Of all the superpowers, this isn't the one you want to have, trust us.
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00:00 (music)
00:04 Wouldn't it be cool to see things
00:06 through any wall and any door?
00:08 Oops, sorry.
00:10 (cough)
00:11 How about seeing through your own skin?
00:14 Or your dog?
00:16 No, no, no, and no.
00:20 Of all superpowers out there,
00:22 this isn't the one you want to get your hands on.
00:26 This is WHAT IF,
00:28 and here's what would happen if you had X-ray vision.
00:34 X-rays are light,
00:36 but they have different wavelengths than visible light.
00:39 And that makes them interact with matter differently.
00:43 Basically, they can make some materials partially transparent,
00:46 like human tissue.
00:49 Seeing X-rays wouldn't be anything like what they show in superhero movies,
00:53 not even close.
00:54 Besides, it would require you to have another superpower in your possession.
00:59 Here's why.
01:01 There are very few things on Earth
01:03 that naturally emit enough X-rays to make themselves visible.
01:07 That means you'd have to shoot X-rays from your eyes
01:10 onto the object you want to see through.
01:13 But if you were just running around blasting them in all directions,
01:16 you wouldn't see any difference.
01:19 When you pay a visit to your local hospital emergency room
01:22 to see if you've got anything cracked,
01:24 they place you between a source of X-rays,
01:26 an X-ray machine,
01:28 and something that can detect the emitted X-rays.
01:31 See where I'm going here?
01:33 You can't be a source of X-rays and an X-ray detector at the same time,
01:38 unless you moved very fast and got behind whatever it is you looked at
01:41 just before the X-rays hit it.
01:44 Although they're not the kind of light you can see,
01:46 that doesn't eliminate the fact that X-rays travel at the speed of light.
01:51 That means in order to make use of your X-ray-blasting eyes,
01:55 you'd have to move faster than the speed of light.
01:58 But here's the bummer.
02:00 From what physics has taught us, that's not possible.
02:03 Nothing can outrun the speed of light.
02:06 Let's not give up just yet.
02:08 A quick solution to this problem would be to cooperate with a friend
02:11 who's been granted the same X-ray shooting abilities.
02:14 Your friend would blast X-rays your way,
02:17 and you would detect them,
02:18 and the other way around.
02:21 While you were casually shooting X-rays,
02:23 anyone not wearing a lead outfit in the nearby vicinity
02:26 would be exposed to ionizing radiation.
02:29 That kind of radiation can damage human DNA,
02:32 causing DNA mutations and leading to cancer in later years.
02:37 Maybe you should opt for the ability to detect X-rays and not emit them.
02:42 But again, there aren't too many natural sources of X-rays on Earth.
02:46 If they were the only thing you were able to detect,
02:49 you'd be in almost complete darkness.
02:52 You could look up to the sky to see a faint glow of space radiation,
02:56 mostly blocked out by the Earth's atmosphere.
02:59 The only things you'd really be able to see through would all be man-made.
03:03 You could start hanging out at a hospital's X-ray department.
03:06 When that gets boring, you could move on to particle accelerators
03:09 like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
03:12 But that's about all the fun you'd have.
03:15 Neither our bodies nor the environment we live in
03:18 are suited to this superpower.
03:20 Your eyes can process about 10 million colors within a visible spectrum,
03:25 anything between ultraviolet light and red light.
03:28 With over 2 million working parts,
03:30 our eyes are the second most complex organ, behind only our brain.
03:35 They generally outperform X-ray vision.
03:38 So leave the X-ray vision to Superman,
03:41 and stick with red capes and make-believe for now.
03:44 At least, until cancer is no longer a problem for humanity.
03:48 But that's a story for another WHAT IF.
03:52 [music]