Recent scientific breakthroughs are changing that. Within our lifetimes we just might be able to see mankind do the things it only wrote about in cheap picture books and their multi-billion dollar film adaptations. Some day, you or your children may very well get to be ...

Every one of us once dreamed of donning some spandex pants and taking our brand of renegade crime fighting to the streets. The only problem was our total lack of super powers, and the fact that when we blasted ourselves with gamma radiation we only got a super-powered tumor that becomes more malignant when angered.

5 Iron Man

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The Character's Power: Technologically advanced battle suit.

After being kidnapped by the Vietnamese (or in the film, some brown people) billionaire inventor Tony Stark MacGyver's himself a technological wonder of a battle suit that simultaneously prevents shards of shrapnel from entering his heart and helps him explode you with literal hand cannons.

How Science Can Give It To You:

Meet HAL 5.

HAL 5 is an acronym for Hybrid Assistive Limb ... 5. HAL is an artificial powered exoskeleton. In other words, a technological wonder of a suit that is capable of allowing the user to carry five times the weight they could normally carry.

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"When a person attempts to move, nerve signals are sent from the brain to the muscles via motoneuron, moving the musculoskeletal system as a consequence." We just copy and pasted that from the official HAL website because it sums it up well enough (apparently just saying, "When you move, this thing moves HARDER!" is too simplistic for the type of people who know how to make cybernetic suits).

Unlike Tony Stark's "Mark VI" Iron Man suit, HAL was not invented for tearing-ass through a war zone, leaving behind a trail of men slowly realizing they just got their limbs torn off by a robot. On the contrary, HAL was designed for factory work, disaster relief, assisting disabled people, and, as the website states, "the entertainment field" which we're sure is code for "Superhuman Endurance Sexbot."

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The only problem is ...

You'll probably think we're being silly when we point out that "HAL" is also the name of the AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you're having trouble remembering the character let us refresh your memory: HAL 9000 spied some astronauts talking shit about him behind his back, and went on a murderous rampage in response. Probably just coincidence, right? Surely not a sign that the inventors have evil intentions or anything.

Well, do you remember when we linked the official HAL website earlier? Look at the web address. That's www.cyberdyne.jp. Cyberdyne! As in, "the manufacturers of the Terminator" Cyberdyne.

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Don't get us wrong, we're not saying this isn't an amazing technology. All we're saying is that you should find your nearest John Conner and sequester him in your local underground robot apocalypse bunker before some dip-shit scientist puts some kind of thinking chip in these things.