Relative Super Powers
The origin of Superman is fairly well known. A baby is sent to a planet and gains super powers from being in the environment (technically the sun, but I believe you catch the gist). I'd like to make a planet/environment that boosts humans in a similar way. What kind of planetary/environmental features would allow for a normal human to be a "super human" and how super human is that?
The human in question will only be staying a maximum of 5 Earth days (120 hours) and at absolute minimum 3 Earth days (72 hours). By normal human, I really mean Navy Seal level of fitness. Please note that the "powers" or increases in abilities are not intended to be permanent. They are mere side effects of being in the environment. Similar to if you begin jumping on a trampoline, you can jump relatively super high in comparison to jumping on normal earth.
Requirements/Goals (to properly define what "super human" means)
- Able to carry or move a larger mass than on earth
- Has more endurance/stamina
- See better/farther
- Able to react to primitive danger faster (primarily for fighting faster and does not require elevated thinking)
- Any unique or beneficial ability you can conceive of
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/116553. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
Greater endurance/stamina: A thicker atmosphere/higher oxygen levels
Try a thicker atmosphere - or rather, a planet where the humans largely live at higher elevations. Altitude training is useful for athletes on Earth. By training somewhere with a lower partial pressure of oxygen, a person's red blood cell count rises, which helps oxygen intake at lower altitudes. This is especially important in aerobic activities such as long-distance running, where respiration is important (contrast this with anaerobic activities, such as sprinting).
Your Navy Seal is used to living on Earth, where the oxygen levels are lower than this planet. Therefore, he or she has effectively undergone altitude training back at home. The effects of altitude training can last for a week or two, so five days sounds pretty good to me.
It's been suggested that the best altitudes for training are at 1,200 to 2,500 m. This means oxygen levels can decrease by up to 25% of their values at sea level. Therefore, maybe an atmosphere of ~25-30% oxygen would be reasonable (see also below).
Greater strength: Lower surface gravity
Try a planet with a lower surface gravity. The stronger the gravity, the harder it is to do normal things, and the stronger the humans will be - and vice versa, for normal humans. In a lower-gravity environment, the natives will likely be weaker; they won't have had to deal with the (relatively) strong gravity on Earth. Thus, this human will be stronger.
Here's the thing: Planets with lower surface gravities usually have thinner atmospheres thanks to atmospheric escape and other processes (oxygen is depleted by these other processes, not atmospheric escape1), so if your humans live at sea level, or its equivalent, they'd be weaker but would actually experience lower oxygen concentrations. Therefore, we need to mitigate this somehow, possible by having the atmosphere be more like 30% oxygen, rather than 21% oxygen. The relative fraction of oxygen may be higher, but the overall concentration will be lower, and so it will be easier for the Seal to breathe.
1 In particular, dissociation, collisions and non-thermal escape break up oxygen in Earth's atmosphere. Dissociation happens by the reaction $$\text{O}_2^++e^-\to\text{O}+\text{O}+\text{energy}$$ This largely happens in polar regions. Collisions with particles from the solar wind then help oxygen atoms and $\text{O}^+$ ions escape. Reduce this rate somehow - perhaps by increasing the planet's magnetic field, to better shield it from the stellar wind - and you could diminish oxygen loss, and thus perhaps increase oxygen levels over geological timescales.
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