Science and technology are becoming more than just tools, they are enhancing the human body and fundamentally changing lives. From science fiction imaginings like Iron Man to real-life examples like Stephen Hawking, we see machines and humans combining to overcome physical limitations and open up new possibilities.
We can no longer develop our bodies by natural selection, so we need to evolve them in conjunction with machines.
-Stephen Hawking
With the impact of advanced science and technology on every aspect of our lives, there are a lot of movies about science and technology. One of the most inspiring movies I’ve seen is Iron Man. In this movie, Tony Stark, the brilliant and talented protagonist, lives a glamorous life as the CEO of the world’s largest weapons manufacturing company until he is kidnapped by guerrillas in Afghanistan. Tony Stark is forced by them to manufacture missiles, but instead, he succeeds in creating an armored suit that allows him to survive and uses it to escape. Along the way, he learns that the weapon he created has fallen into the hands of the enemy, and he feels skeptical, so he improves and perfects the suit in order to build a new life. He also discovers that his life partner and company colleague is a traitor, and realizes that the woman who has always been close to him truly loves him. As I watched this movie, which has a plot of slowly uncovering the person behind the events and solving the problem, I thought, “Science is advancing beyond the scope of my imagination.
In the movie, the main character uses various machines to enhance his body, and I was intrigued to see how this technology has evolved in real life. One of the most famous examples of a machine enhancing a human body is British scientist Stephen Hawking. At the age of 21, he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, a paralyzing condition that destroys motor nerves, and was told he had only a few years to live. However, he didn’t let that stop him from publishing many theories and theories. The reason why Stephen Hawking is still alive is because he used technology to combine his body with a wheelchair. He went from being unable to speak and unable to move to being able to speak and move in his wheelchair using the technology built into the wheelchair. Stephen Hawking once said, “We can no longer develop our bodies by natural selection, so we must evolve our bodies by combining them with machines.” I was deeply moved by this quote. It made me think about how much happier people with disabilities like Hawking would be if they could use the technology in Iron Man.
Having been impressed by Stephen Hawking’s use of a wheelchair to lead his life, I found it interesting that the movie’s Iron Man developed his own suit. The Mark3 suit from Iron Man uses a triangular arc reactor, but the original suit used a smaller round arc generator inserted into the body. The chips in the core were made of palladium. An “arc” is a high energy flow between certain materials when a high voltage is applied to an object. Kwon Kwon-woon, director of the National Nuclear Fusion Research Center, said that the use of palladium, which has atomic number 46, seems to borrow ideas from the 1990s’ room-temperature fusion theory. However, he said, even if a room-temperature fusion reaction is lucky enough to occur once, the reproducibility rate is low, making it far from practical. While the mainstream energy sector has yet to catch up, external devices seem to have already entered the early stages of development.
In 2011, Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor in the United States, developed a robotic suit that allows a soldier to run at a speed of 16 km/h while wearing a 90 kg armor, and in the following photo you can see the HAL-5 robotic suit, which looks almost exactly like Iron Man. The robot, called HAL-5, is the work of Professor Yosayuki Sankei of Tsukuba University in Japan. Cyberdyne is ready for mass production and can be rented for $2,200/month. The suit moves its limbs in response to signals from the brain, providing a very robust assistive machine. There are plans to develop it not only as an aid for the elderly and disabled, but also for military use. The enhanced suit can make a person more than five times stronger and move as easily as a muscle. It receives electrical information from the nerve cells in the skin. But it’s heavy. In fact, to achieve the maneuverability of the Iron Man Mark3, it would be impossible with such a heavy body. In 2008, the American company Sarkos succeeded in developing a suit that boosted a person“s strength 20 times, but it didn”t have the same maneuverability as the Mark1 and failed to be commercialized due to its heavy weight of 68 kilograms. Despite this failure, the theory and scientific research is very impressive.
What motivated me to learn about the above scientific research was the Iron Man movie. The movie sparked my interest in technology and gave me hope that the researchers who watched it could get more ideas and improve their devices. It also gave me hope for how much better our world would be if these technologies were developed. I’m excited about the power of scientific advancement, which is a hallmark of our current and future era.
