Among his seemingly endless list of superpowers, super strength is probably one of Superman’s most recognizable and most commonly used superpowers. It was the one that was shown on the very first issue of Action Comics.
We’ve seen things like this everywhere – Superman lifting cars, buildings, even planets with his bare hands. As an example, I’m going to use this image of Superman holding up a plane by its nose:
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how strong Superman is – this feat is simply impossible. A Boeing 747 commercial airliner has a maximum take-off weight of almost 1 million pounds. In other words, in order to do what we see in the image, Superman has to exert a force equal to 1 million pounds. However, there’s something we’re not accounting for here: pressure.
Pressure is simply the amount of force applied over a certain area. Superman is applying a tremendous amount of force over a tiny area – the size of his hands, or approximately 16 square inches. Therefore, the plane has to sustain a pressure of more than 60,000 pounds per square inch – far greater than the pressure caused by being hit by a bullet. Imagine trying to stop a falling orange with a knife sticking straight up. If Superman had the strength to withstand the weight of a 747, he would simply pierce through the plane as it continued to fall.
Likewise, this is true for virtually anything that Superman is commonly depicted as lifting. Cars would buckle and bend under the pressure. Buildings would crumble and fall apart as soon as Superman tried to lift them. How does he even maintain balance while holding these massive things over his head?
Superman’s incredible strength is often attributed to the increased gravity of his home planet, Krypton. This article attempts to calculate how much larger Krypton would have to be in order for Superman to be strong enough to exert the amount of force he does. It’s not optimistic: Krypton would have to be “3,000 times the mass of the sun.” It would be nearly impossible just to send a space ship into orbit from Krypton, much less all the way to Earth.
Even further, Superman may have been born on Krypton, but he grew up entirely on Earth. His bones and muscles should have developed for Earth’s gravity, not Krypton’s. In fact, astronauts lose muscle and bone mass incredibly quickly in space, to the point that they often have trouble walking upon returning to Earth. They have to run on a special treadmill pretty much every day just to prevent too much bone loss. Superman, on the other hand, just flies around everywhere. That can’t be good for exercise.
So Superman’s super strength is pretty much impossible in every way. Nobody will ever be able to lift a million pound plane. But actually… we can. Not only that, but we can also send it at 600 miles per hour through the air. Scientists and engineers have developed machines that are capable of both flight and super strength, and they have changed our lives by allowing us to travel across the globe. Sure, we may not be able to pack it into as small a package as Superman, but I don’t think that even Superman can claim to transport millions of people around the world every day, year after year. A commercial jet is a real life ‘superhero’ with real-life ‘superpowers.’