Name: Could You Be Iron Man?
Uploaded: 2015-07-18T13:03:34.000Z
Duration: 6 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Vsauce! I’m Jake and back in 1868 a machinist from New Jersey named Zadock Dederick created

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a man...a steam man. It was designed to pull items that weighed more than any human could

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move on their own. Now, 147 years later we are still pursuing this concept, but instead

of building machines to replace us we are building machines to enhance us, ones that

we can wear. Naturally this made me ask myself the question, Could You Be Iron Man?

According to Forbes Magazine, Tony Stark has a networth of $12.4 billion which helps enable

him to prototype and custom create his suits. Since we don’t have billions of dollars

to spend on building our own exoskeletons there are luckily a multitude of ones in development

and some that are even available today. JOEVIS, can you pull up some examples.

Oh, JOEVIS is my artificially intelligent computer. It stands for Jake’s Operating

Environment Visualization Integrated System but we can call him JOE for short. Waddya

Well, Jake, a lot of exoskeletons with the most robust systems are designed for military

use. Lockheed Martin has one called HULC that enables soldiers to lift up to 200lbs and

have increased endurance. Then there is DARPA who is working with Harvard in designing a

soft exosuit that would also allow the wearer to walk for longer and lift more with less

stress. Or you could be like the Hacksmith who built his own that can lift 170lbs.

But the majority of exoskeletons that are out right now are for medical and rehabilitation

purposes. Like the REX, Ekso and ReWalk. All designed to allow people who are no longer

mobile, to be able to stand up and walk again.

The ReWalk is the first commercially available one but at $85,000 it is still quite expensive

and isn’t suited for the high octane movement and maneuvering we’d want from our battle

suit. There is an exoskeleton you can rent though named HAL, which supposedly has no

relation to the evil sentient computer of the same name from 2001 A Space Odyssey, nor

does the company who makes it, Cyberdyne, have any relation to the company of the same

name from the Terminator series that launches SkyNet.

I’m...I’m going to ignore that JOE. Unlike Iron Man’s suit, exoskeletons don’t fully

cover our bodies - they’re more like wireframes but it is the best that we currently have.

But what about flight? Tony Stark can fly, so we should investigate that as well. Joe?

If we go back to the 1960s we have one of the oldest known jetpacks, the Bell Rocket

Belt. It ran on hydrogen peroxide, could go 34mph but only lasted for 20 seconds. And

over the next 50 years the flight time has only gone from 20 to 30 seconds.

Very true Joe, to actually make body mounted jetpacks feasible, they have to be fairly

light which means they can’t carry large amounts of fuel. If you were able to skip

the lift off part, and start from the air, you’d be better off. Jetman, also known

as Yves Rossy, was the first man to fly with a jet propelled wing. It can go 124mph and

Let’s go back to the issue of fuel though. There is an exoskeleton the US military is

working on called TALOS which would have liquid body armor. MIT is developing the technology

and it could go from liquid to solid in milliseconds when an electrical current or magnetic field

is applied. However the suit would supposedly weigh close to 400lbs...365 of that being

batteries. And that is really one of the biggest problems, energy...power. For example the

HULC exoskeleton has a battery life of only 8 hours.

Tony Stark uses his custom made and incredibly unique Arc Reactor to power not only himself,

but his suit. It most resembles a fusion reactor which smashes two hydrogen atoms together

and gives you a helium atom, which is also exactly what the Sun does. It would need to

be about the size of a building. Lockheed Martin is developing a compact reactor that

And the one we would require would need to be small enough to fit into a suit and would

have to actually exist. At the moment, no fusion reactors are functional and are estimated

to be 10 years away. If only they had advanced Artificial Intelligence like myself working

Yes, ok, it has been estimated that the reactor Tony uses would have the equivalent of 1,000,000

horsepower - the power of 62 space shuttle launches. Now, that would generate an incredible

amount of heat...so much so that if your suit was powered by it, you would just no longer

So why not remove the physical human element and create a drone.

That is a very good idea. In the Iron Man films, Tony is able to control the suits remotely

and that is actually possible, to a degree, using Brain Computer Interfaces. I’ve mentioned

BCI before in my Portals video but it is when electrodes are placed into certain areas of

the brain. They’ve done test with monkeys where the animal’s brain is sending signals

directly to a robotic arm - enabling the monkey to control it and it has been successfully

In 2008 researchers used the brain activity of a monkey walking on a treadmill in North

Carolina to control a robot walking on a treadmill...in Japan. This kind of technology would allow

us to control machines from anywhere in the world using only our minds. So it isn’t

hard to imagine being able to control a mechanical suit of armor without needing to physically

be in it. It would protect us from being burned alive by our power source, and also would

be safer because instead of us and the suit being blown up in a battle, just the suit

would go and who cares about a giant flying computer?

Nothing...just joking, Joe. Ya know, I think maybe we should just shut down the system

I wouldn’t do that if I were you...Jake.

Oh..oh no. I was worried this might happen. If we create truly intelligent artificial

intelligence, what is to stop it from becoming evil? Follow me over to Joe’s channel It’s

OKAY to be Smart to find out if an AI like Ultron is inevitable and, as always, thanks