I spent a good chunk of my child hood reading comics, as well as all of my adult life, and I thought then as I do now, how cool it would be to web-sling around New York like an urban Tarzan or fire fist punch a hole through a metal wall of a villain’s evil lair. Only to realize, “Oh wait! That’s only in comics. None of that stuff can happen in real life. I better just focus on what is actually going to be the wave of the future and focus all of my aspirations of success into working for Laserdisc or Dippin Dots.” I mean how cutting edge can you get? A giant CD with a movie on it or space age ice cream, come on.
Science, however, was headed in a different direction, making the time I spent involved with the ice cream of the future seem like a huge waste of time. Now I have no doubt these nerds were fueled by ideas they picked up in comics as all three of these things (science, comics and reality) are just smashing into an awesome singularity.
Iron Man Suit:
Iron Man 3 just hit the shelves on Blu-ray, and if that trilogy has taught us anything, it’s that Robert Downy Jr. is a bad ass and that a suit of weaponized armor is really the only suit you will ever need. Lucky for us, that may be happening sooner rather than later. Meet the real life Tony Stark. Steve Jacobsen, the man behind the OSX Exoskeleton. Being a genius in software and mechanical engineering, not to mention his 35 year career making animatronics for companies like Disney and the Bellagio Casino made him the perfect candidate to land a military contract and develop a super powered exoskeleton suit, or in other words become Tony Stark incarnate.
So the skinny on the suit is there’s a pilot strapped into a 150 pound robot suit and the frame automatically reads 6 points of contact to determine what appendage he is moving, how fast he is moving it, and how much pressure to apply. This enables him to lift large amounts of weight repeatedly with no strain or fatigue. Yeah…AUTOMATICALLY! Hundreds of thousands of calculations are made in an instant by the on-board computer to make sure the pilot is not strained by performing the task it is doing, such as, oh let’s say lifting a xenomorph queen. I think Ripley will be thankful in the future. Although not as big and bulky as Ripley’s alien crusher, it’s more like the robotic frame Matt Damon wore in Elysium. Unfortunately, it still has some bugs to work out before it reaches fruition and total portability as it still runs off of a tethered umbilical cord of hydraulic power. Not quite the same elegance of an arc reactor but Rome wasn’t killing aliens in a day…or was it built? I’ve heard it both ways.
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! The suit of armor is my shtick, Colston!”
Spider Sense Suit:
It is exactly what you think it is. A suit that mimics Spidey’s ability to sense danger before he can see it, or in this case, the danger of walls and the bane of every person stumbling through a dark room, the shin-shattering coffee table edge.
Developed by a group of researchers from the University of Chicago, who are no doubt fans of the wall crawler for which this is named after, but whose plans are not quite up to fighting crime, yet still very heroic. They hypothesize that the spider-sense suit would be a huge breakthrough to aid the visual and hearing impaired by granting them an extra sense to help them survey their surroundings in a more complete and accurate way. The suit uses a series of 13 sensor modules connected to a controller box. The sensors work like sonar, sending out ultrasonic pulses and then measuring the echo (sounds more like Daredevil’s way of mapping a room through sound. For some reason Ben Affleck will be made fun of for this too) and then applies pressure to the sensor the object is closest to letting the wearer know where the object is and how close it is. Sounds like a lot of work went into this suit. I think it would’ve been way faster to just get bitten by a radioactive spider and hope for the best.
Some people just look ridiculous in their crime fighting costumes. Luckily this guy is blindfolded so he can’t see how goofy he looks.
Nano Medicine:
If that radioactive spider doesn’t give you superpowers, but instead just gives you horrible, horrible cancer, fear not! This is where Wolverine science comes into play with nano medicine, killing off that pesky cancer and then healing affected cells. I’m generalizing greatly here, but that is the hope that this new emerging science is attempting to do. It has not been approved for human testing quite yet, but that’s not stopping those mad scientists from taking the applied science one step further and creating self-replicating nano bots that would live in a human body and continuously heal it of all maladies, including quite possibly, the reversal of aging. Keeping your body disease and age proof? It’s actually pretty creepy if you ask me. It would be like if the movie Innerspace meets a Terminator apocalypse, with a chance of never dying zombies. And we all know how terrifying that is…Being compared to a Martin Short movie.
Shot hundreds of times? No problem. Why did you even come to a Hospital? Just walk it off.
Cyberware:
This is where the line between comics and reality really begin to blur. Cyberware is considered a “proto science,” in that it’s brand spanking new. The said technology combines robotics with the human body. This new science in the real world pretty much accounts for 80% of comic tech, sci-fi storylines, and almost any 80’s action movie about the future.
Interface cyberware: Software inserted into the brain. Think the movie Johnny Mnemonic. It is a way to directly connect with the brain/nervous system and insert or manipulate data. It is doubtful someone will be chasing you around trying to kill and download the info you have in your brain. I really don’t think someone is going to care how many Ghostbuster quotes I know or how many different ways I can prepare a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which is a lot actually.
Prosthetic cyberware: Prosthetics that can be controlled with the user’s brain. This is the technology behind all of those comic book heroes with metal limbs like Cable, Cyborg, Forge, etc. and scientists are catching up with it pretty quickly. Scientists aren’t going to quit until they make a robot arm that can punch out a robotic Muhammad Ali, which I’m sure they are working on too. But the beauty behind this tech is that once it’s developed it would work seamlessly with your brain, giving this fake arm a totally natural and controllable movement, even replicating sensations such as touch, heat, pressure, and vibrations. Next stop ticklish androids.
“Your arm is lame. It’s not even chromed out. Loser” ~Cable
Weather Manipulation:
Not all of science’s newest advancements look to be torn out of an X-Men comic. Some have been around for a couple of decades before a comic book writer thought of it. I refer, of course, to the power of weather manipulation, better known as “cloud seeding.” Sorry Storm, but at least you make it look sexy. Scientists have been man-handling weather for over 50 years now, and still haven’t been able to combine a tornado and lightning to make a spinning Tesla coil of doom like some of the mad scientists wanted to do. Looks like science needs to step up its game. Until then, we will have to be impressed with the fact they have managed to generate precipitation over drought areas, or more importantly, new snow for ski resorts by shooting or dropping various chemicals into the clouds. Currently, scientists are limited as to what they can do to manipulate the weather, but give them some time and I’m sure that whirlwind of electric death will be in beta testing before you know it.
This is how Storm flips off people who cut in front of her while flying. Lightning bolt to the face sucka!
At the rate science is bridging the gap between comics and reality, we will be flying around, zapping laser beams out of our hands in no time, not to mention knee deep in our own nerd drool over how cool this is.
