The Effects Of Superhumans On Modern Society

I've actually written this exact scenario before.

And that wasn't the outcome in my story.

Realistically, we would have every reason to fear people who can blow up buildings with their mind. They would have every reason to abuse that power. There is very little chance of this ending well...

It might eventually end well, but certainly a lot of things are going to get blown up along the way.

Frankly, when I did it, I had an out.

I don't think the OP is doing the same genre, though, therefore removing that kind of out...

I also don't think there would be anything left to end well, over. Unless you consider leaving society in roughly the same state as the people are in in Fallout 3 a good ending...

I suppose it depends (again) on precisely what powers show up and the Super Weight, but most people are not actually Omnicidal Maniacs. More will take advantage of their new status to be assholish to the normals, but by the time it got to The End of the World as We Know It levels most people are not going to continue. You could get an end-of-world scenario if there was a significant faction of supers (more powerful than whichever ones assembled on the side of good) dedicated to achieving it, but the only way that could be catalyzed would be by one single Omnicidal Maniac or, uh, super superiority person who kept a lot of them on his side. The greater threat would be trigger-happy governments nuking everything in an attempt to get rid of all of them. Of course, all this speculation is assuming that there are no individual Persons of Mass Destruction with Game-Breaker powers—if so, then it just about solely depends on the inclinations of those people.

...Okay, I guess my argument isn't that the events surrounding the empowerment wouldn't be insanely bloody and depressing, but that you could, eventually, make a stable and decent social order with supers extant.

edited 8th Sep '11 6:36:32 PM by alethiophile

All I have to say is... a few million against a couple billion? Pfft.

A superiority complex and, in this case, eugenics even, are theoretically justifiable when you are superior.

Even if you get good ones and bad ones, the resulting destruction—plus inevitable government (nuclear) intervention—would be irredeemably devastating...

Sure, if they're only moderately superpowered. But a few million of Superman? Or even a few million of the similarly-powered one-trick ponies, like Xavier or Magneto?

edited 8th Sep '11 6:51:09 PM by alethiophile

Well... it's an extreme example, but might I recommend reading, or re-reading, Watchmen to see what just one superhuman means to the world? Sure, you probably won't have any Dr. Manhattan level beings trotting around, and it's possible that more will merely mean they balance each other out, but nevertheless, I'd advice putting that one the list of sources to take inspiration from.

edited 8th Sep '11 6:44:45 PM by KillerClowns

According to the OP, if I'm not mistaken, they can blow up buildings with their minds. That isn't "moderately powered."

Ironically, when I did it, all of the supers actually were approaching Doctor Manhattan's super weight. They had a very convenient and very powerful Drama-Preserving Handicap, though...

Blowing up buildings isn't a big deal. We can do that. I'd be quite a bit more scared of a powerful telepath, a speedster, or a versatile telekinetic. There's a character in my setting who's a Gravity Master; he was insanely overpowered until I gave him some fairly stringent limitations, and even with those the only reason he doesn't rule the world is that he doesn't have any interest in it. (The physics-based powers that the Rogue Powers have are largely countered by the Psychic Powers of the ruling aristocracy, but Gravity can overrule that by using his powers as a railgun sniper rifle.)

Uh, yeah, but we're really obvious about it. The average person can't bring down a building without a couple hundred pounds of TNT.

When you can do it without warning and with your mind? Not good. And it's also an unapplied force—unless this is some kind of "only targets buildings" powers; that would make things... interesting...—so you can blow up basically anything. Buildings are just the scale measure. What use is, say, an aircraft carrier if the enemy can think and crack it in half?

And there's millions of them...

edited 8th Sep '11 7:00:19 PM by USAF713

But if these are really random people, scattered across the entirety of the world, then other than the superpowers they aren't going to be anything special.

Will they cause massive problems? Yes. Will they topple governments? Most definitely. But will they all be powerful enough, smart enough, savvy enough, patient enough, charismatic enough, care enough, willing to kill enough, to actually do it? I don't think so.

There will be plenty of monsters in there, and plenty of bottle-rocket villains, but enslaving the human race needs more than some fancy tricks. It might be a huge problem later on, if these people are capable of kids with super powers and start clumping together, but even by then everyone else won't be quite as blindsided as they where at the start.

I mean, seriously, even if there where six million of these guys, if that's scattered around across the Earth that means statistically there will only be a few hundred of them in the US. And even if they find each other in all of that, having that one trait in common won't always be enough for them to join together for a common goal. They're going to be lone wolves, with relatively normal lives before then. They won't be impossible to take out.

edited 8th Sep '11 7:08:31 PM by Dec

Yeah, it's still powerful, but it's not game-breakingly impossible. Sufficient force, or sufficient precision, can still take them out, and it's not like they're all going to be on the same side anyway.

edited 8th Sep '11 7:06:22 PM by alethiophile

They don't need to enslave humanity. They could just kill us all. It would be mutually assured destruction. We cannot live in tandem, and so it becomes a who-dies-first game of cat-and-mouse.

And, yeah, using nukes to kill them basically does the same thing as them killing all of us...

It really depends a lot on the type of people who gain powers. It's one thing for say, a drug lord to suddenly be able to liquify people, but what about some scared little boy who doesn't want to hurt anyone?

A lot of this assumes that a large number of supers are even going to want to use their powers. Some people just want to be normal, and arent exactly going to run around calling attention to themselves. Will it have an impact on global politics and economics? Most certainly, but it'd take quite a stretch for it to become The End of the World as We Know It.

Sure, if you suddenly make every super into an Omnicidal Maniac, then they could probably successfully kill us all. But that's not particularly realistic. (Unless you want to make that a side effect of the power, which would work. The Rage of the Powers from Fine Structures was bad enough, and that only lasted a quarter-minute.)

My own prediction: Assuming that they are evenly distributed according to population...lots of turmoil everywhere, to start with. First-world nations will be able to contain it somewhat better, both because they have better facilities for it and because their supers have less to complain about and so are less likely to start rampaging. It'll start with local chaos. In the less-developed areas, you'll get the supers setting themselves up as warlords. Then they'll start having wars with each other; there's a chance of one, if one shows up, trying to unite several and strike out at others, a la Genghis Khan. China is probably going to get screwed, at least the current government; there's enough rebellious sentiment there that the quorum of people are pissed off at the government, and assuming one in a million is a super, they're going to get one thousand of them. (I have a hard time thinking of this as anything but a good thing.) Eventually things will shake down and some super will try taking over a major country, either as an invasion from outside (one of the third-world warlords getting aspirations) or as a coup. At this point it's quite likely that some nukes have already gone off; China maybe, on their own people, or maybe some trigger-happy first world government didn't like what was happening with one of the warlords. If the latter happened, then there's a chance that many of them might band together against whoever launched the first strike, which offers multifarious opportunities for mayhem.

Think more later.

edited 8th Sep '11 7:27:44 PM by alethiophile

Killing off millions and billions of people takes a really long time, even for people with super powers. Especially if you're making good time on it, you're going to end up staying in one spot too long and the SWAT team/army/whatever is going to be called in.

The guy who can blow up buildings, even if he uses his powers that way and isn't going to end up killing himself from his own blasts, isn't omnipotent or indestructible. He's going to fall into all the other pitfalls criminals fall into, and after the first time he blows up the arresting officer, he's going to get shot.

And even if he's the sort of guy who does know what he's doing, what's in it for him to kill everybody? Life isn't going to be all nice and cushy, without the supermarkets and the running water. Why destroy it or rule it when he can just use it? He could probably make a killing in some mafia somewhere, without being an omnicidal zealot. It's more convenient for him that way.

edited 8th Sep '11 7:27:42 PM by Dec

Anyone who sent an aircraft carrier to fight that sort of threat would be an idiot.

I asked the OP "what could they do against carpet bombing" for a reason. For one thing, we have UA Vs capable of carrying extremely powerful ordinance in this day and age. We can send them in, blow up the entire damn county if we have to in order to make sure that asshole is dead, and there wouldnt be much he could do about it. Also, snipers. One of the major problems with superhero stories is that people tend to forget about snipers. A superhero like, say, Magneto, isn't going to be able to do jack against a sniper bullet realistically.

You might be saying, "but Magneto clearly deflected bullets" in First Class, so that won't work. Watch again. Magneto was able to deflect bullets when he knew they were coming. In the penultimate scene of the movie, when Moira shoots at Magneto, a bullet actually hits his helmet. The only reason Magneto didn't get killed right then and there was that his helmet happened to be made of some unobtainium bullshit that's Immune to Bullets. But when he didn't know the bullet was coming? He didn't deflect shit.

Also, about the "they'd kill all of humanity instead of enslaving them". And why the hell would they do this? Technically, if the most powerful nations on the planet decided that they wanted to wipe out a certain race of people (let's say asians because they're the majority), they could feasibly do it. If we decided to do a repeat of the Holocaust for no discernibly good reason, we absolutely have the means to do so now. Nuclear weaponry, biochemical weaponry, or old-fashioned genocide with an assault rifle...we could take our pick. But why don't we do this? Because it doesn't solve anything.

What purpose would reducing the world from a few billion to a few million achieve the supers? Most of them would live in the same status quo we do. Most of them would have friends, family and loved onces who just might be muggles. Even if a few of them are dedicated to genocide, so long as they're a Class 2 on the Super Weight, with a power level at approximately 5 or below (to use Marvel's power ratio), they ain't gonna do it. If we're dealing with a Class 3 or higher, or someone with a 7 ranking in telepathy, energy manipulation, or raw power? Yeah, we're hosed.

But the individuals in this story seem to be a Class 2/Ratio 4. That's dangerous as hell, but not anything humans can't fight against.

edited 8th Sep '11 7:36:25 PM by KingZeal

Little kids would be the worst of the lot. No self-control.

Power corrupts. When you hand a person the power to do whatever—which is what this is, basically: a blank check—it will, more often than not, end spectacularly poorly.

Also, you act like fighting this kind of threat wouldn't be immensely costly in life and property on its own. Urban warfare against walking battalion-grade threats? And they can hide and ambush you with ridiculous firepower? "Can't see it coming" goes both ways, remember.

Of course it does, but we're muggles, remember? They're One Person, One Power while an entire world of pissed-off muggles have a Super Power Lottery. We have satellite surveillance, spy networks, intelligence reports, GPS tracking, and all kinds of nifty stuff that gives conspiracy theorists nightmares. But, when this shit goes down? All that stuff is going to be our best friends.

Also, cost of life isnt important. Assuming that mankind has become serious enough about this problem to declare all out war, we've already accepted an "us or them" mentality. So, it's not likely we'd care how many of our own we lost. We still outnumber them a few thousand to one.

Think about it in military terms. It's a person with limitless explosives that can be deployed instantly and without warning, and shows no initial trace of being there.

That is literally the most dangerous thing I've ever heard of and makes the Nazis and World War Two look like a pussy slap fight.

I didn't say we'd care. I'm saying that a lot more people will die...

Yeah. Things are most likely going to go spectacularly poorly during the transition. It might be amusing to focus on some superpowered child and spin it somewhat like Firestarter. (I actually found the discussion of 'fire training' in that book to be absolutely fascinating.)

Looking up some random demographics, and again assuming one in a million supers, there'll be about 7,000 total supers worldwide, about 1800 of which will be below fourteen, about 553 of which will be over 65. (In case you didn't get it, the rest are between those ages.) The US will have about 300, China gets about 1350, India gets about 1200. Africa as a whole gets about 1000, Europe as a whole has about 595, North America has 538. Just for information. (If the assumption of one in a million is wrong, then just take the ratios of those numbers for the number of supers you will get.)

7000 supers wouldn't really make for much, then. They'd simply be exterminated.

Then again, for every place you increase it by (i.e. say 1 in 100,000) the number of walking bomb dispensers goes up by an order of magnitude, so...

Yeah, but we have far more options and means of delivering the same amount of destructive force. Also, as you said: this works both ways. Any congregation of these guys is going to risk one of them being on the muggles' side (for whatever reason) and going "surprise, motherfuckers!" And again, a loss in their numbers is going to hurt them a lot more than it hurts us.

The bigger problem would be that the military/political leaders would start spreading themselves out and isolating themselves from the rest of the population. No one except a very small few would ever know where the president was or any of our other high-priority personnel/equipment. The world would pretty much become a fascist dystopia until we've identified all of the supers.

They'd also be the easiest to kill, if they actually have some control over their powers. Mainly because they ether won't have the good sense to run or hide, or won't know how to do it without being A) really obvious by going it alone, or B) have no clue how the hell to stay alive. Even if they have a parent, if they don't have self control and can kill people with nary a thought, I don't think the parent is going to last very long ether.

And I agree — it would be insanely costly to actually take out someone who had that level of power and was using it to kill people. It would be horrible, utter chaos. We wouldn't all die though, and they aren't guaranteed a win.

And they aren't really limitless bomb potential. They still need to eat, sleep, and do the things that humans do. They'll be remarkably cheap, but also insanely unique if every super has different powers. It would be a really, really bad idea to rely on that in a war.

edited 8th Sep '11 7:56:16 PM by Dec