Ok before I hit the hay. You can turn into an animal at will. Your clothes and such won’t turn with you but mass is not conserved so you can turn into something much bigger or smaller. It has to be a real creature that does or has existed and I guess if you want a plant that would be fair game. For me its an albatross. could travel around the world. might even manage to carry something that is not to large if packaged right. I am a bit torn though as the ocean is large so maybe a sea creature would be better. like a killer whale. of course then its not great for getting somewhere inland.
Do I get to turn back or is it a one and done thing?
If the latter, then probably a blue whale. I don’t really want to live as a whale but I do want to know in my dying whale breaths that they’ll never get the stench of my bloated 30 ton corpse out of the Australian parliament building.
no real gotchas outside of the stipulated it just your body and not what you are carrying. at will. keep your mind. no percentage life span carry over or such.
Well you didn’t add any caveats to the transformation and you said it’s at will so… If mass is not conserved then I’d just turn into something heavy yet compact like a rhino and harvest infinite energy from the toggling. If I get support from a State I might even choose a whale so we can extract the most energy per toggle. You can basically build an engine from it, and since whales are like 200 tons and I’m 70kg, the conversion ratio would be pretty damn good. Though it would require a dedicated facility, which is why I’d rather go with a rhino or something, which is however about 100 times less efficient so it would require 100 times as much toggling. You get the picture.
I remember reading something (might have been xkcd) that said Superman could do the objectively most “good” by simply powering a massive generator and providing free energy to the world. It would benefit the most people at one time, and provide a larger affect than simply beating up bad guys. So, in the same vein, your sacrifice will be remembered.
Like those cats with buttered toast strapped to their backs.
Reminded me of this video optimizing flash. You basically en slave one person so everyone else can live easy life.
“Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”
it’s Saturday morning breakfast cereal but my 5 minutes ddg couldn’t find the source. there’s a (urgh) reddit post about it that added some repeating flashes for the powerplant superman had to operate.
Yup! That’s it, good find.
He’s an alien being capable of freely traveling the universe that is itself filled with hyper advanced societies and advanced technology. He could literally just go pick up an asteroid of solid gold, go to a planet of hyper tech, and buy an advanced tech to Bing back to Earth.
He’s also a god like being, he could just personally deal with each individual that currently contributes to a complex systemic issue in an afternoon.
Others: I like this animal for reasons.
You: I’ll be a power plant.
Be careful what you wish for
Collapsed comic because it's kinda long: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Zach Weinersmith
@majormajormajormajor@lemmy.ca Posted this before I read your comment lol
That sounds like slavery with extra magic.
I wouldn’t want to spend my life stuck in a power plant.
Beats being stuck at a desk.
YFW power plant desk
It’s free energy, yes … but only a relatively small amount of free energy, in the grand scheme of things.
Let’s say you go as big as possible with a blue whale, topping out at 200 metric tons. And let’s say the dedicated facility built for this has a height of 500m from which it can capture the energy of your descent. Each descent can (assuming 100% efficiency of the system) deliver about 980MJ (272kWh) of energy. A 500m drop in complete freefall would take about 10 seconds (disregarding air resistance). But since we need you to survive to do the process over again (rather than splatting into whale goo at the bottom), you’ll need to decelerate gently at the end, which will slow the process down. Capturing energy from the fall will also slow you down. Let’s say the drop takes 20 seconds, minimum. And, as unrealistic as it is, let’s go for a highly optimized scenario of lifting human you back to the top just as quickly, so 20 seconds for the trip back up. Assuming you can transform instantaneously, that’s 40 seconds per cycle – 90 cycles per hour, at the absolute maximum. 90 cycles x 980MJ means you can generate up to 88,200MJ per hour, which is equivalent to 24.5MW.
A fairly average wind turbine like this one will generate 5MW at peak output. So you, as a blue whale power station, can generate a maximum power equivalent to ~5 large wind turbines. It’s not totally free, either, since the machine to capture this energy will be huge and expensive to build – likely bigger and more expensive to build than 5 wind turbines.
(Not to mention, we’re ignoring a lot of minor inefficiencies here. Air resistance will be an energy-sapping factor on both the downward and upward parts of the cycle. Then there’s friction in whatever mechanical setup you build for the machine. Then there’s the energy cost of lifting human you back to the top. Then there’s the inevitable inefficiency of the energy capture, which would more realistically be in the 80-90% range at most, not 100%.)
And to keep up that relatively meager energy production, you’ll have to transform every 20 seconds. 180 times per hour, every hour, as long as you can keep doing it. And assuming you need to be awake to transform, the power station will have to go offline regularly while you nap. It could also be a problematic power source because of its pulsing nature – 20 seconds on, 20 seconds off. That’s messy power to be dumping into a power grid, forcing other energy sources to constantly vary in order to make up for it. You could smooth that out with giant capacitors or something … but then that adds additional inefficiency and power loss into the system.
Yes, it’s neat to be able to cheat physics and get ‘free’ energy … but on a grid level, the amount of free energy you can possibly get this way is pretty trivial. Not worth giving up your whole life for.
Funny you assume this would not lead to almost immediate enslavement.
Now you just need to find a way to boil some water and… I feel like I’ve heard this one before.
A raven doesn’t sound too bad. Can fly, smart, doesn’t really have a predator so I can explore the world at ease
smart won’t really matter. no real gotchas here so no matter what you would keep your normal intelligence and ego and such.
what would you do to cross oceans, plop down on a ship and travel along?
I dunno I’ll try to befriend some nice sailors, most ppl are reasonably nice to ravens… Into the ocean is out of the question unfortunately
You can go back and forth between animal and human. Save on airline tickets by being an emotional support raven for someone and ride for free. No friend? Fine, buya human ticket and zhwooop, now and have a seat 5 times your size. Never wait in line to poop. Fill up with one meal. So awesome.
Plane crashes? Easy, just open a door as a human and transform in the air.
Raven is the winner.
A small and cute goat in a petting zoo. You get fed and you can headbutt people and kids to oblivion while everyone thinks it’s cute.
See username. I could probably name a better bird for what I want, but hawk is literally right there. Not actually what it means in my username, but hey, if the shoe fits…
…as to why, it’s basically just flight.
And those eyes
I guess if you want a plant that would be fair game.
In that case, I would choose a quaking aspen based on the specimen named Pando. I would have a vast array of sizes at my disposal, from as small as a single seed to as large as the 106 acres that Pando covers.
I want to escape from somewhere? Turn into a seed. I want to destroy an environment? Turn into a giant network of trees.
Migratory bird of some sort. I’d go with a species that dies migrating the least often.
you know someone said the artic tern and I had considered it but the albatross seemed more efficient but I see the albatross is not as good over land. I just found out sea birds have a gland that let them drink salt water to. So im leaning toward the artic tern now.
Raccoon. Still got haaaaaands biiiitches
With the second part of that comment you sure give off raccoon vibes lmao
Hell naw man…
My favourite raccoon clip: https://youtu.be/rfbb4yRBH64
An arctic tern.
I actually thought about this as an alternative because of the ability to hide and survive extreme conditions. Its very tempting along with the travel you could do.
What do owls see in the night sky?
90s Animorphs kid here. I’ve been considering this for 30 years.
And I’m not telling
This dove:
I wanna fly away.
yeah something flying would be nice
what’s the apex bird?
thats a good question. In my area I feel its the hawk but globally no idea?
Pterodactyl I think
your ability is going to become public fast.
Orson Welles. I want to turn into 1970’s Orson Welles.
A Rottnest Island Quokka. Highly promiscuous, well fed, no predators and beloved and protected by humans.
I. ah. did not think about sexual aspects.
My thought process when choosing:
What increases happiness? Food, sex, safety, community.
What decreases happiness? Hunger, loneliness, fear.
https://www.rottnestisland.com/see-do/wildlife-nature/Quokkas
