Does Superman need mouthwash?

[Captain Kal]

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.

[RedSunOfKrypton]

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.

[Captain Kal]

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.

[Captain Kal]

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.

[RedSunOfKrypton]

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.

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.

[Captain Kal]

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.  

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.  

[RedSunOfKrypton]

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.

[Captain Kal]

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: