ribble's Superpowers

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the question a man my age must inevitably face: if I had a single superpower, what would it be?

For a long time, I was thinking flight. Then I read a Real Life comic where a fan points out that everyone chooses flight - it's a cop-out answer.

Then a question on the everybody votes channel, "Which would you rather have: invincibility or telepathy?," got me thinking in a different direction.

We all know that Claire Bennett is just so much cooler than Matt Parkman. However, whether I look back at my life or think about my future, I can imagine a lot more circumstances in which telepathy would be useful than invincibility.


When you think about it, an average person could interact with thirty people a day who want something, but he is unlikely to be shot even once in a lifetime. Invincibility could let us do a lot of stuff no one else can do, like rush in to a burning building, but the potential of telepathy is limitless.

Here's the thing: telepathy is possible. Or, at least, some people can understand what someone's feeling (and surmise what he is thinking) just by looking at his face. It's not even outside the realm of possibility for you and me.

For years, a researcher named Paul Ekman has been researching the human face and how to understand it (I first read about him in this Malcolm Gladwell article). Ekman trains people to read faces - he even publishes a CD-ROM that purports to teach people how to do it (doesn't run on Mac, so I can't yet say for sure if it does).

I keep coming back to this idea, which I've tried to explain before but never to my satisfaction, that conventions of fiction, especially fantasy, are possible in the real world if only one imagines them in a slightly different way. I keep trying to get to it in my (fiction) writing, but I've never quite pulled it off.


Five years ago, I wrote out a list of these conventions or cliches - things like aliens, time travel, vampires - and tried to think about their equivalent in the real world.

Take aliens. An alien is a transplant from a totally foreign culture, operating by a set of rules that may make sense somewhere else but don't fit in here. In my script, the alien is an immigrant. He is brutal and ruthless, but not out of any particular malice - they just do things differently in the dimension where he comes from.

Or time travel. Time travel means that you can witness and influence events of the past or future. In our world, we can witness the past by reading or learning about it and influence it by changing the popular view of what events occurred or what influence they had.

I believe that we are also moving towards an ability to predict the future but, imporantly, only if we interprete it more in the psychohistory sense than in the more outdated prophetic vision sense. Techniques like prediction markets are harnessing very accessible technologies to make seeing the future closer to reality. Exciting stuff.


And vampires? Vampires are people who suck the lifeblood out of someone in order to survive. I'm not naming names, but I've struggled with vampires my whole life.

It's easy to get off track with this stuff, but what I'm getting at is that abilities, cliches, fictions that were outside the boundaries of thought even thirty years ago are now achievable or even commonplace. Incredible powers or freedoms, things like instant communications, are ours for the taking.

Once again, I've built a blog entry into a treatise on the powers of man, and all without answering my original question.

After thinking about the challenges I face in my daily life and what it means to be a superpowered person in the world that we live in, I'd take total recall. How about you?