Skip to main content

dc - What is the Flash's normal or jogging speed?



It has already been established that the Flash can reach and surpass the speed of light. However, if has also been made explicit that such a feat is not easy for him, as it's not cheap in terms of possible consequences.


As such, I assume that could be considered like the top of his range, a sprint that he can perform but he'd rather not, as opposed to something he can do and maintain for an extended period of time (like jogging for a standard human).


However, some comics illustrate him performing feats such as moving around without people right beside him even perceiving he's gone, a feat that is only possible if he's gone for less than 1/50 seconds. This puts his his speed at a minimum of Mach X for each 5 meter radius, that is Mach 10 to affect something that is 50 meters away.


My question is, what is the standard speed (broadly speaking) that the Flash uses on a day-to-day basis (or the range of that speed) and what speed does it become an effort or strain for him to maintain?



Answer




Since his top speed varies so wildly from author to author and continuity to continuity, there's no way we're going to be able to pin down a "comfortable" run speed with 100% precision. It's hard to imagine why an author would bore a reader with his ho-hum speed. Usually, numbers are only going to be used when talking about a feat that's crazy fast, even by the Flash's standards.


All that being said, we should still be able to calculate something reasonable.




TL;DR


Normal Male



  • Top Speed: 15.9 mph

  • Jogging Speed: 8.3 mph (52.2% of top speed)


The Flash



Based on calculated speed:



  • Top Speed: 8,937,608,400,000,000,000,000 mph

  • Jogging Speed: 4,665,431,584,800,000,000,000 mph (52.2% of top speed)


Based on written speed:



  • Top Speed: 670,616,629 mph (speed of light)

  • Jogging Speed: 350,061,880.338 mph (52.2% of top speed)





Your question has 2 parts:



what is the standard speed (broadly speaking) that the Flash uses on a day-to-day basis (or the range of that speed)



and:



what speed does it become an effort or strain for him to maintain?



First we need to establish a baseline with a normal/average person. I've seen several exercise websites list a good treadmill jogging speed as between 5 and 6 miles per hour (such as this one and this one, for example). I tend to trust high-profile news sources more than I trust exercise recommendations from the internet so I found this article from The Telegraph that says:




The average man jogs at a speed of 8.3 mph



We'll go with that.


The same article gives us a sprinting speed of 15.9 mph.


So, we can use these numbers to say that an average male has a standard, maintainable speed of 52.2% of their top speed.


To extend this calculation for The Flash, we need to know his top speed. The fastest speed I've been able to find is from this image:


enter image description here


We have a discrepancy here because the author clearly notes the speed as just short of the speed of light but further inspection of the feat itself proves otherwise.


Based on the above calculation, The Flash can travel up to 2,482,669,000,000,000,000 miles per second. Converted to miles per hour, that's 8,937,608,400,000,000,000,000 mph. That's unimaginably fast...



Given that top speed, we can estimate his comfortable jogging speed at 4,665,431,584,800,000,000,000 mph, or 6,956,927,972,032.14 times the speed of light.


If we allow the author a little breathing room and place The Flash's top speed at the speed of light (670,616,629 mph), that puts his comfortable jogging speed at a much more modest 350,061,880.338 mph or 456,244 times the speed of sound.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Was the "pure soul" of Harry's what had really hurt Voldemort?

In the Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort possesses Harry, and it hurts. Greatly. I think that Dumbledore explained that it was because Voldemort's rotten soul was incapable of assimilating Harry's pure soul, that Voldemort didn't understand the love and friendship etc that Harry has in his heart. But, I think it was a lie. Remember that in Deathly Hallows, while looking for information regarding Horcruxes, it is discovered that it is in fact possible to merge a soul fragment back, but that the process was extremely painful. Now then, if Voldemort tried to possess Harry, and Harry had a fragment of Voldemort's soul, I think that it could have been the true cause of Voldemort's pain: the fact of having his soul so close of another fragment. I think that Dumbledore knew that fact, but had to lie to Harry because it was inappropriate to let him know that he had one of Voldemort's soul fragments at the moment. Is that right? Or was it truly the pure soul of Harry's...

languages - Do we ever see written English in the Star Wars films?

In Empire Strikes Back , we see a transcription of what R2's beeps and bloops mean, but it's not English (sorry for the low quality, it's from the 2004 DVDs): I'd assume it's what Basic looks like when written, but is there some point in the the Star Wars films we see written English instead? (This sort of spun off from a discussion in How do people understand astromech droids? .) Answer At one point there was English but it has been phased out in subsequent versions of the films. Chris Gould at DVD Active did a comparison of all versions of each of the Star Wars films, and in his comparison of Episode 4 , there are a couple of screenshots showing how the power gauge for the Death Star tractor beam was changed. I imagine there are probably more to be found in his other comparisons but I haven't got around to reading those yet.

star wars - What "exactly" happens when someone turns to the Dark Side?

When I saw the original Star Wars saga as a kid, the concept of the Dark Side imprinted in me was quite simple. You did a bad thing, so you're a bad person so you go to the Dark Side and keep doing bad things. Now, obviously this doesn't hold true in reality. In my mind it is perfectly reasonable for Luke to kill the Emperor and Vader and then just flee the Death Star and rejoin the Alliance. After all they are at war, those are enemy officers that have captured him and are taunting him by threatening with death of all loved ones and the whole operation was intended to kill the Emperor anyway. The same would hold true for Anakin. He could have killed Mace Windu to save the Chancellor and Padme but that doesn't mean he's going to then go mad and kill all Jedis including children. It doesn't add up from a merely psychological point of view. He had a set of objectives and that made him want to keep the Chancellor alive (quite valid by the way, Mace Windu is quite clums...

star trek - Warning regarding forward saucer section in Nemesis?

In Star Trek: Nemesis , just before the Enterprise rams into the Scimitar, Picard sends a text message from his captain's chair arm pad to Troi — who is manning the helm in lieu of the crewman who was just blown out through what was once the view screen — indicating that she should put full impulse on standby. (Literally, if you watch the scene closely, Troi's console prefaces the order with "TXT MSG" !) My question is: Did Picard also somehow warn crew members in the forward saucer section about what was about to happen? The ramming of the Scimitar was a heat of the moment decision. Considering that he also resorted to calling the auto-destruct sequence shortly after (which ended up being offline), he probably was of the mindset that any losses would be acceptable in order to hault Shinzon's march to Earth. Still, I'm curious. Answer The original script indicates that he called for the crew to " brace for impact ". Whether that call (or the comma...