Will Iron Man-Style Power Suits Become Commonplace for Civilians?
The Blind Eternities forum
Posted on Oct. 4, 2020, 6:30 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
It is almost certain that military forces in actuality are developing power suits similar to what Tony Stark uses in the Iron Man films, but I, myself, am hoping that such suits become commonplace for civilians, since that would be not only awesome, but one of the great breakthroughs in technology since Henry Ford made automobiles that were affordable to the majority of people.
Obviously, such suits will be expensive, initially, but history has clearly shown that all forms of technology eventually become less expensive as time passes; many people, including myself, are hoping for flying cars, but power suits are better overall, in my mind. They do have less storage capacity, but they occupy less physical space and likely have greater maneuverability due to their smaller size, so I see no reason why they would not be a revolution of both technology and transportation.
What does everyone else say about this? Will Iron Man-style power suits eventually be as commonplace as are automobiles, currently?
Seems wildly impractical to me, both for civilian and military use. But then again, I also believe flying cars are incredibly pointless and impractical, especially for our current infrastructure and relatively horizontal settlements. And to be totally honest, I don't believe that even personal motor vehicles as we know them now are the most efficient or practical method of transportation. Not that I believe they'll be replaced, as they're far too popular, profitable, and culturally ingrained.
October 4, 2020 7:09 p.m.
What we are likely to see are suits akin to the Mobile Infantry in the novel Starship Troopers - something armored, providing increased carrying weight and weaponry, and with augmented reality to enhance situational awareness. There’s already declassified projects to this end, and various agencies, such as DARPA, have already made advancements and prototype exoskeletons that could serve as the framework for these suits. Sure, it’s not quite as flashy as an Iron Man suit, but I know people who have worked on this tech, and even the declassified positions are pretty awesome.
As for civilian use, the technology used to make the exoskeletons is also being adapted to help individual with damaged limbs (DARPA also - they do a lot of medical projects to help wounded soldiers recover). There are also civilian applications of carrying weight increasing exoskeletons, so we will likely see this tech deployed in all manner of shipping and other industrial purposes.
As for using such tech for personal use, unlikely to see widespread adaptation. There simply are not enough problems that an exoskeleton would solve to make if anything other than a glorified toy. The money is in industry and military applications, and that’s where the focus will be.
October 4, 2020 7:12 p.m.
MindAblaze says... #5
If history has taught us anything it’s that that human mind has no bounds when it comes to creating something to sell in mass quantities
October 4, 2020 7:54 p.m.
Heard the latest project is a nuclear equipped walking battle tank. Supposedly it delivers its payload by means of a rail gun, making a nuclear launch undetectable. It’s being developed based off a Cold War era prototype the Soviets built. (!)
October 4, 2020 7:57 p.m.
VampDemigod says... #7
I will point out, the Maker community is still making mechs years after the military gave up. Not commercially available, mostly hobbyist pilots. That’s what I’d imagine iron man style suits will end up as.
October 4, 2020 8:24 p.m.
Flying cars will not happen until they have a system so sophisticated as to render the pilot totally unnecessary and incapable of taking manual control of the craft.
Look how bad people drive already, and you want to add another dimension to that?
At the same time flying cars become widely available, there will be a boom in "Car Catchers! Get your own teflon and ballistic cloth net that will catch a car before it falls through the roof of your house!"
October 4, 2020 9:10 p.m.
i'll take a flying vehicle over a suit any day. taking it off would be a nightmare, and the complete lack of any storage space makes the whole thing not worth it.
October 5, 2020 1:13 p.m.
Getting pulled over for speeding in a suit would suck too.
"Sir, I am going to need to see your license and registration." Answer:" Um...well...errr...i dont have pockets so, like...um...."
October 5, 2020 3:10 p.m.
Im kidding. I imagine by then, everything will be chipped so you wont need to carry documents around.
But you cant use a suit for picking up groceries, or your kids after school so yeah. +1 for flying cars before flying suits.
And where would you put your bag of magic decks and rpg gear?
October 5, 2020 3:12 p.m.
VampDemigod says... #12
MagicMarc This is what backpacks are for. Integral backpack, or maybe one that slots on.
October 5, 2020 7:51 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #13
MagicMarc, I would prefer to have a more optimistic perspective of humanity than that.
subrosian, what do you believe is the best form of transportation?
October 5, 2020 8:58 p.m.
DemonDragonJ Keeping in mind I am by no means an expert, these are my thoughts. The most efficient method depends on the distance scale, and I believe most of these will be fairly mundane or unexciting.
On the smallest necessary scale, intracity, inter-district, or inter-community transit, human-powered transportation would likely be the most resource and energy efficient. This could manifest as publicly available bicycles, for instance, perhaps housed at hubs for transit of higher distance scales and/or distributed to individual residences.
At the inter-city level, a highly standardized, automated form of mass transit would be most efficient. Something like a light rail or monorail, or perhaps an automated bus or large taxi system. These could likely also be partly human-powered in some small part.
At the interstate, inter-province, and cross-country or intra-continental levels, high-speed rails would be the best solution in many cases, although flight would still have its uses for point-to-point travel across difficult terrain as well as in inter-continental travel.
Of course, each method would have its own drawbacks, and mass public transit in particular grows in efficiency with population density. So for less dense areas, there could still be an argument made towards personal vehicles, although some form of group transit would still be preferable in that case. That being said, as the human population grows and the livable areas on Earth shrink, I strongly believe mass transit will become even more important.
tl;dr Actually good standardized comprehensive public transit infrastructure and bicycles ;)
October 5, 2020 9:24 p.m.
DemonDragonJ when you say "optimistic perspective", what exactly do you mean? are you referring to people's driving skills?
October 5, 2020 11:05 p.m.
subrosian: i think considering the topic of the thread, the question implied personal vehicles, not public transportation.
October 5, 2020 11:08 p.m.
Pyrra, sure. But I did address that-- for personal vehicles, the most efficient both by resource and energy consumption is human-powered transport, such as a bicycle. So my answer would be that high speed personal vehicles as they exist now are in general inefficient, unsustainable, and often impractical. They should be replaced by mass transit as often as possible.
Again, I'm no expert, and this is only my opinion based on reading and observation. And I fully expect personal vehicles to exist for a long time, for reasons I mentioned before. And of course it's entirely possible that breakthroughs in sustainable energy and manufacturing could make personal vehicles less wasteful.
October 6, 2020 12:35 a.m.
subrosian: but you can't force people to take public transportation. i for one absolutely loathe it. so "bicycles" doesn't really cut it for most efficient personal vehicle.
October 6, 2020 1:05 a.m.
Flying cars are a bad idea and will never be mainstream. You all addressed the obvious problem--crashes and the increased damage as compared to regular cars--but that is not actually the reason we will not see mainstream adaptation of flying vehicles.
The real problem? The operational cost is much higher than that of a regular car. Not only do you have to spend fuel to move the vehicle and its cargo on the horizontal access, you have to expend energy to get the vehicle into the air and then continue to expend energy to keep it there.
Let's do some math:
Potential energy = Mass x Force of Gravity x height.
- Force of Gravity on earth is 9.8 m/s^2.
- Let's say we want to fly our car above house height--10 meters will put us above most 2 story houses.
- The average car has a mass of 1,300 kg.
So, the potential energy of our flying car is 127,400 J.
A gallon of gas contains about 120,000,000 J of energy. Let's assume you are getting perfect energy from that gas--you wouldn't, any system is going to have loss, but let's assume anyway.
Just to get your car up to flying height, you have to spent .001 gallons of gas. Doesn't seem like much, right?
Let's assume your car gets 40 miles per gallon. That .001 gallons would move you 64 meters horizontally. 64 meters of horizontal travel with the same fuel it takes to get 10 meters of vertical.
Now, with a true flying car, you're not just trying to get it up to the height--you then need to continue to burn fuel to keep it at that height. Getting your potential energy isn't so great if you just plummet back to the ground.
Even with better, more efficient power sources, you're still going to be wasting a whole lot of unnecessary energy just to keep your flying car flying. The added utility of avoiding roads is vastly eclipsed by the ineffeciency, which both drives up costs and is terrible for the environment (even if we're using electric, that energy has to be generated somewhere, somehow).
TL;DR:
Flying cars are a bad idea--the act of flying takes more energy than the utility flying offers. There is a reason we are not all flying helicopters--it makes no sense to use a vehicle that is lucky to get 8 miles per gallon when you can just drive a car and get 40+.
October 6, 2020 1:21 a.m.
sergiodelrio says... #20
Caerwyn while your calculation is right, your assumptions are flawed imho. Street cars are heavy, yes. They need the weight to actually be able to move forward (to a certain degree ofc). A flying car would have different specs. It would be weight optimized, as pressure against the road to move the wheels is irrelevant. I'd like to refer you to Franky Zapata's Flyboard. Imagine this with a lightweight aerodynamic exoskeleton around it.
October 6, 2020 4:33 a.m.
sergiodelrio - My assumptions are likely far closer to correct than yours. While you would reduce weight due to not needing a heavy wheel frame, you’d still need a sufficiently large engine to lift yourself, the vehicle, passengers, groceries, and all the additional safety features necessary to ensure every crash does not end in an inferno of death.
Again, we already know that flying cars would be inefficient, because they fill a similar design space to helicopters (think even the small news ones, not larger military or private use ones), with much the same considerations in terms of size, weight, and energy consumption.
A true flying car, one that could actually replace all the necessary functions people use their cars for, is just not a practical tool in the real world. Too much wasted energy and too many safety and liability problems.
That’s why we’re focusing on developing more efficient cars/cars with longer battery lives - something that actually solves a real world problem, rather than chases an ineffective view on futurism.
October 6, 2020 6:17 a.m.
sergiodelrio says... #22
Caerwyn You may or may not be right, but this is all speculation. This is actually being researched tho
'On 4 August 2019, Zapata told BFM TV that he was working on building a flying car, that he hoped to introduce before year-end. He said that he had flown a prototype chassis powered by four gas turbines but the final model would employ ten turbines in order to cruise at 310–400 kilometres per hour (190–250 mph), and achieve a range of about 110 kilometres (68 mi).'
October 6, 2020 6:28 a.m.
sergiodelrio - I was careful to say that they’d never be mainstream, not that they wouldn’t exist. People have been working on building a flying car for generations, so it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion we’ll get one eventually - likely even in relatively short order.
But simply having invented something doesn’t mean we’ll have widespread adoption.
October 6, 2020 10:32 a.m.
Pyrra: I understand your perspective, and the likelihood that many people would share that perspective. I suppose it's not really a matter of "forcing" people, but of changing the public perception of transportation and raising awareness around the current inefficiency and unsustainability of personal vehicles. Ideally people would choose mass transit for the common good. I am, however, aware that this is an incredibly naive hope and it's extremely unlikely that such a shift in public opinion could happen.
Even so, if global temperatures rise by about 4 degrees Celsius, some models predict that much of the United States, Mexico, South and Central America, southern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia with the exception of Siberia, Australia, and the majority of Oceania will become uninhabitable. The resulting mass emigration and refugee crisis would lead to at the very least a sudden increase in population density (among other adverse consequences, such as the disruption of global supply chains and "cheap" overseas manufacturing and labor) that will only make the acceptance of public transit more vital.
I would hope things don't get to that point, but realistically I think it's a likely outcome and should have at least some consideration.
October 6, 2020 10:35 a.m.
To weigh in on your personal versus public transportation conversation, you both are correct, insofar as public transportation is a solution to a whole lot of problems, while, at the same time, has a number of flaws that simply cannot be fixed.
There are myriad advances to a good public transportation system, even beyond the environmental benefits of reducing one's carbon footprint. Local subways and such tend to be cheaper than paying for parking in the city and often can be faster when you factor in rush hour traffic and time to locate parking.
However, there are things public transportation can't do so well:
- You can't get large amounts of groceries, buy large objects, etc. with public transportation, nor can you purchase any such items with manpower (unless you live somewhere like NYC where there are enough grocery stores nearby that you don't need a car). For such situations, a personal vehicle is necessary.
- Not every city lends itself to public transportation, or not every party of the city lends itself to public transportation. It's really hard to construct public transportation that can serve all of the suburbs, or all of a fairly spread out, decentralized city. If there is too much surface area to cover, then you receive diminishing environmental and practical returns from your public transportation system. After all, if a stops only serve a couple potential riders, due to how spread out the potential riders are geographically, then you are burning a whole bunch of energy to remove a miniscule number of cars from the road.
- Public transportation is expensive to build and maintain. Some cities simply do not, and never will, have the money to build such a system, let alone ensure its long-term safety and viability.
- Public transportation starts to fall apart when you get into rural areas, where it does not make sense to build a transportation network.
- Public transportation does not allow for long-term journeys as easily. Even with expansions to rail and other systems, there are still limitations on where those systems can take you, and there will be limitations on how much stuff you can bring with you. Those limits do not exist if you own personal transportation.
All told, I fully agree better public transportation options need to be made available, and that, if so, more people would likely utilize them. However, public transportation works to supplement personal transportation--it is clear that, outside of the most dense population centers--public transportation cannot be a 100% replacement for ownership of personal transportation.
October 6, 2020 10:59 a.m.
Caerwyn, you bring up some great points, and I do agree with you for the most part. Although I think it's a bit disingenuous to not consider how climate catastrophe might impact future technological developments, I also don't believe humanity will adapt radically enough or quickly enough to make public transit as necessary as I imagine. In other words, I expect society will allow mass death rather than create the necessary infrastructure to support mass emigration and a sudden increase in population density. Which, obviously, makes my entire line of thinking fairly moot.
October 6, 2020 1:07 p.m.
Anyway, my apologies for steering the conversation somewhat off-topic.
October 6, 2020 1:16 p.m.
subrosian - Technological developments are not going to solve the inherent flaws in public transportation and cannot fully eliminate the need for personal vehicles for large portions of the population.
It isn't practical to restructure all of society to live in a situation where private transportation is unnecessary. To do so would require nearly impossible increases not just of public transportation infrastructure, it would require the construction of countless new buildings, some incentive for mass relocation out of the suburbs, improvements to energy infrastructure to ensure the grid for cities could maintain increase demand, etc.
Even assuming that the world was willing to make such radical changes, those changes are simply too impractical to occur in a short period of time.
Your solution--a world where private transportation is not necessary--is impractical, but that doesn't mean we are all doomed. Vehicles have seen massive improvements to emissions standards and we have developed and continue to develop electric vehicles that are performing quite well.
That is where the focus of development should be--if we cannot practically eliminate the need for private vehicles, we can make private vehicles have low-to-no carbon footprint. How? Build electric charging stations along highways, so you can actually use electric vehicles for long road trips. Keep pushing emissions standards so petroleum powered cars pollute less. Generate power through green means so electric cars are not indirectly polluting.
That's all stuff we can do and already are doing. Adaptation need not be radical to be effective.
October 6, 2020 1:27 p.m.
Right, I understand your perspective and I agree that there are a lot of stopgap "practical" solutions that will be possible in the first world to mitigate damage, and that here we likely are not "all doomed." I'm also unconvinced, however, that advances in this non-radical direction will be enough to avoid significant casualties in the global south and developing/third-world countries. Of course this goes well beyond the issue of transportation, and I take your point on the necessity of personal transport. Again, apologies for diverting from the subject of the thread.
October 6, 2020 2:04 p.m.
No need to apologize, subrosian. It is all interesting conversation.
This topic is a purely subjective, armchair science back and forth about "stuff".
I personally feel safety considerations will preclude any short term adoption of any aerial system of personal transportation. I believe we would get giant advances in public transportation before that happens.
And, as Caerwyn pointed out, we should see big strides in availability in electric or whatever replaces electric as a fuel/source and transportation.
The environmental concerns are very serious and very real. Already, summits around the world to address what may be the biggest threat to our species after pandemics and meteors are happening. They will provide opportunities for ideas, solutions or goals to find a way for us.
October 6, 2020 4 p.m.
for those thinking that flying cars are a good idea, try driving in central ohio. i'll be doing 70 in a 65, in the slow lane, at night, in the rain, and people still FLY past me while honking and giving me the middle finger. then people on the opposite end of the spectrum going 30 in a 45. or grandmas trying to turn right while in the lane 2nd from the right (in other words next to the turn lane but not actually in it) while i myself am in the right lane and they almost smash into me. nobody ever uses their blinker. i can't even count the number of times i've been trying to turn, and could have gone much sooner if the oncoming traffic had just used a turn signal as they approached the intersection. double parking is practically a pandemic of its own. bottom line, the average person simply cannot be trusted with a flying car.
October 8, 2020 1:10 a.m.
VampDemigod says... #32
And just imagine how much harder it would be to learn. You’d probably have to get a permit at 15/16, then get your license a year later, just to make sure you actually know how to drive in 3D.
October 8, 2020 8:51 a.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #33
I wholeheartedly believe that, when scientists eventually master nuclear fusion, that shall make personalized flying vehicles feasible.
VampDemigod, most people are able to master driving normal automobiles, so it should not be especially difficult for people to learn how to pilot flying vehicles, either, with sufficient time and training.
October 8, 2020 12:28 p.m.
DemonDragonJ: its not about whether flying vehicles can be made, the issue is that no, most people are not able to master driving normal automobiles, and yes, it absolutely will be a nightmare to train people to use flying vehicles. we cannot trust people to even look left or right, so we definitely can't trust them to have to look left, right, up, and down. airline pilots undergo extensive training and still have whole teams of air traffic control to make sure crashes don't happen.
October 8, 2020 12:32 p.m.
Whether it is true or not that most people can master driving has nothing at all to do with how often those same people get in or experience accidents while operating them.
An arbitrary google search led me to the WHO's and other websites and some sobering statistics.
Worldwide, approximately 1-2 million people die in car accidents per year.
Worldwide, approximately 20-50 million people experience non-fatal injuries per year.
I couldnt find any statistics but how many traffic infractions, unreported accidents, bumper touches and whatnot happen worldwide but if a total of 52 million people get hospitalized or die per year, there could be 100s of millions of non-injurious/non-fatal accidents per year.
Try to imagine up to 100s of millions of Flying car accidents per year.
VampDemigod says... #2
Google “mythbusters iron man suit”. I think it was Adam Savage who made it. It can crush a beer keg! XD
No flying sadly, jet pack tech isn’t quite that advanced yet.
Just a fun little thing.
October 4, 2020 7:04 p.m.