I just came across this thead while on another one about this "bench pressing the Earth for 5 days". I'm going to repost my reply (because the writer that came up with this feat is so profoundly ignorant of math and the source of Superman's powers that it needs to be repeated).
I'm an old-time comic book reader, having started reading in the mid-70s until about the mid-90s and only recently returned. I see that not only has DC gone back to the completely out of touch with reality power levels of the pre-Crisis era, they've caused Marvel to do this too. My nephew showed me this sometime ago, Superman "bench pressing the Earth for 5 days" crap, and not only is it just beyond ridiculous even by comic book physics, it goes against everything we know of the source of Superman's powers.
Let's look at what "bench pressing the Earth for 5 days straight" actually means.
The mass of the Earth = 5.972e24 kg. Assuming one bench per second and a distance of 0.5 m for each press we get the following information:
5.972e24 kg * 9.8 m/s^2 * 0.5 m = 2.93e25 joules of energy per rep.
5 days * 24 hours/day * 60 min/hour * 60 sec/min * 1 sec/rep = 432,000 reps.
This yields 1.26e31 joules of energy needed for Superman to "bench press the Earth for 5 days".
Now Superman gets his powers from our sun - specifically our yellow sun. The amount of power received from the sun on Earth is approximately 1.37 kW/m^2. The average man has about 2 m^2 of surface area, half of which we'll assume faces the sun for absorbtion. For simplicity's sake we'll also assume all of this energy is absorbed by Superman (even though we're told it's the "yellow" part of the sun that gives him his powers - and the "red" takes them away).
So we get 1.26e31 J / 1.37 kW = 9.23e26 seconds that Superman must spend absorbing sunlight in order to have enough energy to, again, "bench press the Earth for 5 days".
9.23e26 seconds = 2.93e20 YEARS. That's 2.93 hundred billion billion years. Even if Superman "sun dipped" at some optimal absorption point with the power output of 1,000,000 times that of the surface of the Earth (at the surface of the sun the power output is only about 10-20 times that on Earth), it would still take more than a 20 billion times the age of the universe in order for him to get that much energy. Like I said, beyond ridiculous.
Look I understand this is just a comic book character, but stupid crap like this completely destroys the suspension of disbelief in stories. Superman at this power level is so far beyond someone like Wonder Woman or the Hulk (at least the old 70 ton calm Hulk) that seeing Spider-man's Aunt May knock out Aquaman is actually more realistic than anyone ever hurting Superman. Even the "holds back" his full strength explanation makes no sense. He'd need to control not just each individual muscle cell, but every molecular fibril to a precision of parts per billion and he'd still risk obliterating every person he ever hit. Is it really so important to people that their guy be the strongest there is, that you need feats like "punching through dimensions" to satisfy you?
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