Not fast enough to outrun these allegations.
Don’t worry, that was my last Ezra Miller joke. I won’t besmirch The Flash’s reputation with Miller’s misdeeds. We’re keeping things PG from now on, the exact opposite of how Ezra was keeping it with those minors. Okay THAT was my last one. Probably.
So to understand how fast The Flash is, first we have to understand the source of The Flash’s powers: the Speed Force.
What the #$^% is the Speed Force?
The Speed Force the speed at which Ezra Miller forced their way into that house that they burgled in Vermont. I’m sorry, I can’t help it.
In the DC Universe, the Speed Force is a mystical “velocity dimension” that The Flash taps into when he uses his powers. To clarify, the Speed Force is not the sole source of The Flash’s powers (he came open them organically through a science experiment gone wrong) but the Speed Force that The Flash can tap into is for the upper limits of his powers. So how fast is the regular Flash without the speed force?
Well, if we use The Arrowverse’s Flash as a reference, he nearly breaks the sound barrier by running around a 261 mph F5 tornado twice as fast in the opposite direction around it. That’s over 700mph, just below the speed of sound. He then broke the sound barrier five episodes later when he punched a villain called The Girder while running at Mach 1.1, just a bit over the speed of sound. By the end of the first season, his power WILDLY INCREASED when he learned how to tap into the Speed Force and phase through solid matter. I’m sure Ezra wishes they could do that; it would make breaking and entering much easier.
By Season 2, The Flash is jumping dimensions, and running at speeds of Mach 13.2, over 10,000 mph. That’s almost four times faster than an F-15. By Season 3, he could go into “Flashtime” which is almost incalculably fast. Barry was able to move a world that had seemingly “stopped” and he was invisible to the naked eye. If that’s the case, it means Barry was moving at a fraction of the speed of light. You know, that thing that nothing can go faster than?
Except Barry that is.
In Season 6, Barry has to rescue a scientist who created a singularity and got his consciousness trapped inside. Don’t you just hate when that happens? A singularity is a theoretical point in space-time that has zero mass and infinite density. Sounds like it breaks science? It does. The “outer shell” of a singularity is called the “event horizon” and it is a section of space that is so warped that not even light can escape from it if it falls in. The entire structure of the singularity and event horizon is called a black hole. There is nothing in the universe that moves fast enough to escape a black hole. Enter Barry.
Barry is able to travel inside of the event horizon and basically dick around in there for half a minute before dragging the science nerd’s consciousness back out. Normally, a black hole this small would cause Barry to be ripped apart by crushing gravitational forces before he even crossed the event horizon but I guess the Speed Force protected him? If Barry was able to escape the black hole, this means that he was traveling faster than light. How fast is that? Around 670.6 million mph, or Mach 874,031.
But WAIT. He gets FASTER.
While The Flash show puts Barry at physics-breaking speeds already, the comics introduce a Flash character that can outrun even him: Wally West. How fast is Wally West? Wally West can run at something called the “trans-time velocity”. This means that he can outrun instant teleportation. A comic called The Human Race features a group of intergalactic gamblers who spend their time flitting around the universe making speedsters race each other. If a speedster loses a race, their home planet gets destroyed. Naturally, the space gamblers are attracted to Earth after hearing about the new Flash, and challenge Wally to a race. Wally accepts, but turns the tables on the gamblers by challenging them to a race and not the other speedsters competing. The gamblers take him up on his offer. It’ll be a cinch. After all, they have a teleportation device. At the sound of the gun, Wally taps into the speed force and moves so fast that he actually reaches the finish line before the gamblers are even able to press the button. Wally West is faster than teleportation. A better scientist than I broke it down in a Youtube video about the stunt, and calculated that Wally would have had to move 23,759,448,520,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 the speed of light. I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO SAY THAT NUMBER!?
But Wally gets FASTER STILL. In his GREATEST FEAT EVER, Wally outruns THE BIG BANG. Yes THE BIG BANG. You know, the explosion thing that started the entire universe? So scientists have calculated that the primordial universe expanded at a speed between 10^-32 and 10^-36 seconds. That’s .000000000001 yoctoseconds. This is almost approaching Planck time, which is the time it takes for light to travel one Planck length (the smallest unit of measurement conceivable) which is about 5.39×10−44 seconds.
So how fast did Wally move to outrun it? This is where the math gets tricky. Thankfully, some internet eggheads already did it.
The universe expanded to 60 trillion light years, which 5.67643828354848e+29 meters in 10^-36 seconds. Using velocity measurements, which is distance divided by time, we can can calculate that Wally’s velocity was 5.6764383e+65 meters per second. This doesn’t mean much right now because it’s such a dummy thicc number that we can’t even wrap our heads around it. But to compare it to the speed of light, we have to divide this number by the speed of light itself. That’s 5.6764383e+65 m/s divided by 299,792,458 m/s which equals 1.893456e+57
How the #$%^ do you even pronounce that number? That’s 1.89 octodecillion times the speed of light.
Fast enough for Ezra Miller to outrun their charges at the other side of the universe, but not fast enough to outrun the shame when they get there.
(featured image: DC Comics)
