Inventing Iron Man (4 page)

OK. So Tony is in a dire scenario. What he does next is the kind of wonderfully delicious understatement that makes comic books so awesome to read. He decides to create a brain interface that will allow him to remotely control a suit of armor. Thus is born the “telepresence unit.” And, in wonderful comic book hero tradition, Tony is shown lying in bed and saying, “All I've got is the power of my intellect. Fine. That's all the power I need.” (Please cue the Black Sabbath “Iron Man” power chords right here.) He gets a tech from Stark Industries to “kludge together the neural interface computer aided design and manufacture [the] teleoperator's rig” that he needs to create the suit. (How awesome is it that he had to create an interface that vastly outstrips the technology we have currently in order to build and control a robotic suit of armor that even more vastly outstrips our current technology? We will look more closely at this brain-machine
interface in
chapter 3
.) After Tony gets this technology squared away and gets jacked in—plugged in like a telephone into a jack in the wall—he creates the telepresence armor. Once he begins using it, Tony comments that his new tweaks have really improved the experience and that “subspace link eliminates transmission lag time. Neuromimetic system makes it feel like I'm actually there … That same system insures that mortal damage to the remote will result in fatal neural feedback.” This newest iteration of the telepresence armor allows Tony to remotely control, in a kind of virtual environment, a fully functioning Iron Man robotic suit.

The idea of a human interacting with a virtual environment was also the central theme in some recent movies. In the 2009
Surrogates
starring Bruce Willis, the basic theme is that remotely controlled robots are used as “surrogate people.” Eventually some users die when the robotic units they control are “killed.” I love one scene early on in the movie when a detective asks the police chief: “Sir, how is that even possible?” I bet you can guess the reply: “We don't know.” Exactly. Anyway, the actions of the Iron Man suit were controlled by the brain activity of Tony Stark. Echoes of this story are also found in the 2009 blockbuster
Avatar
. The interface between the controllers and the Avatars is essentially a kind of biology-to-biology telepresence control and is very similar to an extreme extension of brain interface. The movie also shows the interesting biology-to-biology interface of Na'vi and the Pandoran wildlife. (The real fun part of
Avatar
is that we don't yet have the technology for the mobile ride-inside exoskeletal robots that the military uses in that film.)

When I reread the stories about the telepresence armor in Iron Man #280–290 while researching this book, I was stunned by how closely they parallel the basic workings and operational theory of current brain-machine interfaces, although most of the real ones are one-directional. That is, they send commands to control a device but cannot necessarily receive commands from that device. Iron Man's NTU-150, in contrast, was bidirectional and included information that couldn't normally be picked up by human sensory organs.

With a bit of foreshadowing, let's say for now that the Extremis armor comes the closest to what would be needed for the whole Iron Man
concept to work with a real biological human body. By the end of this book, I hope to have convinced you of that. This concept is also the furthest away from reality of any of the armors developed so far. The Extremis armor that writer Warren Ellis created is a complete departure from everything that came before it. Not in terms of how it looks (see
figure 1.2
and compare the panel C showing Extremis armor with panel B showing the classic red and gold armor), but in terms of how it interfaces with the user. We will talk in
chapter 6
and elsewhere about the concept in perceptual neuroscience of “embodiment.” However Extremis takes a literal approach to embodiment, becoming part of the user's body and allowing direct connection with the nervous system. The Extremis concept debuted with art by Adi Granov in the Invincible Iron Man story arc from 2005 and 2006 called simply “Extremis” and told in six parts. The origin story for Iron Man was updated for this series (Tony was now injured in the Gulf War rather than in Vietnam) and was collected in the 2007 graphic novel of the same name.

In this story, the basic idea behind Extremis lies in the work of Maya Hansen, a former girlfriend of Tony Stark and a scientist who tried to create a serum (described as a “powerful techno-organic virus-like compound” by Iron Man chronicler Andy Mangels) for a new supersoldier that became “Extremis.” A terrorist group steals this serum (actually, Maya gives it to them—long story). Eventually Iron Man fights Mallen, the leader of this group, who has been amplified by Extremis. Tony suffers debilitating injuries in this exchange and has to get Maya out of prison so she can help him undergo “extremis,” or a modification of his genetic expression (“rewriting the DNA”). In Tony's case, the procedure creates a kind of amplified neural network that allows him to interface completely with his armor to directly jack in and control satellites and remote computers.

The gist of this story line is that Tony and the Iron Man armor are now biologically integrated. He is in fact a cyborg. But a cyborg who can effectively turn himself on or off. With Extremis, Tony Stark has the neural interface for his armor with him at all times. It sits as a layer of electronics just under his skin and in his bones. Extremis is fascinating scifion the very fringe of scientific fact.

Extremis represented a fundamental shift in how Iron Man was portrayed and really created a significant evolution for the character. Iron Man editor Tom Brevoort is quoted by Mangels as saying that, prior to Extremis, “Iron Man was a guy who had no powers and put
on a suit, and when he was done, Iron Man was a guy that absolutely had some measure of powers outside of the armor, because the technology has become so integrated into him.” The questions central to our work here are, How much of these concepts are realizable? And if they are realizable—however incrementally—what does it mean for the human inside (or part of) the Iron Man suit of armor? To answer these questions means understanding a bit more about the characteristics of the human body, how it works, and what it means for the human body to be interfaced with technology. Next stop, on to looking at the basic biology of Tony Stark … and you!

WHEN THE MAN OF METAL NEEDS TO MUSCLE IN

My transistors will operate the machine electronically—move countless gears and control-levers—
the iron frame must duplicate virtually every action of the human body
.

—Tony Stark to Professor Yinsen, from “Why Must There Be an Iron Man?” (Invincible Iron Man #47, 1972)

In motions honed to high efficiency by years of repetition, microcircuited metal mesh armor is slipped on, snapped into place and polarized to a hardness that rivals titanium steel, and once more a master inventor calls forth his greatest creation—Iron Man!

—“Dreadnight of the Dreadnought!” (Invincible Iron Man #129, 1979)

Iron Man in action—even just walking across a room—would turn heads in London's Piccadilly Circus, New York City's Times Square, or Tokyo's Shinjuku train station. However, Iron Man wouldn't be nearly so impressive if he could only stand stock still like a statue. Biological movement is based on the actions of muscles and, in vertebrates
like us humans, those muscles are layered on top of our bony skeletons but underneath our skin. For Iron Man, the link between muscle activity and motorized actions of his mechanical exoskeleton has to be almost symbiotic.

Normally, when Anthony Edward Stark wants to make a movement, a chain of commands begins in his brain and finishes with the contraction of his muscles and the actions of his body. For example, think back to that excited reach you made to pull this book off the shelf and then carry it, full of hope, to the checkout line. (Or, for those of you so inclined, the motions you made to click on a computer to order it online. That's cool, too.) When you decide to make a movement like lifting up your left hand, a series of commands are relayed from neurons in your brain, down to those in your spinal cord, and then out from the spinal cord to the muscles themselves to make them contract. That chain of command is an inherent part of Tony Stark's and your nervous systems.

Muscles sit quietly inside our bodies, leaping into action only when we need them to do something. And, honestly, we need them to do something pretty much all the time. We humans have an awful lot of muscle in our bodies and they make up a whopping 40% of our total body weight. So, Tony Stark, whom Marvel Comics lists at about 6′1″ in height and about 100 kilograms (225 pounds), is packing about 40 kilograms (90 pounds) of muscle! You—and Tony—have three kinds of muscle in your body: smooth (like that found in your gut), cardiac (found in your heart only), and skeletal (found in the muscles that move your skeleton).

Skeletal muscle is probably the type you think of right away when someone shouts “muscle.” Your body has 639 skeletal muscles ready and willing to act during deliberate voluntary actions, during automatic activities like walking, and during reflex corrections to movements. The focus in this chapter is on how Tony Stark would use these muscles to help him control a fancy robotic suit of armor and on the chemical reactions that make these movements possible.

First, let's look at some of the major muscles that are important for moving our arms and legs and giving us stability. In
figure 2.1
, panel A shows muscles on the front of the body and panel B shows muscles in the back. All 600-plus of these muscles will need to be protected and enhanced with the Iron Man suit. Of great importance is figuring out how realistic it might be for Tony Stark's nervous system to be linked to the muscles that move his body and to the suit that surrounds it.

Figure 2.1. Some muscles on the front (
A
) and back (
B
) of the human body. Images from
Gray's Anatomy
modified by Mikael Häggström.

In such a suit the connection between brain and armor would need to be so good that the brain could actually control an instrumented robotic suit of armor, as if that suit of armor were a human body. In effect, Tony would have to create an anthropomorphic suit. That's the same “anthro-” as in anthropology and means relating to things human. So, it must be a suit that is meant to look and act like a human. Such a degree of connection wasn't needed in the first versions of Iron Man armor or even in the Iron Monger armor. For the level of interface between man and machine shown in recent comics, though, that type of suit would be needed.

To set up our exploration of this interface, we first look at how your own body is controlled. How does the nervous system work to produce movements? What kinds of signals are used and how does it all work together? The “motors” of your body are your muscles. In neuroscience the term “motor control” is used to describe how the brain controls movement. But real motors aren't usually part of movement. Could muscle control be used to mimic the control of motors in a real machine? To answer these questions, let's review the basics of biological activity and of the anatomy and physiology of the human body. This review will help us when we look at the topics of controlling robots, robotic exoskeletons, and similar inventions.

Let's compare the overall structure and function of the limbs in our bodies to those of a robotic exoskeleton. The basic biological principle is that the bones of our skeletons support our bodies, the muscles move our bones, and our brains command our muscles. The sum of all the muscle activity and bone movement is the movement of our whole bodies. In the case of a robotic suit of armor, the new skeleton is on the outside and the “muscles,” in the form of motors or actuators, are on the outside of the new skeleton. So, we are dealing with two sets of supporting skeletons and two sets of muscles. For this whole enterprise to work, there has to be a link between these two sets. How that could possibly occur can best be understood by thinking through how the human nervous system functions. The cells of your nerves and muscles are what is known as “excitable tissue.”
This refers to electrical excitability. Storing electrical activity of your cells is similar to the way a battery functions, except the “discharge” of your neurons powers information transfer instead of a flashlight or a Nintendo DS game. Which is pretty cool, in my estimation.