Edward Kearns | Contributing Writer
‘The superman exists, and he is American.’ Well, not quite. But don’t tell that to the US military; they’ve taken inspiration from a different superhero, and have announced that they are trying to develop battle armour that basically amounts to an Iron Man suit.
You can read that again if you need to. The US Army is trying to make an Iron Man suit.
They call it the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit, or TALOS, in keeping with their traditional love of acronyms. The suit’s purpose is to provide not only standard features like night vision and protection from gunfire, but also enhanced strength. This is supposed to be facilitated by a powerful exoskeleton that would enable the wearer to lift and move objects that a normal soldier could not. Just like Iron Man. The suit’s bullet-proof armour is also highly innovative; MIT are working with the Army to develop a form of liquid armour that solidifies when an electrical current is applied to it. In addition, the suit would have health monitoring systems and readouts to display how much power the suit’s batteries have left. Granted, it wouldn’t have the jet-thrusters of Tony Stark’s design; that’s still a little bit out of their reach it seems. Imagine a more Spartan exoskeleton, like the forklift-suit that Ripley operates in Aliens. Because that’s much more believable – a very real possibility.
But then the US military has never seen believability as an obstacle. Nor are they shy about taking cues from the silver screen, as Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ satellite-mounted missile-defence system showed. Thankfully that genius vision never came to pass, but what if the Army did somehow manage to manufacture a super-soldier suit; what science-fiction technology would they turn their attention to next? Phasers that can be set to stun, singe or toast? How about the automatic doomsday device from Dr Strangelove? That could certainly be done. And if you do make an Iron Man suit, you only have to ramp up the scale a little bit and you get the gargantuan fighting-machines from Pacific Rim. Granted they were made for fighting aliens, but they’d probably do the job on humans as well.
A bit of perspective perhaps. While all of the above may sound crazy, imagine how crazy you would have sounded in 1955 if you tried to describe a modern laptop computer. Now they’re completely normal, and if you go back far enough, you can thank the US military for their existence, because the military played a role in the development of integrated circuits. Many commonplace technologies were originally invented or funded by the military. They pioneered the global positioning systems that would eventually become suction-cupped to the windscreens of our cars. They championed ARPANET, an early version of the internet featuring a recognisable form of what we now call e-mail, that allowed universities and research institutes to communicate with each other electronically as early as the 1970s. Microwave ovens were invented, quite accidentally, by an engineer working for the firm Raytheon, who had a contract with the US military to improve radar systems. The company remains involved with the army; only now, they make guided missiles. Right now, the Army Energy Initiatives Task Force is working “to implement cost-effective, large-scale renewable energy projects.” That can only be good.
However, it is important to remember that while some of the military’s R&D projects may seem tangential, ultimately they serve the goal of finding safer and more efficient ways to kill people. Like small unmanned aircraft that can be piloted by a man with an Xbox controller from hundreds of miles away. That kind of thing. Reagan would’ve loved that. Perhaps he could’ve had a certain appreciation for liquid-armour super-suits as well.
So it’s not all nutty; sometimes these inventions can be quite sinister, and sometimes they never get off the ground, but a surprisingly large amount of the time, technology that was originally developed for military purposes can end up improving our lives. Things that must have seemed absolutely ridiculous at their moment of inception, like the concept of using electromagnetic radiation to excite the molecules in corn kernels in order to heat them up and make them explode into white fluffy goodness.
An idea for a new piece of technology only seems crazy when it exists in isolation. As soon as it becomes ubiquitous, we don’t even give it a second thought. Who wants some popcorn?
