stark Industries complex, and was generally considered a dead end design kept around only for PR reasons.
    • In the comics, it is Hand Waved that since most of Stark Tech goes to the Goverment or SHIELD it takes years for them to reach civilian hands (pretty much Truth In Television).
  • In Bruce Almighty, not only is Bruce incredibly stupid but he seems to have no desire to use God's power to make this a better world. His only attempt at this really involved more of "how can I get people to quit bothering me" and even that was handled so stupidly it defies belief.
    • It's not like he became God for the sake of helping others. It was clear right from the start that it was all selfish whining that got him the post.
  • The Ghost Busters movies (and the 2009 video game) plays with this. While, they do use the technology they've created for personal profit, the new game has them as licensed contractors for New York, they do ignore the potential profit they could make from developing that tech for other uses.
    • Which could be a interesting idea to consider if the third film project gets made, considering the patents on at least the original equipment like the proton packs and the traps would have expired by now.
    • Please note that one of the upgrades for one of the weapon modes in the videogame sort of Lampshaded the use of the tech by saying that while it can punch small holes in the fabric of reality the holes can't even be used to dump away trash.
  • In The Prestige, Nikola Tesla makes magician Robert Angier a machine which was intended to be a teleporter but turns out to be a matter replicator. It could be used to make unlimited quantities of food, clothing, machine parts, construction materials . . . it could put an end to hunger and material poverty for all time. And Angier can think of no better use for it than a stage-magic act.
  • Lampshaded in Back to the Beach where Bob Denver and Alan Hale, Jr. are seen in a bar. The Bob Denver character complains about being stranded on a deserted island with a guy so smart he could make a nuclear reactor out of a couple of coconuts...but he couldn't fix a two-foot hole in a boat.
  • Men In Black possess enormous amount of confiscated advanced technology which is probably enough to take over all universe. But they are doing great deal of constant memory erasing to hide alien existence to avoid possible panic (or more likely not to lose their power)
    • It's stated in the first film, however, that they DO release some of the technology to the public. As a private organization, MIB has to make money somehow, so they hold the patents on nmerous alien technologies sold to the public- velcro, microwaves, and CD's, to name a few.
  • subverted in Earth: Final Conflict where humans extensively use Taelonian technology for daily life.

Literature
  • In the Harry Potter novels, the Ministry of Magic keeps the existence of wizards secret from Muggles because, as Hagrid puts it, "They might want magical solutions to their problems." It never seems to occur to any wizard to ask, "Well, why not?" In the Muggle world, wizards could become simply one more category of useful, respected, highly-paid professionals... Of course, it could go horribly wrong. The prejudice against so-called "witches" - that for some reason still infests the real world - shows how badly that could go.
    • This troper would like to mention that wizards seem to be extremely outnumbered by the muggles. Assuming that Harry's class size was average - meaning about 5 boys and 5 girls in each year per House - there aren't even 300 students at Hogwarts. While it has been implied that there may be other wizarding schools in the UK - Hagrid calling it the best implies there are some that aren't the best, after all, and Harry had his name on the list from birth, meaning some don't have their name on the list. Logic says they have to go someplace - they probably aren't the size of Hogwarts as they were never mentioned. In 2007, the UK had over 60 million residents; if you take Hogwarts stats, then you have about 40 wizards at each consecutive age (40 15-year-olds, 40 16-year-olds, etc). Even if you assume these numbers stand for all ages (considering it is the wizarding world, I'll even guess high and use a spectrum from birth to 150-years-old), there would still only be 6,000 wizards in the UK. That's one in every 10,000 people. Also take into account that the wizarding community was most likely shrinking as is implied by the scarcity of pure-blood and the two harsh wizarding wars. So, if they outed themselves, they would be so vastly outnumbered that being overpowered couldn't be too difficult. It's merely self-preservation that keeps them from announcing their "gifts" - the same way that any sane individual wouldn't walk into a room full of strangers waving around a winning lotto ticket; it's just asking for trouble.
    • The reverse is also true - wizards are apparently completely mystified by such things as escalators, telephones and computers, despite having their very own (magical) version of radio and the odd impossible purple triple-decker bus. And not one of them, not even the two major characters that were born/raised in the Muggle world, ever considered non-magical solutions to their problems, such as:
      • Firearms. Word Of God has said that one of the reasons why wizards keep Muggles in the dark is because in a fight, a Muggle with a firearm would win.
      • Then there's the idea of working around the spells curses with modern technology, such as using a defibrillator on anyone who gets hit with a death curse. Or using the old lemon-juice technique to send secret, non magical hidden messages.
      • In the fifth book, one of the doctors at the wizard hospital attempts to cure a magical snakebite using stitches. It doesn't work.
      • The basic rule seems to be that prolonged heavy use of magic affects the conductivity of the air, meaning that most forms of electronics are screwed up. This doesn't affect explosives or weaponry.
      • There are, apparently, already spells that function as explosives, as well as the fact that the vast majority of spells can be used weapon-wise (Wingardium Leviosa has already been proven thus). And being zapped with a few thousand volts of electricity isn't going to fix the fact that ALL of your bodily functions have simply been stopped.
    • The wizarding world has access to a potion that can regrow bones. Muggle medicine would be infinitely grateful for that alone, and, judging by the novels, most potions are concocted from naturally-occurring components. Despite that, although certain potions are dangerous, or could become dangerous in the wrong hands, wizard ethics are just as fragile as a regular Muggle's, so keeping the knowledge to themselves is unbelievably selfish and negligent.
      • To be fair, "unbelievably selfish and negligent" is a really good description of the Ministry of Magic itself up through Harry's time. Perhaps things had changed by the time of the Happily Ever After epilogue, though if they have, we're not given any indication of it.
      • Word Of God states that the breach between the two worlds is permanent.
      • Word Of God also says that magic potions will, at one point during their preparation, invariably require magic. Simply giving Muggles the recipe to useful potions would not work; it'd have to be full-blown export of the stuff, which would mean exposure, the considerable downsides of which other tropers have described better than this one could.
    • Wizards also have their own diseases, their own weapons, etc., and they can't fix their own problems any faster or more efficiently than the Muggles, or at least so is implied. They might be able to regrow bones, but they also have Dragon Pox. Although who's to say that Muggle medicine can't come up with a Dragon Pox vaccine? The two together should still be stronger than the two separate.
      • Along the same lines, it's interesting to note that the Masquerade began in the 1600s when the wizarding world split from the muggle world and went into hiding. The fact that the wizards only have familiarity with 17th century technology seems to justify this, until you realize that weapons such as longbows (12th century) and muskets/hand cannons (14th century) were around long before that time. Either of these weapons could easily take out a wizard from outside the range of their spells, but that's beside the point; just imagine how effective Magitek versions could have been in the Potterverse.
    • And now you get the picture why the HP JBM page is so very freakin' long.
  • The elves from Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Trilogy are self-righteous, vegetarian, nudist, atheist Wiccans (who cares if that's a contradiction) who are "coincidentally" superior to crude, meat-eating humans and the overtly religious dwarves in every way, shape, and form. They're also ridiculously powerful magicians who nevertheless never actually do anything about The Empire they so hate.
    • Subverted in that the elves, up until the Big Bad took over the world, always gave out just about all of their technology and magic that wouldn't be horribly abused. Quality of life for the humans has dropped off dramatically in the last century or so since the elves got run out of town. They're also ridiculously powerful magicians who are hopelessly outnumbered by almost-ridiculously powerful magicians led by a magician powered by Ancient Secrets.
  • The Dresden Files book "Turn Coat" explores this. The reason so far given is that if mages were to be part of the world; they would become part of the political process. Wars between Muggles would become wars between mages; and then nobody would be able to stop the vampires. Whether this is a good reason is left open...
    • Actually this is a gross oversimplification of the reason given. Luccio says that, while in hindsight the "good" and "evil" sides in mortal conflicts might be evident, in the heat of the action, it isn't so (because in real life, no one thinks of themselves as a villain). She uses WWII as an example, saying that it would have been impossible for the White Council of Wizard to choose between allied and axis propaganda (and both sides accused the others of atrocities). So the only way the council could interfere with mortal business would be by deciding who's right and wrong, thus taking power over the mortals. Also, the council is an international forces, and if it were to pick sides, people who felt their country was being picked on by the council would split away from the council, which would leave the council in a state of civil war, splintered and unable to defend the mortals against evils like the Vampire Courts, Warlocks and the like. The laws of magic, while having no sense of justice, do make it illegal to use most black magics, limiting the damage a single individual could do.
  • Theodicy is essentially the study of why God, the main character of The Bible, doesn't just solve all of our problems in Real Life. Is it possible that Status Quo Is God?
  • A Ray Bradbury short story ("A Piece Of Wood") has the army-employed scientist protagonist invent a machine that causes immediate rust: a pen, a tank, a rifle will dissolve into red dust. The finale reveals that since the device has a time delay: he has been walking around the entire military base disabling the entire installation, and it is revealed he plans to do this to the entire world. (How he would get there is unaddressed.) The story ends with the general he was talking to getting up from his chair and breaking off a leg, intending to use it as a club.
  • In The Watch books, the Others do interfere with human affairs, but an elaborate system of mutual sanctions makes sure that interference isn't overt. The sanctions were set up to preserve the Balance, which, in turn, was established because open warfare between the Light Others and Dark Others left catastrophic casualties on both sides (not to mention untold collateral damage). Of course, this doesn't stop each side from trying to find an advantage that would allow them to win without triggering Mutually Assured Destruction.
  • On the Discworld, Lord Vetinari keeps Leonard of Quirm under lock and key for the express purpose of ensuring that Reed Richards Remains Useless. It also helps that inventors like Urn realize that they're better off being useless, and that the magical equivalents of things like movies, rock and roll, and guns are powered by evil or destructive forces.
  • Similarly, from Pratchett and Gaimen's Good Omens:
    "Think of all the things you could do! Good things!"
    "Like what?" said Adam suspiciously.
    "Well... you could bring the whales back, to start with."
    He put his head to one side. "An' that'd stop people killing them, would it?"
    She hesitated. It would have been nice to say yes.

Live Action TV
  • Magician scientist Zelda Spellman from Sabrina The Teenage Witch tried to make a machine that would somehow, using de-ionization and the Hanta virus, to process dirt into edible protein pellets and end the suffering of millions. When the first prototype blew up she became frustrated and quit trying, blaming her disinterest on a lack of electricity in the poorest areas... Yeah, right.
  • The Tenth Doctor has developed a habit of talking about time being "in flux". When it's in flux, it's possible (read: he's allowed) to change things. Otherwise, it's a no-no. Time seems to be conveniently in and out of flux whenever the plot demands it, which is nice.
    • In the wonderful fanfic "People Used to Dream About the Future," he is convinced to do this. Unfortunately, what he does is wipe himself out of existence, undoing everything he's done or not done. And it's implied heavily this is the world we have today, if you believe what the story's narrator says, that is...
    • Do recall that when the Fourth Doctor was literally omnipotent for 5 minutes at the end of The Armaggeddon Factor (thanks to the Key to Time), it seems that he was scared and horrified at the temptation it presented him, and he abdicated that power as soon as he could before it corrupted him...
  • On the subject of Sarah Jane, in one episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures the characters suggest using an alien device to cure an old woman's Alzheimer's disease. This Troper instantly knew, because of this trope, that it wouldn't work.
  • In one episode of Law And Order, a mysogynist modifies a commercially available machine pistol from semi-auto to full-auto, turning it into a highly efficient killing machine. He uses it to shoot a group of female med students, killing 15. He pleads out by about 0:35, and in a brutal subversion of Not So Fast Bucko, Jack McCoy decides to go after the pistol's manufacturer for knowing their product could be easily modified and not doing anything about it. (It's mentioned that the gun has been used in a hundred-odd crimes in a few years, and in every case but six the gun was modified.) 15 counts of negligent homicide, and the city of New York wins. While everyone except the defendant is celebrating, the judge goes "Hold it!" and delivers a directed verdict of "Not Guilty", due to the people basing their case on emotion rather than fact. Immediately followed by an Author Tract, in classic trope style, about how the problem can't really be solved by putting people in jail. Also doubles as a Wall Banger, since if the original verdict had held, it would've heralded the start of a new age of corporate accountability, leading to widespead change in the L&O'verse. Can you say Status Quo Is God?
    • It's a Ripped From The Headlines, actually.
    • Not to mention that the judge's entire point is that once you start focusing on the results of your actions and not caring about how you get there (and how it fits or doesn't fit with the law), you start getting into Utopia Justifies the Means.
  • The Stargate universe is full of these. While the series begins with 1995 people using 1995 technology, by the current date, the SGC has at its disposal nearly infinite energy production, medical, construction, mechanical, computational, and metallurgic advances, and an entire empire of inter-galactic colonies and allies...but flatly refuses to share the technology, because every time they do, the Trust or some other Earth-based bad guys abuse it.
    • There were two times that they met with an alien race called the Aschen which offered to solve a massive part of Earth's problems, and the heroes were more than willing to go along with it until the aliens turned out to be evil.
      • At which point the whole thing was conveniently reset with time travel. Later when their own technology went far beyond the Aschen, the Masquerade still remained the primary concern.
    • Possibly averted (or at least starting to be) by the last season where its shown the SGC is displaying prototypes of local versions of alien devices but have to be careful about how much they do lest too many questions be asked.
    • Not only that, but they've learned from the experience of one of their former allies, the Tollan. The Tollan shared their advanced technology with a neighboring world, only to watch as that world destroyed itself and devastated their own homeworld. There's a good reason the SGC is introducing things slowly.
  • Dr. Morris and his team on Now and Again successfully created an artificial human body with superhuman strength and a nanotechnology-based Healing Factor, and then successfully transplanted a human brain into it. Any one of the solutions to the problems they had to have overcome to do this would revolutionize medicine; for example, a method for reconnecting nerves would end trauma-related paralysis by itself. To be fair, Dr. Morris does want this technology to be available to everyone, but it's both ridiculously expensive and a military secret.
  • In Heroes, the Healing Factor is so powerful and so intrinsic to an individual's cells that a single blood transfusion is shown to be able to cure a bullet wound to the head. There are currently three main characters possessing this power (although admittedly one of them is a sociopath), yet neither them nor anyone else has even considered that they could literally save thousands of lives every single day with nothing more than a needle, a tube, and a constant supply of plastic bags.
    • Granted, blood is very fickle when it comes to transfusions. It is possible that it only works on someone with the correct specific blood type. While Peter and Nathan probably have the same blood type, we can't be sure that normal humans will react at all the same way to mutant blood.
      • On the occasions when regenerator blood has been used to cure a disease, heal an injury, or outright raise someone from the dead, blood-typing has never been a concern. This seems more like a feature of the power that has just been conveniently forgotten.
      • Or possibly it is a feature of the power. Maybe it not only heals, but also "fixes" the recipients, possibly even "correcting" their blood type to match. Alternately, maybe Claire and Peter are O negative, the universal donor.
    • Claire at one point wants to use her power for just this purpose, but is convinced otherwise by her father. Remember, Them What Have Powers in the Heroes universe have good reason for remaining incognito, and such activity would attract dire attention.
      • She could still show up at random blood drives, though. Though it'd certainly throw the medical community for a loop.
      • Also, blood is usually tested to some extent before collection. Maybe the healing factor wouldn't show up as odd, maybe it would, but if it did, odds are they wouldn't take her blood in the first place.
      • During the eclipse, Claire started dying because of an extremely large buildup of bacteria and viruses. Apparently, her powers prevent her from getting sick, but the high concentration of bacteria and such would certainly show up in any blood she donates, even if it wouldn't harm the recipient.
      • And once word got out that Claire's blood heals, she would become a 24 hour cure-all potion factory for the rest of her life (and given that she is immortal . . . So Yeah), strapped to a machine with no freedom. Admittedly, it would be a noble sacrifice but its unfair to put that burden on a 17 year old girl. Peter is not a problem anymore but even when he had this power, he had acquired it through empathic mimicry and its possible the blood would not retain its properties after it left his body.
    • A recent episode brought the idea back up to cure Hiro's brain tumor. Claire's offer was immediately shot down by her father because the regeneration factor would make Hiro die FASTER.
  • In Smallville, Clark Kent discovers that his blood can bring people back to life, but the revived people have to keep taking it every twelve hours or else they die, for good. And, being around kryptonite hastens the time limit. In addition, they come back increasingly psychotic. Clark disposes of all the blood samples, deciding it isn't worth it.
  • Lampshaded in Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Buffy comes across two men menacing a couple in an alley, discovers they're not supernatural at all, and comments: "Wow. A mugging. Haven't gotten one of those in a while. Usually it's blood, and with the horror ... just a good old-fashioned mugging. Kinda sweet actually."

Tabletop RPG
  • Lightly averted in GURPS International Super Teams, the "house campaign" for superhero roleplaying in GURPS: the presence of superpowers stimulates research in numerous directions, and by the 1960s blasters and powercells with high energy densities (among many other technologies) have resulted. Furthermore, contact with an alien species during the 1980s has resulted in humanity gaining a stardrive before the end of the 20th Century.
  • Exception: In White Wolf's Superhero Table Top RPG Aberrant, "Project Utopia" is dedicated to using the new superheroes for the betterment of mankind, including greening the sahara, patching the hole in the ozone layer, getting rid of pollution, inventing new technology, toppling dictators, etc. It is also dedicated to regulating technology, especially that created by those super-beings who are hyper-intelligent, and hiding away those it deems society can't handle.
    • Naturally, there is a thriving black market for such technology as a result; the Yakuza, and in no small way, Japan as a whole, make excellent profits that way.
    • Aberrant's Player's Guide provides options for keeping "super-science" from changing things excessively; basically, provides those running games the means to enforce this trope as they see fit.
  • Mentioned explicitly (though not by name) in the Tabletop RPG GURPS, with the "Gadgeteer" advantage, which allows characters to invent new gadgets more easily. While Gadgeteer allows characters to make gadgets for themselves or to solve problems that arise during an adventure, in order to sell their gadgets for money (or even outfit their teammates with gadgets) they must purchase additional advantages which cost more Character Points.
  • Genius: the Transgression features many of the Inspired trying to stop being useless, but it's not going well because normal humans cause Wonders to break, dissolve, or start hungering for their creator's blood.

Video Games
  • While Mega Man mostly averts this trope, as in the Mega Man X and subsequent series the world has been radically changed by the advances that Doctors Light, Wily, and Cossack made in robotics. Space travel actually seems to have taken a large step backwards between the original and X series from which it apparently never recovers. Most of the levels in MM3 take place on mining facilities on the moons of Saturn and/or Jupiter and in MMV on the Game Boy. Mega Man travels across the solar system fighting Wily & the Stardroids. In X, all we get is a couple of orbiting space colonies and an elevator tower, most of which end up destroyed, MMZ has a space colony-sized Kill Sat that also blows up and ZX has no space travel at all. In Legends it gets a little better, with a new Kill Sat and something that's either an artificial planetoid or a terraformed moon, but it still appears nobody's tried to get beyond Earth's orbit in all this time. Sadly a case of Truth In Television, as little progress has been made in manned spaceflight since the Apollo missions and it is unlikely that much more will be made in the lifetime of any human alive today.
    • Further justified in the fact that while the Mega Man series just had Wily attacking with goofy robots, MMX and MMZ both suffered catastrophic wars that nearly ended life on earth several times, and even in ZX large amounts of the world are uninhabitable. Even if the world had the technology to go to the stars, the world is just too crippled from war to impliment it.
    • Megaman X is even an example of why it's better for a scientist to be useless. While Doctor Light created X and his endless capabilities, the humans of the future couldn't fully replicate his design, nor did they bother to put their reploids under a special mental-stability diagnostic like X had been. The result was a race of intelligent free-thinking androids that weren't completely stable, causing the endless wars mentioned above.
  • In Pokemon Bill has invented a way to store objects as data (and the ability to use this to transport objects cross country instantly) Teleportation (albeit with The Fly like consequences) and time travel and all that comes of this tech is for trading Pokemon.

Web Comic
  • Jayden and Crusader has a character Smic who is apparently a genius, inventing an infinite pizza machine, a working time machine, man-eating anteaters (presumably genetically engineered) and a steam powered time travelling hover-cycle. However he never seems to have turned his skills on anything useful in the slightest.
  • So very averted in Girl Genius, where mad science has literally reshaped Europe.
    • Which might also serve as a good exemple of why, sometimes, it's a good idea to suppress anachronistic world-reshaping technology.
    • So... Reed Richards Is A Dick?
    • Also played somewhat straight, however. An awful lot of inventions come from insane epiphanies that can't be reproduced, most of them are dangerously unstable, and many of them are built and used for the express purpose of destroying the inventions of rival mad scientists. Scientific miracles abound, but most of Europe seems to be stuck in a Dark Age most of the time that's only recently begun to stabilize; commoners have little access to all the technological wonders but plenty of exposure to many technological horrors.
  • Dracula found the cure for cancer, you know. He hid it in Mars.
  • Justified in Mindmistress - title heroine has the most advanced technology in the world, but is afraid that released it could change our society for worse.
  • In alternate dimensions of Sluggy Freelance the Plot Technology of the usual mad scientists were used to change the world, sometimes for the better and getting themselves canonized, sometimes just improved what might've been a crappier-sack world, and in the latest storyline what looks like a change for the worst. And in the main dimension of the series, it looks like Schlock is attempting to avert this by selling Riff's robot design to the Department of Defense.

Web Original
  • Averted multiple times in the Whateley Universe. Jobe Wilkins, the son of supervillain Gizmatic who is the king of his own Caribbean country, has almost cured dysentery. He's 14, and he has already come up with a far more effective vaccine for dysentery that is predicted to save 600,000 to 800,000 lives a year. Oh, and he tested the vaccine on convicts back home in his country.
    Jobe: "If the end doesn't justify the means, you're working on the wrong problem!"
  • Averted in the <3-Verse, with Thunderbolt. The world's most powerful hero, mostly uses his Thunder-God powers to continue his work as a missionary, building hospitals and churches, as well as bringing rain to drought-stricken areas and beating bad guys.

Western Animation
  • The cartoon series Batman The Brave And The Bold has the seemingly retired, former Blue Beetle convincing the current Blue Beetle to help put the alien technology that gives him his powers to greater use via a fleet of perpetual-energy machines and robots that'll irrigate the Sahara, end world hunger and turn the world into a paradise. Of course it doesn't work out that way, but neither Batman nor the Blue Beetle stops to wonder if such a plan really wouldn't be better than just using it to beat up crooks. Note that the former Blue Beetle was actually dead, this guy was an impostor, and he planned to use the robots to conquer the world.
  • In Captain Planet the Planeteers fly around in the "Geocruiser" a smallish VTOL aircraft which was designed and built by by Gaea (who knew she had a machine shop on that island?) and is stated to run entirely on solar power and to produce no pollution whatsoever. It can apparently fly anywhere in the world in a few hours at most without ever producing a sonic boom and is so simple to control that a teenager can operate it without any training whatsoever. Yet even when one of the antagonists builds an equally impossible super-aircraft that runs on smog and makes even more smog Gaea never once considers she could do more good with her own ubertech than she could by keeping it exclusive to five self-righteous idiots who use it for nothing but getting to the next poor sap they feel like preaching to.
  • Parodied in Invader Zim: Professor Membrane (a non-villainous Mad Scientist) has just invented perpetual energy, and is about to demonstrate it to the world. Then, on a whim, decides "no power for you!", dismantles the project and leaves.
    • It's not just on a whim, the insensitivity and impatience of the audience ticks him off and he decides they're all undeserving. Not, of course, to say that justifies it...
    • Membrane can more or less do what he wants, it's suggested throughout the series that his genius is the only thing actually sustaining what is otherwise a civilization in severe decay because it's populated entirely by morons/jackasses. Although he only seems to create things on the basis that they interest him, pose an intellectual challenge or that he finds it utterly flabbergasting nobody else has already solved the problem in question. The fact that he's probably the most powerful and wealthy man in the entire world seems to mean absolutely nothing to him. Honestly it was only a matter of time before he finally decided to pull a John Galt...
    • Given that Membrane seems to have been gifted with every scrap of intelligence that every person on the planet WASN'T I can't imagine why he wouldn't want to trust perpetual energy to a horde of apathetic morons....
      • So in a way Membrane is actually a pretty good example of this trope, he can and occasionally will on a whim change the world for the better, but only because he feels like it and not because he feels any duty to do so or cares about any of the idiots living in it.
  • Phineas And Ferb build interplanetary rockets, animal translation devices, and the like every morning. But by the time their mom gets home everything is back to normal.
  • In Justice League Unlimited, two Thanagarian law officers used advanced alien science to transform ancient Egypt from a barren desert into lush agricultural land when they crashed on Earth. After all, their ship was not going anywhere, so the least they could do was make a nice home out of the hellish Sahara and attempt to improve the lives of the natives. The problem is that they only educated their people to the level of tool users, never progressing to tool makers (This is, in Real Life, a critical sociological point), and the humans had no experience or training when it came to the maintenance or construction of the advanced alien technology. When the aliens themselves died, their wonderful utopia vanishes in a generation.
  • In one episode of the Dungeons and Dragon cartoon, Dungeon Master grants one of the adventurers his powers. The newly uber-powered member uses his power to bring forth water for the thirsty teammates. Dungeon Master responds that by using the powers to generate that water, water from another area had to be deprived.

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