If you could one have just one power what would it be? Without being a smarta*s and saying, “The power to have all superpowers,” what would you choose? Many would choose powers like flight, super strength or super speed as feats of physical ability. Others would choose those powers with more cognitive or supernatural skill, such as teleportation, time travel or mind reading. With comic books and various shows exploring and entertaining these fantasies, it comes to question, which is the best? For argument's sake, I present the most overly thought-out answer: telekinesis.
Telekinesis comes from the combination of the Greek words "tele" for “far off” and "kinesis" for “movement.” When most people think of this, they merely think that it entails the ability to pick up things with your mind like a Jedi, or they think of carnival magicians and bent spoons. These assumptions would not be wrong and alone could be very interesting. The lazy person in all of us could take advantage of this – no problem bringing anything out of reach to our hands without having to get up or put in much effort. Of course, there could be much evil that could be done as well, such as stopping someone’s heart or ripping someone’s head off with your mind, but it doesn’t have to be all gruesome and gory!
If the power is simply being able to move things with your mind, the possibilities don't stop there. By picking yourself up, you acquire the ability of levitation and by moving yourself through the air: flight. If we were to consider the movement things on a much more molecular level, things get even more interesting and wild. By being able to move matter in and out, we can compress or expand things at a whim. You can make cars implode or explode in an instant or spaghetti-fy your living room couch. You can stretch and shrink things at will – making anything bigger or smaller than it previously was and as much as it can stand without pushing back.
We can take this even further if we take the movement of things and apply this at a subatomic level. By speeding up or slowing down the atoms within an object itself, we can heat things or cool things at varying extremes! Imagine igniting everyday objects or turning them to ultra hot plasma or the opposite: freezing water or creating a frozen solid from air itself. Any physicist with this power could effectively take over the world just with his or her mind.
It doesn't stop there. Lets take this even further still. Allow us to fully embrace the absurdity (as if this wasn’t absurd enough) for one moment. If we can do all sorts of weird things to objects by the manipulation of motion at the molecular level, we are dealing directly with quantum mechanics. What if we consider the opposite of this and examine this in the realms of general relativity. Let's assume that without restraint, you have a telekinetic power that rivals God…What can you do? Imagine the ability to move entire cities, continents, or even entire planets and celestial bodies. The world-ending possibilities are endless. You can turn back or slow down the movement of time; thus altering the motion of the Earth. If you control the masses of universe that put things in motion through gravity, you effectively control space and time. What you can do, really, is up to you and how creative you are in utilizing it.
With telekinesis, you can go from being a Jedi Knight or Sith Lord to being Jean Grey from the X-Men or the new God of your people. The only things more powerful than telekinesis are time manipulation powers or being God. Of course, this is all hypothetical and in no way scientifically possible, but so is any other comic book power.
