Z-Man

Le site de la DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), agence qui prend en charge la R&D des nouvelles technologies militaires américaines, regorge de pistes pour alimenter les réflexions sur le transhumanisme. Un exemple, le programme Z-Man qui consiste à doter les soldats de capacités d’escalades qu’on osait attribuer jusque-là qu’à des héros de bande dessinée.

De manière générale, il y aurait beaucoup à dire sur les rapports existants entre les super-héros des comic books et les idéaux transhumanistes. J’essaierai de défricher le terrain au fur et à mesure.

“The Z-Man Program will develop climbing aids that will enable an individual soldier to scale vertical walls constructed of typical building materials without the need for ropes or ladders. The inspiration for these climbing aids is the technique by which geckos, spiders, and small animals scale vertical surfaces, that is, by using unique biological material systems that enable controllable adhesion using van der Waals forces or by hooking surface asperities. This program seeks to build synthetic versions of those material systems and then utilize them in a novel climbing aid optimized for use by humans. The overall goal of the program is to enable an individual soldier using dry adhesive climbing aides to scale a vertical surface at 0.5 m/s while carrying a combat load.”

http://www.darpa.mil/dso/thrust/matdev/zman.htm