A long time ago, my friends and I were geeks. One day, we had a contest among ourselves to see who could come up with the most useless superpower. We’ve all heard of the big guns; teleportation, energy beams from the eyes, flight, indestructible, telepathy, mind control, healing.
Even the comics limit themselves to B- and C- grade powers. I thinking here of Doug Ramsey. There was a mutant in the X-men who could make sculptures out of light. The sculptures persisted even after he died… until someone touched them. In case you’re curious, he committed suicide because he was bullied by anti-mutant kids and (IIRC) it was Kitty Pryde who found out about the light sculptures.
Anyway, the most useless super powers. My favorite back in the day was “The ability to be seen through walls.”
So, wanting to revive this, because it’s funny, I posted to the sci-fi group at G+ and got a list of the most useless superpowers that they could come up with. Here’s the list as of Saturday the 7th.
- Being able to blow up the Sun.
- Parallel park first time, every time.
- X-ray vision, which only works on clear materials…
- Ability to always plug in USB cable the correct way on the first try
- Suck all oxygen from air…
- The ability to cross your fingers… Backwards.
- Indestructible eyelashes
- The ability to remove 1 calorie from any single serving of food. (Calories as measured scientifically, not the dietary standard aka kilocalories)
- To keep people from knowing what your superpower is.
- Meat Vision
- The ability to make your theme song play at will.
- Captain hindsight
- The ability to create bellybutton fluff on demand………
- Make any extension cord 1 mm shorter.
- Elevator Man (or Woman) – always knows which elevator is next
- TinTab, can open one of the old-school beer pulltabs without snapping the ring off.
- The power to project invisible dots onto any surface.
- The ability to make H20 fall from the sky though only in India during the monsoon season
I told the group I would pick a winner, but I just couldn’t.
My favorites are the bellybutton lint, remove 1 calorie, and project invisible dots.
The ones that I actually think are useful are the USB cable and the picking an elevator.
So, what do you think? Can you come with equally useless superpowers? Can you think of a use for these?
