- This is Power.
- [Narrator] Getting super
powers in a comic book is easy.
Just find the right spider.
It's even easier when your
next superpower is a pill away
like in "Project Power",
but is it even possible?
What would mere humans need
to suddenly have superhuman powers?
The scientists we talked to agreed,
in most cases it would take a huge leap
in our knowledge of
biology and technology,
but they still gave us their best guess
on the path to get to
each of four superpowers.
(dramatic music)
Whether you're a cop on a beat
or just someone who
has the uncanny ability
to find himself in a shootout,
bulletproof skin is a handy power
to have on the streets of New Orleans,
because as numbers and movie
fight scenes remind us,
the human body isn't
great at handling bullets.
The sources are all over the place,
but a bullet only needs
to travel somewhere
between 148 and 197 feet
per second to break skin.
If it clocks in at 203,
there's tissue damage.
That might sound fast,
but even bullets fired up in the air
in celebration can come down at speeds
of over 600 feet per second.
So for something like this,
our skin needs to be tougher.
That may not be possible with keratin,
the protein currently responsible
for the toughness of our
skin, fingernails and hair,
but our experts saw
possible replacement for it
in an unlikely source,
the ironclad beetle.
Its exoskeleton is so tough
that it can shrug off a stomp.
You apparently have to drill
a hole in one to display them
so it's probably good
for hallway fights too.
And the fibrous material behind
its power is called chitin.
It's like keratin, but much stronger,
boosted by magnesium, calcium, zinc,
and chitin is able to
handle many, many times
its own weight, according to scientists.
But there are problems.
Maybe the biggest one is that
humans don't produce any.
Technology does have an
answer, but it's a strange one.
Scientists engineered
goats that can produce milk
with spider silk in it,
and as if that wasn't enough,
they combined the resulting spider silk
with leftover skin from plastic surgery
to test bulletproof skin.
- That's cool, right?
- [Narrator] It could only stop bullets
at less than full speed
so we should probably
keep working on that pill.
Some of you might be thinking,
isn't being a human
torch already possible?
And it's true that there are
occasionally suspected cases
of spontaneous combustion
going all the way back
to the 1600s
It's usually when someone
finds the burnt remains
of a person in an otherwise undamaged room
with no clear explanation
of what caused the fire,
but there are no shortcuts to superpowers.
Scientists think many of those
mysteries are explainable
via something called the wick effect.
Like a candle, clothing
can soak up melted fat
and deliver it steadily to a flame
for a long controlled burn,
but you still need an
outside source of fire
and probably an accelerant.
So to pull off flame,
our experts said it would take
an entire new matrix of capabilities.
First, you have to do
something about the human body,
which is relatively hard to set on fire.
After all, we're full of water.
It takes two or more hours at 1600 degrees
to cremate one of us.
So we need some accelerant on our skin.
Weirdly enough, there's actually
a relatively common process called ketosis
brought on by everything from
alcoholism to low-carb diets
that causes the formation
of a highly flammable
chemical called acetone.
If you could divert the electrical charge
that your nervous system
sends outside the body,
then perhaps.
But even if you somehow
lit yourself on fire,
there are still real problems.
Humans might not easily light on fire,
but we don't handle heat well.
Things get bad at 104 degrees,
but internal temperatures of 120 degrees
can directly kill our cells.
The animal kingdom only
has mixed solutions.
The echidna has been observed
dropping its core temperature
up to 45 degrees to withstand
the heat of forest fires.
But unfortunately for
aspiring crime fighters,
they only do it by going into
something called a torpor,
a kind of automatic shutdown mode.
Pain management through painkillers
would also be crucial.
On the end, our experts believe
that the most likely way
to get to the human flame
is a combination of a
suit that produces fire
and protects from heat,
biotechnology and extensive training
in smoke avoidance.
Kind of like this stuntman.
- [Director] Three, two, one, go!
- [Narrator] Unlike some
of the other powers,
changing into a giant
maybe somewhat attainable,
but there are a few catches.
After all, gigantism
is a naturally-occurring
phenomenon in animals.
In individual cases,
it's usually caused by a
condition known as acromegaly
in which a malfunctioning pituitary gland
produces too much growth hormone
and whole species can have gigantism,
especially island species
that had no evolutionary
pressure to be small.
But synthetic methods
like human growth hormone
are already used to grow
size and muscle mass,
manipulating proteins like
follistatin and myostatin
could help muscles grow
to superhuman size too.
But here comes the first problem.
HGH only increases bone length
if administered before
growth plates in bones fuse.
In other words, before puberty.
So, according to our experts,
instantaneous morphing would be impossible
without some miraculous ability
to fuse and unfuse growth plates.
The second problem is that
there's an inherent limit
on being a giant.
As size increases the relationship between
volume and surface area changes.
There's relatively more
volume, less surface area.
That impacts the body in so many ways
from heat regulation to
the amount legs can carry.
It's partly why real sufferers
of acromegaly face
considerable health issues.
One way to get around it would
be to reengineer the body,
playing with different materials
and proportions get thicker.
So the goal is attainable,
but so far out of reach.
If humans wanna see the power
of invisibility in action,
they only need to turn their
gaze towards technology
and the animal kingdom.
At least one sort of invisibility
cloak already exists.
It's composed of sheets
of lenticular lenses
that refract light around
a target and, yeah,
it seems to work.
And nature gives us
a few different avenues for invisibility.
Squid and octopus use a
combination of pigment,
which has a fixed hue and
light-reflecting cells
to blend into their surroundings.
But the chameleon relies solely
on the presence of nanocrystals
in their skin cells.
By relaxing or contracting
layers of their skin,
they rearrange those crystals changing
the way light reflects off
of them and thus color.
So according to our experts,
for this to happen, instead
of you just running around
in your underwear,
you need to borrow those
ingenious adaptations.
Light-reflecting crystals
in your skin cells,
plus the mechanic ability
to move them somehow.
But chameleons change
colors based on moods,
so experts also suggested the need
for specialized photo receptors
that can scan the environment
and notify the skin.
So out of everything we've seen,
not being seen may be
the closest to reality.
Invisibility, flame generation,
giant growth, bulletproof skin,
none are quite as easy as they may seem.
And given all the violence, chaos,
and explosions they
cause in "Project Power",
it might be better to keep them safe
in our comics, movies, and imaginations.
- What's the most powerful
animal on the planet?
- [Narrator] Art is right
that a pistol shrimp,
which can create a high
velocity jet of water
that's louder than a gunshot is recognized
as one of the world's deadliest creatures.
- But it hits so fast.
- [Narrator] But weirdly
it's not the only shrimp
on that list.
The six-inch mantis shrimp
has the world's most powerful punch.
Accelerating at 10,000
times the force of gravity,
it's capable of shattering aquarium glass.
I call dibs on that power.
