It’s kind of a nerdy question, but it always seems to come up. You’ll be hanging out with a few friends and someone will ask, “If you could have any superpower you wanted, what would it be?” Most people can’t answer right away because there’s so many to choose from. But not me. I know exactly what I’d pick, hands down, every time: invisibility.
Just think about invisibility for a second. No one can see you. You’re there but not there. You could be in the same room with someone, standing inches away, and they wouldn’t realize it. Sure, they could reach out and touch you if they wanted—but why would they? They wouldn’t know you were there! Heck, an invisible person could be watching me this very second, and if not for the fact that my super hearing allows me to detect a heartbeat anywhere in the world, I’d have no way of knowing.
Go stand in front of a mirror. Now, imagine there’s no one looking back at you. Or what it would be like if you held your hands directly in front of your face and saw nothing but the wall on the other side of the room. That’s impossible, right? That simply does not happen!
Invisibility would definitely blow people’s minds. I could be holding a 50-ton tanker truck above my head, and it would look like it’s just floating there, in total defiance of the laws of physics. Or I could put out a fire at an oil refinery with my super-cold breath, but no one would see me expel the subzero, hurricane-force winds from my lungs—to them it would be this miraculous gust of arctic air blowing in from absolutely nowhere.
Can you imagine what it’s like to fly over a crowd of people and not have a single one of them look up and point at you? What could be more amazing than that?
There I am, floating invisibly outside Brainiac’s spaceship. I can use my X-ray vision to make out every last detail of his evildoing, yet he’s completely oblivious. His sensors detect something, of course, but he’s sure they’re malfunctioning because by all appearances there isn’t anything out there. And later, when I nudge the earth from its orbit just enough to avoid his apocalypse beam, he never knows how I discovered his plan. He probably wouldn’t believe me if I told him!
Yeah, invisibility is the best superpower, without a doubt. I honestly don’t know why people even have this discussion.
The only downside to invisibility I can think of—and I’ve given this a lot of thought—is how tempting it would be to abuse it. For instance, it would be very easy to rob a bank. I could just stand in the lobby, totally unnoticed by anyone, and wait until everyone went home for the evening. Then, with the whole building to myself, I could simply walk up, rip the vault door off its hinges, and fill my money bags at the speed of light. If the police somehow arrived before I finished, I wouldn’t have to worry about being arrested, because I could stroll right past them.
Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t want to be invisible. But with power like that, I’d just need to be very, very careful.
In any case, I realize it’s a silly fantasy. It’s never going to happen. If someone wants to shoot me, all they have to do is spot me on the street, aim, and pull the trigger, and if the bullet is going fast enough to hit me, it’ll bounce off my chest in full view of everyone.
That’s how it’s always going to be. There’s no getting around the limitations of the real world. It’s fun to ponder, though. Come to think of it, it’d also be cool to have an elastic body and be able to stretch my arms and legs 20 feet or something. That’d be amazing.
Can you imagine?
