.How to Be All That You Can Be: A Look at the Pentagon’s Five Step Plan For Making Iron Man Real
“The human being is almost singularly pathetic. We lack claws, sport tiny little teeth, and are covered with thin, delicate skin. Most of us can’t even walk outside barefoot.”[1] Roboticist Daniel Wilson is pointing to a singular riddle of humankind’s place on the planet. We are one of the weaker species physically and yet we sit at top of the food chain. The reason is our technology. A saber tooth tiger may be able to chew us to bits, but once that first cave man learned to shake a stick, its time was over. Today, we could literally bomb that tiger back into the Stone Age, that is, if it hadn’t already been made extinct by our stick-wielding ancestors.
And yet, while we have exponentially gone from stick to nuclear bombs in our destructive power, our human bodies aren’t any stronger, faster, better protected, or even that much smarter. About the only things that have even moderately changed about us are our waist sizes and hair to body ratio.
Technology again offers the lure, however, of solving for this weakness of the human body, an idea frequently played with in science fiction. Iron Man is the Marvel comicbook series in which Tony Stark, a playboy industrialist, dons a technologic suit of powered armor. The suit gives him superhuman strength, virtual invulnerability, the ability to fly, and packs an array of weapons. In the comic books, Iron Man uses his suit to battle the communists, a Chinese warlord, Godzilla, and the Incredible Hulk. In the new movie starring Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow, Iron Man takes on our 21st century versions of arch-villiany: terrorists and an evil CEO.
But Iron Man is no mere fiction. Overcoming our human body's weakness via technology is a vision into which the Pentagon is today investing literally billions of dollars. As former Air Force Chief of Staff General John Jumper describes, “We must give the individual soldier the same capabilities of stealth and standoff that fighter planes have. We must look at the soldier as the system.”[2] And such dreams of creating technology enhanced supersoldiers are not too far off. What follows is a look at the process of turning Iron Man from science fiction into military reality.
Brookings
H/T Mister Ghost
And yet, while we have exponentially gone from stick to nuclear bombs in our destructive power, our human bodies aren’t any stronger, faster, better protected, or even that much smarter. About the only things that have even moderately changed about us are our waist sizes and hair to body ratio.
Technology again offers the lure, however, of solving for this weakness of the human body, an idea frequently played with in science fiction. Iron Man is the Marvel comicbook series in which Tony Stark, a playboy industrialist, dons a technologic suit of powered armor. The suit gives him superhuman strength, virtual invulnerability, the ability to fly, and packs an array of weapons. In the comic books, Iron Man uses his suit to battle the communists, a Chinese warlord, Godzilla, and the Incredible Hulk. In the new movie starring Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow, Iron Man takes on our 21st century versions of arch-villiany: terrorists and an evil CEO.
But Iron Man is no mere fiction. Overcoming our human body's weakness via technology is a vision into which the Pentagon is today investing literally billions of dollars. As former Air Force Chief of Staff General John Jumper describes, “We must give the individual soldier the same capabilities of stealth and standoff that fighter planes have. We must look at the soldier as the system.”[2] And such dreams of creating technology enhanced supersoldiers are not too far off. What follows is a look at the process of turning Iron Man from science fiction into military reality.
Brookings
H/T Mister Ghost
posted by madtom at 9:51 PM
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