In this blog post, we will look at how the Iron Man suit, which is a fictional creation in the movies, is connected to actual technological developments, as well as the current capabilities and limitations of the technology.
Humans cannot evolve their bodies any further through natural means, so we must combine with machines to evolve our bodies.
-Stephen Hawking
Nowadays, with advanced science and technology influencing every aspect of our lives, there are many films related to science and technology. Among them, the film that impressed me the most is Iron Man. In this film, Tony Stark, a genius with a brilliant mind and talent, lives a glamorous life as the CEO of the world’s largest weapons manufacturer, but is kidnapped by guerrilla forces in Afghanistan. Tony Stark is forced to manufacture missiles for them, but instead, he succeeds in creating an armoured suit that allows him to survive, and uses it to escape. In the process, he realises that the weapons he created have fallen into the hands of his enemies, and feeling conflicted, he improves and completes the armoured suit in order to live a new life. He also discovers that his lifelong companion and colleague is a traitor, and realises that the woman who has always been close to him truly loves him. Watching this film, with its plot that slowly reveals the person behind the events and resolves the problems, I thought, ‘Science really does seem to be advancing beyond the limits of my imagination.’
I was very interested in the scenes where the main character uses various machines to strengthen his body, so I looked into how such technology has developed in reality. A representative example of machines developing the human body is British scientist Stephen Hawking. At the age of 21, he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, which destroys the motor nerves and causes paralysis of the entire body, and was told that he only had a few years to live. However, he did not give up and continued his active life, publishing many theories and hypotheses. The reason Stephen Hawking is still alive today is because he used technology to connect his body to a wheelchair. Unable to speak or move, he was able to speak using technology built into his wheelchair and move around in it. Living this kind of life, Stephen Hawking left behind the words, ‘Humans cannot evolve further on their own, so we must combine ourselves with machines to evolve.’ I was very moved when I read this. I began to wonder how much happier people with disabilities like Hawking would be if they could use the technology from Iron Man.
Impressed by how Stephen Hawking lived his life using a wheelchair, I found it interesting that Iron Man in the film developed his own suit. So I wanted to take a closer look at the technology behind Iron Man’s Mark suit. The Mark 3 suit in Iron Man uses a triangular arc reactor, but originally, a small, round arc generator was inserted into the body. Palladium was used for the core chip. An ‘arc’ refers to the flow of high energy between certain materials when a high voltage is applied to an object. Kwon Kwon, director of the National Fusion Research Centre, said that the use of palladium, atomic number 46, seems to have been borrowed from the idea of room-temperature nuclear fusion theory in the 1990s. However, even if a room-temperature nuclear fusion reaction occurs once by chance, its reproducibility is low, making it impractical. While the main energy sector has yet to catch up, external devices seem to have already entered the initial development stage.
In 2011, Lockheed Martin, the largest defence contractor in the United States, developed a robot suit that allows soldiers to run at a speed of 16 km/h while carrying 90 kg of military equipment. And in the next photo, you can see the HAL-5 robot suit, which looks almost identical to Iron Man. The HAL-5 robot was created by Professor Yoshiaki Sankai of Tsukuba University in Japan. Cyberdyne has completed preparations for mass production, and it can be rented for $2,200 per month. The suit receives signals from the brain and moves the arms and legs, providing a very sturdy assistive device. In addition to being used as an assistive device for the elderly and disabled, there are plans to develop it for military use. This enhanced suit makes a person’s strength more than five times greater and allows them to move as easily as if they were muscles. Brain signals are received by electrical information from nerve cells in the skin. However, it is heavy. In fact, it is impossible to achieve the mobility of Iron Man Mark 3 with such a heavy suit. In 2008, Sarcos in the United States succeeded in developing a suit that increased human strength by 20 times, but it failed to achieve commercialisation due to its lack of mobility compared to Mark 1 and its heavy weight of 68 kg. Despite this failure, the theory and scientific research results were very impressive.
The Iron Man movies were what got me interested in the scientific research I mentioned earlier. Watching the movies sparked my interest in technology, and researchers who saw the movies were inspired to come up with more ideas and develop their own devices. I also started to hope that the world would become a better place with the advancement of such technology. Through Iron Man, I have high expectations for the power of scientific advancement, which is a characteristic of the present and future.
