You open up the newspaper one day and are
shocked to read the headline: Superman kills 30! Quickly scanning the article, you're shocked
to discover that no, this wasn't some accident that took place during the course of some
super powered fight against a villain, but rather that this was a deliberate act of mass
murder. Then the next day there's a news report on
the tv, Superman has struck again, this time killing another twenty people. As an icy hand of fear clutches your heart
as you realize that something must be done, but what exactly could anyone do? Welcome to another episode of The Infographics
Show- today we're asking the question, what if superman was a serial killer? First we're going to discuss ways Superman
could kill using each of his available powers, then we'll discuss how Superman may be brought
to justice by our modern technology. No cheating with kryptonite lasers or anything
of the sort, but rather we'll just be exploring the question, can superman be realistically
stopped? If Superman was a serial killer, he'd definitely
have a variety of powers to choose from with which to perpetuate his mass murders. We're assuming of course that Superman would
be a bit more... well, super, than the garden variety serial killer. Why go for a body count of one or two at a
time when you can shuffle dozens of souls off this mortal coil at the same time? So, just how could Superman achieve some high
kill ratios with each of his powers? Today's Forecast: Windy With A Chance of Death One of superman's iconic powers is his incredible
lungs, which lets him do everything from hold his breath for hours to shoot blasts of high
speed or even super chilled wind. With such powerful lungs, how might superman
look to use them for mass murder? First is the most obvious solution, Superman
could just cruise around the city looking for people to Fus-Roh-Dah into oblivion like
some wayward dragonborn. While it would admittedly be absolutely hilarious
to see people ragdolled halfway across the city, it would be devastating for anyone caught
in superman's super air blasts. But why blow when you can suck? As has been shown numerous times, Superman
can inhale huge quantities of air, far in excess of what his actual lung capacity should
be able to hold. Instead of shouting people to death, Superman
could simply fly into densely crowded spaces such as a subway or an office building, and
suck all the air out of the room. This would only work in a limited area, though
in a small enough space the vacuum Superman creates would instantly shred the lungs of
anyone caught inside it. Even when the air rushes back in this would
lead to pretty quick asphyxiation as people's shredded lungs are unable to transfer any
oxygen into the bloodstream. But Superman's breath can also chill, though
the laws of physics have a thing or two to say about that since high speed air would
actually heat up to incredible temperatures. However we're going to stick with canon and
just say that his breath freezes, you can leave your complaints to Jerry Siegel and
Joe Shuster in the comments section below. With his super chill breath Superman could
score a pretty amazingly high kill count if he used it at the right place. The Three Gorges Dam for example is the world's
largest dam that spans the length of the Yangtze river in China. Notorious for its devastating floods, the
Yangtze has killed hundreds of thousands throughout history, and is widely considered one of the
most dangerous rivers in the world. Yet the Three Gorges Dam helped tame this
deadly river and bring power to millions. But if the dam ever failed, the resulting
flood is estimated to kill millions of helpless Chinese who reside in the lowland areas the
river frequently flooded. The dam is capable of killing so many people
that US military war planners have debated targeting the dam with air strikes in the
case of war, as the resulting casualties might be the equivalent of having used a weapon
of mass destruction. For Superman this presents an amazing opportunity
to score some super kill counts. With his icy breath Superman could freeze
the top of the Yangtze which is backed up by the dam, adding millions of tons of weight
pushing down on the damn as the frozen water is prevented from flowing past the giant turbines. When it eventually fails the torrent of water
will wash millions of Chinese to an early grave. The Sky Is Falling Superman's most obvious superpower is his
super strength, and with so much strength there's very little supes couldn't do to mass
murder a bunch of people. Sure, he could just fly up and rip an airplane
out of the sky, then hurl that airplane into a cruise ship full of people for double bonus
points, but that's a lot of work for relatively small body counts. To really score high on the victim kill meter,
Superman needs to turn to physics and take a brief trip into space. In the 30th of June 1908, the Tunguska forest
in Russia was flatted in an area the size of Washington DC. While modern conspiracy theorists claim that
the explosion was the result of a secret Nikola Tesla weapon or some other such nonsense,
the likely culprit was an air burst of an asteroid or comet between 200 to 620 feet
(60-190 meters) in diameter. While the explosion is not thought to have
killed any humans, it did absolutely flatten 770 square miles (2000 square km) of forest. The Tunguska asteroid was not very big in
astronomical standards, and its well known that even larger asteroids and comets regularly
whiz by the earth. Yet even this shrimpy asteroid managed to
release an energy equivalent of ten to fifteen megatons of TNT. Superman could take a page from history and
simply fly up into space, turn the earth into his own personal skeet range and simply bombard
every major city center with asteroids. Such an attack over Washington DC today would
instantly kill over 700,000 people, and old supes would be able to periodically send fiery
rocks of death at every population center with complete impunity. But as much fun as turning the earth into
his personal bowling alley would be, Superman could do something far worse for all life
on earth. In one comic Superman and Wonder Woman are
shown lifting The Spectre, a being which weighs as much as all the conscious thoughts in all
creation. Which is a lot. That means that moving an object such as the
moon would be well within the bounds of what Superman is capable of. Moving the moon a bit closer to the earth
would have devastating effects not seen since many hundreds of millions of years ago. Every year the moons moves about 1.6 inches
(4 centimeters) away from the earth, but hundreds of millions of years ago the moon was so close
to the earth that the force of its gravity created incredible tidal effects, making waves
that reached up hundreds of feet and would travel hundreds of miles inland. Because the moon was far closer to the earth,
it also orbited the planet quicker, meaning that if Superman replaced the moon back in
its baby orbit around the earth, we would be scoured by titanic waves every eight hours
or so. Drive-by Death Another of Superman's most iconic powers is
his superspeed. At times he is shown being as fast as The
Flash himself, other times not. For the sake of simplicity and because comic
book writers literally have no sense of continuity, we're just going to assume that Superman's
top speed is the same as The Flash's in Justice League of America #48. In that issue The Flash rescues a city of
half a million people in North Korea from a nuclear detonation- AFTER the nuke has already
gone off. In less than a second he is able to grab 500,000
people, two at a time, and move them 35 miles away. Nevermind that he was basically just turning
all those people into clouds of mist as their bodies disintegrated from friction against
the air they were rushing past. This means that the Flash was moving about
13 million times the speed of light, or 8,718,016,177,000,000 miles per hour (14,030,287,026,356,766 kmh). So now we've set a top speed for Superman. What if Superman wanted to use his super speed
to punch each and every person on the planet's head clean off? With 7.53 billion people on the earth, superman
could achieve the feat in less than one second. In the span of time it takes you to blink,
Superman will already have punched your head off, as well as your mom and dad's head off,
and all of your living relatives. But why punch heads off when you can just
affect global climate by running in circles. Moving at such incredible speeds would create
so much friction that it would heat the air to temperatures not seen since the Big Bang,
which would immediately disintegrate the molecules of all matter around Superman into their most
basic elementary particles- particles that physicists today keep discovering by smashing
atoms into each other at the speed of light. Many scientists would be grateful to superman
for the chance to study what matter is really made of, or they would be if approaching superman
didn't instantly disintegrate them into a bunch of up and down quarks. If Superman went slower though, he could generate
massive amounts of heat which would in turn severely upset weather patterns around the
world. If he did this in the Arctic he could save
us all the problem of trying to convince some very ignorant politicians that global warming
is in fact a real thing, by just completely melting the ice caps. A quick trip down to Antarctica and he could
melt all the ice there too, flooding the world and revealing the ancient cities of Lovecraft's
Elder Things and the horrors hidden within. Ok, so that's a lot of ways Superman could
become an unstoppable serial killer, now we move on to the next part of our show where
we ask the question- how could we stop him? The short answer is, we couldn't. Our only real option to stop Superman would
be to just kill ourselves before he gets a chance to. Serial killers notoriously prey on the fear
and panic of their victims, and have historically reacted very poorly when their victims simply
weren't afraid or refused to show their fear. If we all simply killed ourselves not only
do we rob Superman of victims, but we would take the joy of serial killing out of him
in the same time, turning him from his evil ways. Sadly, there'd be nobody left to witness the
newer, kinder superman because we'd all be dead. But if that's too fatalistic for you, then
sure, we suppose that we could try nuclear weapons, though as has so often been shown
they have little if any effect on Superman. Remember, this is a superhero so powerful
that its creators had to invent an entire alien crystal just to write stories that have
any drama in them at all. Without the invention of kryptonite every
Superman comic would just be, Superman meets villain, Superman punches villain into outer
space. Those would be no fun to read- although we
would absolutely watch a feature length movie of nothing but Superman punching random people
into space. Hollywood, if you're watching, take note. Short of kryptonite, or magic, another of
Superman's weaknesses, we simply couldn't do anything to stop a rampaging, serial murdering
Superman. At least not with our real world technology. Which brings us back to our original plan-
everybody just kills themselves. We can defeat superman by simply beating him
to the punch, but short of that, there's no stopping the big blue boyscout. What other ways could Superman turn to mass
murder? How could we really stop him? Let us know in the comments! Also, be sure to check out our other video
Sueprman vs The Predator - Who Would Win! Thanks for watching, and, as always, don’t
forget to like, share, and subscribe. See you next time!
