Does anyone know if Larry Niven purposefully created it for satire? I mean, I tend to think it was never meant to be taken too seriously.
I just did a quick search on it, and I just learned Curt Swan made illustrations for the essay. There's no way anyone was playing it straight at that point, right?
If a fan chooses to head canon that Superman's body works that way, I'm not going to get in the way, but I don't think its utility was ever meant to go farther than a joke for magazines or movies like Mallrats, the latter of which I thought was light-hearted humor about comic fans who overthink things.