Superman Through the Ages! Forum

In one story where he's trying to prove to a kid that Clark is Superman, the kid only believes him after he sees that Clark's bathroom cabinet has not toothpaste, deodorant, mouthwash ect...
Yet, bad breath is caused partly because when you eat, part of the food leaves a "trace" in your mouth.  So, the big question for me today - does Superman have bad breath at times?  Not that I would mind if he'd save me from a car crash...

thats a very good question but superman probably has breath mints

This would explain why no-one ever gets a nice close-up look at his face. :D

-Ray

well he has Super Breath!

But, I don't think that germs can surive in Superman's body.

Silver-age superman did not need to eat.  if he needed mouthwash all he had to do was fly into the sun.

Or into some other super heated place, like the big flamethrower torch thing in the fortress of solitude.

I think he would have bad breath sometimes.  He probably farts too.   :lol:

One of the more amusing things about the Silver Age Superman was the fact that everythign he did had to be Super. His fortress was filled with Giant things, like Giant robots, or a Giant  diary, or a Giant Bowling Alley, because if it was normal sized.

So naturally he could never practice personal hygene in a normal way. It almost always involved him flying through the Sun, or using giant flame throwers and the like.

-Ray

Superman's immune system and the latent energies of his internal organs would destroy bacteria.  Also, his 'force-field' pushes anything dirty off of him, which is why he never stays dirty.

Heshould need to eat for healing reasons, but his superior metabolism, toughness and the ability to survive off the sun would make eating superflous more than once every few months.  He also wouldn't need to breathe, and I can't believe such a big deal is made of this.  If he can internally metabolise sunlight he doesn't need oxygen (which humans use for making energy with food, something Superman doesn't really have a use for).  True, plants do use carbon dioxide to make sugars and carbohydrates, but Superman CLEARLY does not use carbohydrate energy, there is no way his level of energy could be obtained by that simple chemical process.  What he probably does is metabolise energy into a more reactive chemical (as solar cells do with batteries), although it's concievable that he might actually be able to charge or activate some sort of fission, fusion or Zero-Point energy field with solar radiation.  Being an extremely efficient rechargeble battery would explain his power source, such as a lead/sulphuric acide compound which released electricity and is converted in the process, then when electricity is run through it it once again turns back into lead and sulphuric acid.  Superman could also use the immediate free electrons created from the striking of photons upon his body (the photoelectric effect) for en energy, thus keeping him powered indefinitly as long as he was being bombared with sunlight.

Wait but wouldn't Superman still get dirty, I mean if you take a big block of solid steel and just leave it out. Maybe it wouldn't be destroyed for a long time, but it would sure get dirty. Also hair gets greasy doesn't it? So his hair would get dirty after a while.

His personal force field keeps dirt away from him, and with efficient enough chemical processes in his body, his hair shouldn't get greasy, at least not for a very long time.

That's postcrisis...

I know that Superman doesn't need to eat, but does he eat anyway?  I imagine he does, either out of habit or to keep up appearances as Clark Kent.  

I'd bet that whatever germs and bacteria left by normal food to cause bad breath would be killed off in his mouth in short order.

Post crisis Supes has a decontamination organ that break offensive materials down into pure energy.

And were he able to break even just offensive materials down into pure energy, he'd have all the energy he needed to do his super feats. Considering there's enough energy in a cup of coffee to boil away all the oceans on earth, if Superman can convert matter into pure energy then he's set as far as eating goes.

The Critical Condition storyline established that Superman's digestive system converts food/matter into pure energy which implies that his body tissues reconvert that energy to matter in whatever form needed.

I believe RedSunofKrypton is referring to the zero-point energy in the volume of a cup of coffee which has the minimum estimated value he quotes.  The mass/energy conversion of a cup of coffee is actually much less and is probably around 3.2 megatons or what's needed to vapourize 3.2 million tonnes of conventional matter.  That translates into a cube of water just over 9 miles on a side which is clearly much less than even a small lake.  The minimum zero-point energy value is based on a cut-off distance value of around a proton radius (~10e-13 cm) which was more pulled out of the air than really substantiated; theoretically, no bottom cut-off length may be involved or it may be closer to the Planck length (1.616e-33 cm) which would yield a value 20 orders of magnitude much higher.

One has to take into account that Superman would have an enhanced super-metabolism that would include far more effective antibiotic enzymes in his saliva and white blood cells patrolling his teeth and gums.  Such an environment would be almost certainly germ-free, and without bacterial breakdown of foodstuffs, no mouth odour would be produced.

Yes I was thinking the zero point volume, at the time of that post I was exhausted and a little tipsy. Anyhoo, either way, zero point or just straight energy conversion, I still stand by the fact that he'd have enough energy to do his super feats.

I just had another thought on the halitosis aka 'bad breath' matter.

Kryptonians have much more enhanced metabolisms than we have.  Even discounting the enhanced white cell activity and saliva enzymes I noted above, their mouth tissue would be even better at absorbing nutrients than ours are.  Given that, any traces of glucose, other nutrients, or even any matter would be pretty efficiently absorbed by his mouth tissues.  Even if the bacteria weren't absorbed themselves -- not very likely -- they'd have no foodstuffs to metabolize into waste products to cause 'bad breath' gases.

It should also be noted that in a Super Sons tale, Superman Jr. told Batman Jr. that his half-Kryptonian body doesn't produce a body odour.  Body odour is caused by bacterial breakdown of sweat into waste product gases.  That lack of body odour should also be reflected by a lack of mouth odour.  I suspect my reasonings above about the mechanisms for this apply here.

Post Crisis Superman has achieved at least 99% lightspeed which means he has to supply at least 6 times his own body mass (225 lbs/102 kg) in addition to his rest mass to do so.

Clearly, simple mass/energy conversion is not sufficient for even the Post Crisis Superman's high-order feats.

Zero-point energy access or some other high-order process must be behind his high order feats with mere ambient energy absorption and mass/energy conversion contributing a relatively minor component of his energy resources.  It can be likened to the difference between anaerobic and aerobic respiration for energy production in our cells.

I guess so, now that his powers are getting back to the Silver Age levels.

I tend to shy away from zero point energy as a reason though, because there is so much debate about it and so much is unproven, scientists who say "no, there's not really that much energy there" accusing the ones who say "yes there is" of just seeing what they want to see and fooling themselves.

While most people would say "hey man get over it, it's a comic book", one of the reasons I love comics is trying to theorize a way to make them work in reality, it's all part of the fun in my perspective.

As for potential energy sources I posted a thing about solar neutrinos in reply to your post  here (http://superman.nu/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1006&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0).

I also thought (on the less likely part of the thought spectrum) that maybe his "bio matrix aura" might extend a bit of itself across space directly to the sun, like an ambilical cord, and thereby siphon power off much more directly.

Hey, we're of one mind on this one, RedSunofKrypton.  I too get a charge out of trying to make S.F. and comics work in the real world.  It reduces that 'suspension of disbelief' factor considerably if we can at least theoretically have a way for these characters and situations really exist.  :D

Good call on solar neutrinos, though it must be noted that this is a partial fix at best.  The proportion of solar energy in the neutrinos is only 5% or 1/20th of the total solar energy received.  While that power level would remain pretty constant even at nighttime, it does considerably reduce the power available.  Thus, it makes it even more necessary for solar energy to catalyze a higher-order energy process of some sort since even full solar power is insufficient to even power mobile plants let alone a superhuman being.

For feats like OWAW where Superman moves Warworld -- esp. against its own world moving engines empowered by Imperiex energies! -- it would take power levels on the par with hundreds of galaxies to achieve which far outbalance the measly power of Earth's Sun by a factor of hundreds of billions.

We could fall back on established Genesis continuity and suggest that Superman's power is more truly somehow connected to the Source, the ultimate origin of everything.  This is not entirely unreasonable.  He not only produces mass/energy in excess of what he evidently takes in, but he can produce assymmetric matter from that energy in his body mass without a proportionate amount of antimatter.  The only known mechanisms that could do this are the Big Bang itself and the theoretical assymmetry possible at the quantum scale for gravitational collapse in black holes and singularities.  Hey, those sound suspiciously like what the Source resembles.  :)

Well that's a good comparison to the source alright.

The hypothesis that I had about Superman pushing Warworld was that he (subconciously maybe) used his apparent control of gravity to create a singularity of sorts behind Warworld while he was pushing it. So he wasn't really pushing it, he was sustaining a hole in spacetime creating a gravitational "vacuum" behind it so as to create the illusion of pushing. Warworld moving was really spacetime attempting to fill in the void, and when the planet was moved to where he wanted it, Superman stopped sustaining the void and allowed spacetime to repair itself. The whole singularity theory would take only the energy of a star collapsing (or there abouts) instead of the energy of hundreds of galaxies. I hope that explanation made sense.

The new OWAW Warworld was originally the planet Pluto which is 1137 km in radius.  Though pictorial evidence suggests it was expanded to be roughly the same radius as Earth (6378 km), let's go with the smaller Pluto value since it markedly reduces the energy requirements.

A black hole of Pluto radius would take over a trillion times the power output of our galaxy for one second.  Kicking up to Earth radius makes it far worse.

Regardless of black hole or other grav manipulations, the actual energy expenditure for this feat remains at least in the high multiples of a galaxy level.

The grav aspect certainly explains why he didn't simply push through the thing out the other side.  That grav field would affect the whole planet thus enabling him to push it.

Even if we went by the smallest stellar black hole (3.6 solar masses which is 10.63 km radius -- far smaller than Pluto by a couple of orders of magnitude), that still gives us an energy requirement of over 16 billion times the galaxy power output per second.

Anyway you slice it, that OWAW feat is a friggin' big energy slice.  :shock:

I see, very cool.

Hmm, now I'm tending to think Superman is just a more varied version of Marvel's Cyclops. The more electomagnetic/electrical energy Cyclops absorbs, the more he can tap into a universe with no first law of thermodynamics where his optic blast energy comes from. So you're probably right in that absorbing solar energy is what allows Superman to tap into a bigger source of power; maybe that source of power could come from a similar universe with no FLoT. In a universe where energy is spontaneously created in limitless amounts, Supes would have all the juice he needs. The whole concept though is kind of straw grasping as compared to the zero point field, which while pretty awesome in theory, I can't help but be wary of.

Hi all

I was quite impressed reading the above posts, mainly because I am inclined the same way but I also fancy myself as having a scientific bent of mind and as such like to try and figure things out.

I read a comic book the other day, Superman 2001. It was written and printed in 1976 and one of the things it got right on was a "24 hour news channel" The other depictions still fall into the realm of the sci-fi wish list somewhat akin to the sliding doors of the classic Star Trek.

And then there is the Man of Steel. Yes the Byrned Superman did have his power levels reduced but said powers are slowly being built up again since the departure of JB. While the Flash taps the Speed Force regularly, Superman and the Source? Intriguing but nonetheless plausible for someone with the means whether consciously or otherwise.

Oh back to Superman's bad breath. Maybe he has powerful germ hunting bacteria as described here (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1941) or these (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1289) antibodies. This would not only prevent bad breath, but it would help keep his teeth perfect.