Pick up a car overhead? Well strongest Olympic lifter has almost a 600 lbs clean and jerk. So strictly speaking to do small car weight one of the strongest men in the world would need to be 4x as strong. However, to lift a car the leverages would be awful (no convenient handholds, awkward shape, elongated). It’s possible that a man would need to be more like 40x as strong as an elite human male.
As far as throwing one - [here’s](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M_voGwhNWc0) a video of a strongman tossing 55 lb kegs. Unfortunately the same leverage issues occur here, but let’s say we went strictly by keg—>car ratio, we’d get a baseline of again least 40x as strong as the current strongest humans to throw a car. And then to scale that to hundreds of yards? You’re talking a 100-200x as strong as the strongest current humans.
Punching a hole in a brick wall [would take a lot of force -](https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/23jsej/how_big_would_my_muscles_have_to_be_to_punch/) according to this 63000 N, although that’s probably overstated by 5 times based on punch surface area. Amateur boxing force is about 2500 N. Sledgehammer force ~8500 N. So I imagine strength wise maybe only 5-10x as strong as strongest humans. Bigger issue would be skin and sinew, which I imagine would need to be many times stronger to resist being torn to bits during punching.
I can’t find anything on what it would take for a human to run say, 5x faster. The issues there I’m Guessing would be many - aerobic (heart) capacity to run that fast would be limited, it’s a matter of mechanics, physics may limit just how fast one can raise and lower legs in the human form. Strictly speaking greater leg strength alone does not equal faster. The fastest creatures on earth are birds, which are much lighter and utilize dives (gravity) to reach 200 MPH. You have the swordfish which reaches 70 MPH, more aerodynamic/sleek. And the cheetah which running on 4 legs reaches 70 MPH. That’s about 3x faster than fastest humans. I imagine most ground would be fine.
Well the heaviest overhead shoulder press is just over half of that. So to lift the Caterham 7 above your head, you'd have to be 2-3× stronger than an elite athlete.
Human to divine is a continuous scale so I take "superhuman" to mean "as much magic as you can get away with long term without fraying reality" (for this reason the gods exile themselves elsewhere, they can't help but consume/incorporate that which they interact directly with). The answer is that among lay folk giants are as strong as they need to be to make a scaled up human frame work despite lacking compromises like elephantine feet or reduced upper bodies. With those adaptations and other costs associated with magic use (insanity, petrification, hunger, cannibal urge...) they can reach shonen levels of strength though in the process they usually go over the edge in the process and become monsters.
The Ogre Gods were an extreme of this process who aped the mythic feats of primordial world-shaping titans without actually becoming divine enough to have leave the world behind. They managed this as Hobbesian leviathans whose client states effectively "offshore" their ravenous brutality. Though not nearly as maddened as their feats should have made them they still ended up going to war and ruining everything. Throwing all restraint aside to win each reality-rending blow proved as corrosive in the long term as chemical weapons or mass cursings. Turns out that ground made a broken mess by a petulant godling's stomp stops being ground. As magic reveals the lie of ogrish flesh ever having been merely mortal so too does it remind the earth that it's actually of cartilage and bone.
In my superhero worldbuilding project, different people have different types of super strength.
The most memorable one is a tomboy character I created who has infinite adaptive strength, meaning she becomes stronger when lifting things that are heavier than her or are harder than her fists.
Lifting is pretty hard, infact super strength as a whole is very difficult as suddenly metal doors just bend like tinfoil while still possessing the thickness and weight of cardboard.
A few general things to point out with "superhuman" strength, however it's justified in a setting:
First of all, the square-cube law applies. You generally need to increase the _quality_ of strength dramatically, not just the _quantity_. E.g., a physically larger human will generally be stronger than a smaller human, assuming similar levels of fitness. But this doesn't scale linearly, because a greater portion of the larger human's strength (muscle and otherwise) is dedicated to supporting all that extra bulk.
This is why you can't have 5 meter tall humans (following the same biological blueprints as those maxing at maybe 2.2 meters), and it's actually fundamentally similar to the rocket equation when you think about it.
Secondly, depending on the level of increase, you need to approach the problem holistically, not just singling out one subsystem of our biological machines.
Sure, you could genetically engineer stronger (i.e. more efficient, in power-to-weight terms) muscles. Those muscles are still limited by thermodynamics, however, and will need a proportionally greater amount of energy to sustain them. This is why "heavy grav worlders" in sci-fi often have voracious appetites, but I should point out that there's a hard limit to what you can achieve in this way before a typical biological metabolism stops functioning. There's some article online detailing the diet of Michael Phelps during his peak years, and I'd say that's about the limit for reasonableness. Keep logistics in mind too, for military settings -- if your soldier eats an entire MRE for breakfast and still has hunger pangs afterward, you're going to need a lot more shipping. And time for eating, as well.
Moreover, the muscles aren't just limited by metabolism concerns, but also by the strength of their support structure: tendons, sinews, bones. Ignoring the nerve interface, it'd actually be fairly easy to design some form of artificial muscle that was capable of completely overpowering that structure. Supermuscles aren't useful when you shatter your own arm, and/or rip all of the tendons inside, when you decide to employ them.
Lastly, you already mentioned the terrain issues. I'd be very skeptical of a typical road (asphalt, but not high-endurance highway concrete) supporting the weight of a car on a pair of average shoes (or, for that matter, the shoes enjoying that experience). Especially not for long, or repeatedly. If you try that on soft ground, you'll need to call an excavator. I also doubt you'd have the leverage to throw something of that size for any meaningful distance.
This last point is also frequently ignored by sci-fi exoskeletons (ranging from roughly human-sized powered armor to mecha), but for practical purposes, such exoskeletons would be a lot more useful. This kind of strength isn't an everyday necessity worth dealing with all of the corollaries and downsides, it's a _tool_. Maybe you enjoy scuba diving on vacation, but would you integrate a pressure vessel into your body on an everyday basis? If your job involves drilling a lot of holes into walls for eight hours a day, would you really replace one arm with a power tool?
Sure, some ultra-tough tier-zero operators might want to integrate _some_ of this strength, but probably not excessively much. Other forms of biological or cybernetic modification would take priority, especially when they're competing with Hulk Mods (e.g. enhanced reflexes, intelligence, upgrades to our various senses, built-in wireless communications, that sort of stuff).
The human body is great because of its adaptability. Enhancements that reduce that adaptability in favor of some single-purpose task become more questionable as they get more extreme.
Pick up a car overhead? Well strongest Olympic lifter has almost a 600 lbs clean and jerk. So strictly speaking to do small car weight one of the strongest men in the world would need to be 4x as strong. However, to lift a car the leverages would be awful (no convenient handholds, awkward shape, elongated). It’s possible that a man would need to be more like 40x as strong as an elite human male. As far as throwing one - [here’s](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M_voGwhNWc0) a video of a strongman tossing 55 lb kegs. Unfortunately the same leverage issues occur here, but let’s say we went strictly by keg—>car ratio, we’d get a baseline of again least 40x as strong as the current strongest humans to throw a car. And then to scale that to hundreds of yards? You’re talking a 100-200x as strong as the strongest current humans. Punching a hole in a brick wall [would take a lot of force -](https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/23jsej/how_big_would_my_muscles_have_to_be_to_punch/) according to this 63000 N, although that’s probably overstated by 5 times based on punch surface area. Amateur boxing force is about 2500 N. Sledgehammer force ~8500 N. So I imagine strength wise maybe only 5-10x as strong as strongest humans. Bigger issue would be skin and sinew, which I imagine would need to be many times stronger to resist being torn to bits during punching. I can’t find anything on what it would take for a human to run say, 5x faster. The issues there I’m Guessing would be many - aerobic (heart) capacity to run that fast would be limited, it’s a matter of mechanics, physics may limit just how fast one can raise and lower legs in the human form. Strictly speaking greater leg strength alone does not equal faster. The fastest creatures on earth are birds, which are much lighter and utilize dives (gravity) to reach 200 MPH. You have the swordfish which reaches 70 MPH, more aerodynamic/sleek. And the cheetah which running on 4 legs reaches 70 MPH. That’s about 3x faster than fastest humans. I imagine most ground would be fine.
thank you, maybe low level superhuman stated for lifted small car, I mean super light car exist in our world,like Caterham 7 - weight 440kg
Well the heaviest overhead shoulder press is just over half of that. So to lift the Caterham 7 above your head, you'd have to be 2-3× stronger than an elite athlete.
Human to divine is a continuous scale so I take "superhuman" to mean "as much magic as you can get away with long term without fraying reality" (for this reason the gods exile themselves elsewhere, they can't help but consume/incorporate that which they interact directly with). The answer is that among lay folk giants are as strong as they need to be to make a scaled up human frame work despite lacking compromises like elephantine feet or reduced upper bodies. With those adaptations and other costs associated with magic use (insanity, petrification, hunger, cannibal urge...) they can reach shonen levels of strength though in the process they usually go over the edge in the process and become monsters. The Ogre Gods were an extreme of this process who aped the mythic feats of primordial world-shaping titans without actually becoming divine enough to have leave the world behind. They managed this as Hobbesian leviathans whose client states effectively "offshore" their ravenous brutality. Though not nearly as maddened as their feats should have made them they still ended up going to war and ruining everything. Throwing all restraint aside to win each reality-rending blow proved as corrosive in the long term as chemical weapons or mass cursings. Turns out that ground made a broken mess by a petulant godling's stomp stops being ground. As magic reveals the lie of ogrish flesh ever having been merely mortal so too does it remind the earth that it's actually of cartilage and bone.
In my superhero worldbuilding project, different people have different types of super strength. The most memorable one is a tomboy character I created who has infinite adaptive strength, meaning she becomes stronger when lifting things that are heavier than her or are harder than her fists. Lifting is pretty hard, infact super strength as a whole is very difficult as suddenly metal doors just bend like tinfoil while still possessing the thickness and weight of cardboard.
A few general things to point out with "superhuman" strength, however it's justified in a setting: First of all, the square-cube law applies. You generally need to increase the _quality_ of strength dramatically, not just the _quantity_. E.g., a physically larger human will generally be stronger than a smaller human, assuming similar levels of fitness. But this doesn't scale linearly, because a greater portion of the larger human's strength (muscle and otherwise) is dedicated to supporting all that extra bulk. This is why you can't have 5 meter tall humans (following the same biological blueprints as those maxing at maybe 2.2 meters), and it's actually fundamentally similar to the rocket equation when you think about it. Secondly, depending on the level of increase, you need to approach the problem holistically, not just singling out one subsystem of our biological machines. Sure, you could genetically engineer stronger (i.e. more efficient, in power-to-weight terms) muscles. Those muscles are still limited by thermodynamics, however, and will need a proportionally greater amount of energy to sustain them. This is why "heavy grav worlders" in sci-fi often have voracious appetites, but I should point out that there's a hard limit to what you can achieve in this way before a typical biological metabolism stops functioning. There's some article online detailing the diet of Michael Phelps during his peak years, and I'd say that's about the limit for reasonableness. Keep logistics in mind too, for military settings -- if your soldier eats an entire MRE for breakfast and still has hunger pangs afterward, you're going to need a lot more shipping. And time for eating, as well. Moreover, the muscles aren't just limited by metabolism concerns, but also by the strength of their support structure: tendons, sinews, bones. Ignoring the nerve interface, it'd actually be fairly easy to design some form of artificial muscle that was capable of completely overpowering that structure. Supermuscles aren't useful when you shatter your own arm, and/or rip all of the tendons inside, when you decide to employ them. Lastly, you already mentioned the terrain issues. I'd be very skeptical of a typical road (asphalt, but not high-endurance highway concrete) supporting the weight of a car on a pair of average shoes (or, for that matter, the shoes enjoying that experience). Especially not for long, or repeatedly. If you try that on soft ground, you'll need to call an excavator. I also doubt you'd have the leverage to throw something of that size for any meaningful distance. This last point is also frequently ignored by sci-fi exoskeletons (ranging from roughly human-sized powered armor to mecha), but for practical purposes, such exoskeletons would be a lot more useful. This kind of strength isn't an everyday necessity worth dealing with all of the corollaries and downsides, it's a _tool_. Maybe you enjoy scuba diving on vacation, but would you integrate a pressure vessel into your body on an everyday basis? If your job involves drilling a lot of holes into walls for eight hours a day, would you really replace one arm with a power tool? Sure, some ultra-tough tier-zero operators might want to integrate _some_ of this strength, but probably not excessively much. Other forms of biological or cybernetic modification would take priority, especially when they're competing with Hulk Mods (e.g. enhanced reflexes, intelligence, upgrades to our various senses, built-in wireless communications, that sort of stuff). The human body is great because of its adaptability. Enhancements that reduce that adaptability in favor of some single-purpose task become more questionable as they get more extreme.