Super intelligence would be so much more useful. Can start by finding a cure against cancer for starters.

As for strength. You’re right, it’s hard to think of how one could change the world. Maybe let doctors research you. Being indestructible must give you some interesting genes. Hardly heroic however.

Well, you couldn’t do a lot of good in Darfur by picking a side and defeating it. But you could go around systematically swooping in on armed groups, trying to be fairly equal in your approach, and breaking their weapons. Disarm all sides. True, Rwanda showed that it’s possible to conduct a genocide largely with machetes and clubs, but it’s a lot easier with machine guns, mortars and AK-47s.
Plus, in many parts of Africa the conflict is driven by the various groups exploiting things like diamond mines, where they swap valuable resources for weapons with which to take over more diamond mines and ultimately perhaps whole countries except none of them ever seems to successfully consolidate. Pick a region and systematically make sure none of the groups profits off the key mines, by shutting them down and taking away their toys, and it might be possible to undermine the drivers of violence.

You might do better as a disaster response/rescue person. Sure, it’s not world-savior scale usefulness, but someone with the powers you describe could save a lot of people that conventional technology couldn’t reach. Burning buildings, buried by earthquakes, yadda yadda.

If you were really stubborn and very bloody-minded, arguably someone with those powers could do more good as an assassin. Just publicize that any world leader who ordered armed forces into, or ordered the bombardment of, anyone else’s country without a unanimous vote by the UN General Assembly (to blazes with the Security Council) would be killed. Then follow through. If we’d had someone like that a while back, a million Iraqis would be alive today and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I’m going with my earlier answer: Help humans get into space. The costs of getting out of Earth Orbit are huge. With the powers you listed you could lift more weight into space in a week than humanity has in 50 years. A colony on the Moon before the end of the decade and one on Mars in ten years. It doesn’t solve all the worlds problems, but it’s a big step in the long term.

Also the chief point you made is that you couldn’t do a lot by yourself. That’s true and instead of being depressed by that I think one should accept that we are social animals and that we can accomplish the most in groups. You’d have to attach yourself to an large organization, probably a nation-state, to do the most good with your powers.

Lets say that Canada (to try and keep things less political) is worried that “Qutat” is developing nuclear weapons at facility X. Currently Canada can either bomb it and hope it doesn’t turn out to be a Milk factory, or ignore it. Super-Hero X could just bust through the main doors and look around and discover what exactly is in facility X. Huge change there too.

It’s not that easy to assassinate dictators if they take precautions. The US rained missiles down on various targets in Iraq at the start of the war, essentially the same effect as SuperHeroX slamming into the ground at Mach5, and it didn’t get Saddam until months of occupying the entire country. I don’t see why SuperHeroX would be able to find dictators any easier than he could find random street crime.

With great power comes great responsability… and great problems: alter ego and something like that. I like spiderman and daredevil comics because of these arguments.

And what about EVIL? Why do you make good when you can become the great dictator?

With these powers I see no difficulties in that.

You would be in better situation than Darth Vader (unless you have a son with similiar superpowers ;) )

Now, LET’S BE SERIOUS. What I’ve just said is the most probable end, even for that with good intentions (like the comunism countries, in the begininig maybe they had the best objectives for the people, but with POWER comes CORRUPTION, DICTATORSHIP and the like)

Mike,

The problem with the “bust in the door and examine” technique is that once again you’re basically putting yourself at the disposal of someone with a political agenda to push.

I like the space idea, and I’d take it one further. Since you can carry a metric crapload of stuff, you can haul back asteroids. So you suit up, carry your own oxygen supply plus whatever equipment you need, and go prospecting. Bring back a ton of asteroids to a lunar orbit, help set up a manufacturing infrastructure in orbit, and Bob’s your uncle. Cheap plentiful orbiting power arrays? Yes, please!

(That, plus if anybody pisses you off, you can just throw a rock at them from orbit and let gravity add its strength to yours.)

I think I’d be inclined to be the anti-hero. Show up, cause havoc, fly away. Any hot spot would get my attention, and chaos and destruction would ensue.

Figure people would really start to think twice before they’d start to stir the pot, ere risk my attention.

The biggest area where your powers would shine is in the face of natural disasters. You could fly faster than a tsunami giving islanders the necessary warning they need to reach safety. Your powers would allow you to build firebreaks when areas are faced with overwhelming wildfires. Floods could be diverted by building temporary dams thereby saving villages. Depending on your strenghth, meteroites could be knocked back into space. Famines could be averted by the delivery of food supplies to regions inaccesible to regular vehicles (the Afganisthan starvation in the winter of 2005/2006 comes to mind). Droughts such as the one in Atlanta can be solved by the quick delivery of a couple of icebergs to a few key resevoirs.

As for fighting evil. Some of the worst atrocities are occuring in the world when armed thugs roam the countryside terrorizing innocent people. They go unpunished because they exist in parts of the world that are considered insignificant strategically and the cost in human life is not worth sending in troops. One “invulnerable” hero could swoop in and disarm such warlords and dump their weapons in the ocean. Africa is an excellent example. For thousands of years there has always been a struggle between the “farmer” and the “hunter/gather” but the balance has stayed primarily in check. Over the last 50 years though, the increase in military quality firearms in the hands of the “hunter/gathers” has tipped the balance and put the “farmer” at a significant disadvantage.

Building on Mike R’s idea of becoming a space mule, hire yourself out. Let the market figure out what is most valuable to do by competing for your services.

Since you’re trying to help people, and odds are this will result in more money than you know what to do with, donate all proceeds (minus living expenses) to the charities of your choice.

The market is good at efficient utilization of resources, which helps everybody a little bit. Unlike most rich people who end up rich in the form of stocks and other non-liquid assets, you’ll be able to donate legendary amounts of money to charity, distributing your powers in a way that helps people. (Or better yet, fund a foundation. Trickier, but even more effective.) And if you don’t like a job, nobody can make you take it.

The biggest danger of this approach is wealth.

Hmmm… Here’s my list:

1) Smashing the military infrastructure of various thugocracies has serious potential. You can (possibly) do it without hurting innocents, you don’t have to be able to find the kleptocrat in question, and there’s less problem with intelligence (though you’d still need the backing of a world power). You’d just keep breaking expensive military toys until the kleptocrat decides it’s more financially viable to abdicate than to keep replacing this stuff.

2) Becoming a human space-program would be good, as outlined above.

3) You could hire yourself out as a missile defense system – you could do a lot of good simply by being on call to take out incoming warheads, though it would only work if they cam one at a time.

4) World’s most effective, but expensive, courier service? It’ll get where it’s going on time, come anything short of a nuclear attack.

I think I’d go with the space program trick – try to alleviate global power problems with orbital power satelites. Though its not as easy as people are making it sound; you can’t just chuck stuff up, you’ve got to maneuver it into a stable orbit. And whatever you’re lifting has to be built with some VERY strong handles – no matter how strong you are you’ve still only got a couple of points with which to apply that strength. Not by any means insurmountable, but definitely tricky.

And throw in a good dollop of disaster relief. Super-strength, indestructability, and flight don’t let you do anything much that modern tech couldn’t do, but you can deploy that strength much more quickly, so use it in situations where time is of the essence. Go _with_ the engineers to the building collapse, and lift whatever they want lifted (dont want to bring the whole thing down, do you?) Or airlift supplies into hard to reach places.

I’d be tempted to try to do something about fresh water distribution as well, but how would it work? How big of a thing can you fly that fast with? And how big of a tank could you make anyways before the handles just snapped off, or your hands punched straight through the steel? Or push an iceberg? But you can’t pick it up, nor can you push it too terribly fast through the water – it’d fall apart. Maybe a giant net of some sort? But the net would have to be awfully strong for a berg of any size…

And in my spare time? Hand me a flashlight lads, I’m going to explore the bottom of the ocean, for research purposes. Yeah, thats it; research.

It’s quite simple to save the world with those powers. You’re nigh on impossible to kill. Ergo you orchestrate your own coup d’etat and become a benign dictatorship to the world. You use your powers then to punish those who do wrong/ violate your new laws by sending them into space on a one-way trip to our friendly neighborhood star,Sol. Remember, it’s for people’s own good. Sure the tactics are crummy but sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

After a while you’ve weeded out the bad genes and the political conditions that make people more prone to violence and the “good” slowly becomes self-perpetuating. When you have a good gene pool to work with you strengthen the intellect and strength of the race. When people have time to forget that violence ever was an option (helped along with selective historical revisionism from your new regime) they stop looking at it as an option. You’re retraining the human race.

Once you’ve established firmly your rulership through a combination of strength and fear you use your strength, flight, and invulnerability to become a one-man Red Cross, mitigating natural disaster which reinforces negative human conditions. You can also help reduce or eliminate other conditions that contribute to a general downtrodden state of being such as re-channeling rivers to irrigate desert areas, ensuring food supplies for everyone.

It requires you to take a heavy-handed and long approach but in the end, the results will be a general uplifting of the human condition. Few superheros, however, would have the stomach to do what it takes to get the ball rolling.

I would go for a different tactic with the drugs, hit the source. Carry around a flame thrower, or multiple flame throwers, and fly down to Columbia or Bolivia or Jamaica or any other of the numerous originating sources.
Burn it down. All of it.
The guards aren’t going to stop you and walking through the flame won’t hurt you. Heck, you might even manage to kill a drug czar or two along the way.

Wow. This is a fun discussion.

Fighting / Beating people up would actually NOT be what I’d look to do. Being a super-soldier would really subject you to being used and abused by governments, as you mention. A very slippery slope.

But there are lots of cases where it would be a lot more cut-and-dried.

But hey – how about being on call with the cops in a non-hostage situation? Some dude with a shotgun is holding off a SWAT team? That actually happened in an apartment complex across the street from us many years ago. Send in Captain Invulnerable to make sure the situation gets resolved WITHOUT a likely loss of life. That’d be awesome.

A high-speed chase endangering people? Super-strength, invulnerability, and high-speed flying would again resolve this situation with minimal risk of life.

Dang – imagine what could have been done during 9/11 when the WTC buildings were on fire and collapsing? How many people could have been saved? Kinda in-line with your fire department suggestion. Or tsunamis / floods? How many other situations do we have where the risk is too high to send people in — or there’s simply not enough time.

Or you could be a one-man version of the Berlin Airlift…

I imagine if you HAD those kinds of powers, you’d spend a lot more time thinking about how you could use them. And make a few missteps (hey – just like Peter Parker) along the way.

The possibilities would actually be awesome.

Now here’s the twist… how could you use your current powers (less super, a little less unique, but possibly just as valuable) better?

I think the problem is that you’re thinking too much in the way of “helping people by dramatically changing things”. Instead, look at things that are difficult or costly to do now that a superhero could do easily (and comic hero tend to ignore). You could fight wildfires better than three counties worth of firefighters. You could mine natural resources quickly and without any risk. You could (as someone noted above) build a big ol’ treadmill and generate cheap, clean electricity. You could be a one-man Habitat for Humanity (with a little training in construction, you could easily have a small town assembled in a week).

And while you might not be able to stop dictators and warlords, you could do a lot about the underlying econonomic conditions that allow them to rise to power and maintain it.

This is why, in comic books etc., heroes mostly only fight super-villains. You may not be any use against traditional villains, but you could probably defeat Dr. Strange-o and his Maleficent Towering Iron Fortress.

I wouldn’t care about fixing the world if I had super-powers. I just think it’d be REALLY cool. I’d get a job as a heavy-freight, long-distance courier. Imagine how awesome that’d be. You could make a lot of money. And being able to get something really heavy across the country in a hurry might have more benefits than you’d think.

Crash Test Dummy

Shamus, ever read The Watchmen?

In that universe superheroes are relatively common, but they are all basically masked vigilantes with no powers (ie. Batman/Punisher style). All except one that is – Dr. Manhattan is a genuine superhero – a brilliant scientist who can fly, bend time and space, reconstruct matter and is virtually indestructible. He is essentially a living god.

His enemies wouldn’t dare to attack him directly. In fact he is the most potent weapon in the US arsenal and he single handedly removed the threat of Cold War. Russians wouldn’t dare to launch missiles knowing he could easily disable or turn them around in mid flight with just a thought.

He is the most powerful man on the planet, but he is relatively impotent as his every action has extremely high profile. His personal well being has international importance. When he has a mental breakdown during a talk show it becomes an international incident that shifts balance of power on the planet.

The US govenment doesn’t even really need to use his powers at all. They just aim to keep him confined, relatively happy and away from the public eye. The mere threat of using his powers is what keeps the enemies at bay.

This is the other side of the medal. Even if you have totally awesome powers to influence the planet would you do it? Would you just walk into a conflict that you don’t really know much about and try to solve it by brute force?

Would you blindly follow the orders from your government even if it meant killing freedom fighters and installing ruthless power hungry dictators in destabilized countries and policing the world according to doctrines set up by the current government?

Or would you try to follow your own morals instead and risk being branded as a traitor? Would you try to police the world on your own without tactical intelligence and analysis?

Could you afford being reckless knowing that a small mistake on your part can send ripples throughout the world, change the political scene and affect stockmarkets around the world?

Going back to your questions. The character you describe is essentially of the tank superhero variation – and he would do best in fights against super powered villains and is most effective as part of a superhero team.

Lacking that you could essentially build a covert ops crysis team. Hire few dozen to few hundred people to run intelligence, analysis and support for you. Have people on the ground gather information, have it processed, and analyzed, to develop best plan of attack. Then you swoop in armed with a GPS unit and a radio – you have someone in the base navigating for you. You have people tracking movement on the ground using a satellite giving you heads up on what is going on. Have people monitor police reports all over the world, and prioritize the threats.

Establish hotlines with major governments so that they can call in when they need your services. Have a clear moral agenda and refuse missions that do not seem right to you. Make sure that people know that you are an impartial third party interested in humanitarian work, not a tactical missile for hire.

You could be very effective both in combat as well as in rescue type missions given enough support and direction.

If you put together that team, and they are all working for you with a clear agenda of “making the world a better place” then you could do a lot of good.

You still wouldn’t stop all crime, and your impact would still be relatively minor, but it would be much better than doing this alone, or working as a man sized helicopter. :P

Ironically, it’s a question of asymmetrical warfare. In Iraq, a relatively small group of guerrillas cause a great deal of trouble by popping up unexpectedly and attacking the large unwieldy target (the US army). Similarly, in the hypothetical hero situation, an individual hero would have to pop up unexpectedly and attack any of a wide variety of criminal behavior. In Batman Begins then he points out that by becoming the impersonation of an idea (justice/terror) he can be vaguely helpful. Terror isn’t a rational emotion, even if this hypothetical superhero can’t reliably catch anything, and is much less effective than the police force, it only takes a few incidents where he she or it is vaguely useful before word gets out, and provides an unreasonably large disincentive. Terrorists are a lot less dangerous to the population, per capita, than any of a variety of common diseases, but we generally focus the finance and fear on the terrorists.

So this hypothetical hero occasionally smites the people he’s really confident are actually bad, does so in a very public way, and despite the fact that he’s not directly making any real dent, he will frighten the rest. Yes it’s vigilantism at its worst, no it probably wouldn’t result in justice by any reasonable standard, but it would potentially be a large ‘net good.’ Unfortunately, this wouldn’t do much about white collar criminals, and there isn’t much one could do about any unpleasantness on a larger scale than a single city, unless one wishes to be a one-man assassination squad.

I’m going to completely agree with Jeremy Bowers (post 18).
By simply making yourself available to the private sector you don’t have to worry about what to do with your powers. Other people will come up with the ideas for you and you just choose which jobs to take and for how much. Considering the projects that you could accept you would make an enormous (think Bill Gates) amount of money very quickly. You can then establish a foundation funded by you and by the donations of others to fight disease, famine, poverty, etc. And since you would have final say on what projects you take you can make sure that they are “good” projects that better mankind in general and not just make money for a few. Then in your “off” time you could donate your time to governement or state services to help fight fires, rescue people (say off of sinking ships or mountain tops), deliver relief supplies, and all of the other great ideas presented.

You are abolutely correct, Shamus, that you would be completely unable to change human nature. You can’t end war, you can’t end famine, you can’t end violence, you can’t end crime, but through a lot of hard work you can (in the long run) make a huge overall improvement to the human condition by providing the funds to and being a symbol for the people who really will change the world.

Hm,

42 answers and almost nobody take the obvious.

What the world go round is BELIEVING.

So I can think of three possibilities:
1) Religion:

Summon people who believe in the same goals like you.
Make sure, that everybody believes in you as the new prophet, buddha, saint, whatever.
Develop a Religion around you.
Declare your rules.
Develop as much believers than possible. They change the world and they protect you!
Create a homepage, where everybody can send his wishes.
Let them analyse. Grant some. Small and big ones. With the best P.R.
Take some scapegoats and let everybody show, who is the boss.
Install an church-like organisation. Implement an Inquisition-Force for inside and outside traitors to your believe.
Kill for your believe, because some fundamentalists never get along with you, else stay as peaceful as possible.
Try not to show everything, what you can do.
Avoid poison, radioactivity, röntgen-, microwaves and the like as long as your not sure, one of them is your kryptonit…
Develop a stable Religion, but keep yourself uncalculable for avoiding traps.

Keep your own sanity!!!!

2) Money.
Start as construction worker, Transporter, whatever.
Begin your own “Microsoft”-Company.
Use the same rules like above, but in an economic way.
Use your wealth amd your company for change the world.
See # 37.

3) Mix 1 and 2

Your Superpowers are only a better start and gives you an enormous advantage. But thats all! All the villains in this world will hate you as soon as you break their powerstructure. And they will find a way to get rid of you.

So for changing the world to something better, you must stay invincible in any way! Or they must get aware of you as late as possible.

With powers like flight and super strength, I would help rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure. That would make the lives of thousands of people better in a relatively short amount of time, not to mention lives saved from crumbling bridges and levees.

Captain Shamus McLaserPants- The issues you bring up are explored in the VERY excellent comic series ‘Powers’ by Brian Michael Bendis. In the story (spoiler) SuperPowers are made illegal when a ‘mirror’-character based on Superman gets so old he becomes unhinged/senile/paranoid and starts doling out his OWN justice. Wiping many ‘hotspot’ right off the map in the process.

Mari- your ‘benevolent dictator’ scenario is also explored in the, sadly, unfinished ‘MiracleMan’ by various writers, including Todd McFarlane and Neil Gaiman. In it a superhero eventually takes over the world and sets himself up as a God-like figure above it. The writing is excellent and also very much NOT for children. One of the superheros goes insane and kills almost the entire population of London in gruesome ways before he is subdued.

I heartily recommend both series.

The problem with such powers is that everything you do would ruin someones life.

You put things in orbit, congrats on fireing those who build the rockets on shuttles and who design them.
You put up buildings really fast then you just lost some builders months of work.
etc.

Basicly, you would need to find a job that no-one can currently do(retiving asteroids for those rare minerals/elements that always appear in comics maybe?), or your incredible powers would harm others.

A few people now have suggested avoiding making any decisions by your fallible self, and handing the question over to the infallible market.
This is a horrific idea. The “market” consists of a bunch of folks just as fallible as you, except with much worse motivations. The most “valuable” use for your time and abilities would probably turn out to be as an invulnerable jackbooted thug turning poor people off their land so that agribusiness or dam builders with bribe-driven inflated contracts could take it over. Or as Blackwater International’s most prestigious bodyguard in Iraq.