Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-25069771-20140616130529/@comment-220364-20140618113643

Aussiemic wrote: The lower gravity might explain ... There is no "might", these are the reasons given within the stories. The fictional world those stories describe have the writers taking a lot of artistic license with science.

There is no reason why a different solar spectrum would cause a lifeform to gain powers. Why would evolution produce an organism that benefits in an environment it never encountered? Even assuming that it was possible... Again, the artistic license comes into play. IIRC it was sold at one point that Kryptonian life forms derived the same net benefit from their red sun as we derive from out yellow one. Since the red solar radiation was "weaker" than yellow solar radiation, an organism transplanted from Krypton to Earth has whatever structures that process solar radiation "supercharged" by the stronger yellow sun.

Is there a basis for this in biology? That lifeforms process solar radiation, yes. The "super charging", not so much. But again, we are not dealing with applications of real world science, but science in a work of fiction. The fact that this capacity is present in multiple species simply demonstrates that they provided the prison with lifeforms from the Kryptonians home planet. Or you can go with the simpler explanation of it being a common effect of being native to Krypton.

Frankly, unless there is something stated explicitly in a work of fiction, the simplest explanation tends to make for the easiest read. Over thinking it will result in fan-wank such as "'Kryptonias' must be bio-engineered inmates on an artificially created prison planet." Yes the Kryptonite mysteriously transformed into something that hurts Kryptonian organisms - and nothing else. There is no record of any non-Kryptonian being adversely affected by Kryptonite, with the possible exception of Lex Luthor, who carried around Kryptonite for YEARS before it possibly caused cancer. This makes sense if the planet was DESIGNED to transform into poison to finish off any escaping Kryptonians. Post-Crisis it was introduced that kryptonite has a negligible but cumulative affect on non-Kryptonians. Luthor was not an exception, but an example.

Prior to that, kryptonite was a typical example of abused or ignored science in science-fiction. Along with "krptonian" materials - glass, steel, cloth, etc - that are exponentially stronger than normal versions and Daxamites getting serious radiation poisoning for lead. And many, many, many more story elements. We aren't stronger in other environments are we? If we were sent to Venus we wouldn't have superpowers. When you take a camel out of the desert and put it in a rainforest, it's doesn't get stronger. When you take a shark out of the water it doesn't suddenly get move faster. That is a bit of a change in position since you first posited that organisms don't evolve to have a toxic reaction to their habitat as a whole or in part.

That said, no, you put a human on Venus, you wind up with a dead human. However, you put a human on the Moon in an appropriate survival suit and you get a human that exhibits what amounts to superhuman strength and super-leaping.

As for the rest... frankly you are looking moving a creature from a home environment to a more hostile one. The premise with Superman is that he was moved from a home environment to a more beneficial on.