Could We Engineer Spider-Man’s Powers?
With the upcoming release of Spider-Man: No Way Home, I started thinking about an idea. How far away are we from being able to engineer Spider-Man?
Sure we can escape into sci-fi territory very fast, but what is the technology or research is being done that could plausibly get us to a Spider-Man-like ability set. In this Feeding Frenzy, we take stock of research being done to bring the powers of Spider-Man to our world.
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Super Strength
Super Strength may be one of the most common powers given to all heroes and villains. My first thought for achieving this would be through a powered exoskeleton.
The main limitation in their current state is that they are still very bulky and heavily limit users' mobility. We would need significant motor technology advancements to generate more power in smaller form factors to make this feasible. Better yet, we expect a suit similar to that of Iron Man wears but allows for a larger range of motion. Overall it would be less walking talking tank and more for increased mobility.
Webbing
Spiders-Man's webbing and web-shooters are core to his character almost as much as the deep-seated responsibility. Without webs to swing on, you can't be called Spider-man. Interestingly, we know very little about how spiders are able to make such a strong and versatile material. Currently, the state of research has spider silk being talked about for its tensile properties. Some research reports that synthetic hybrid spider silk could be a promising avenue to mass produce this material. However, currently having a spider farm to collect the silk wouldn't be economical. There's also the other hurdle of if you could package the components on a wrist-mounted device, how would you get it to dissolve within a few hours?
Research:
Microbially produced fibers: stronger than steel, tougher than Kevlar | Washington University in St. Louis
Recent Advances in Development of Functional Spider Silk-Based Hybrid Materials | Frontiers in Chemistry
Wall Crawling
How do spiders stick to surfaces? The feet of a spider is covered in tiny hairs. These hairs are so small they interact at an atomic level in which the strands are attracted to the surface. This force is called Van der Waals interaction in physics. In Sami Raimi Spider-man, you can see how they tried to show the audience this while the barb, while this is not correct from a scientific level, gives the audience an idea of the concept.
Some universities have experimented with this ability to cling to the surface using geckos as the starting point for real-world examples. Their ability is based on the same principles, and they have made robots that can walk up surfaces. What makes these materials interesting is that the stickiness is "on" when the pressure is applied downward and released when the pressure is removed, which would make it intuitive if the material could be applied for use at a large scale.
Spider-Sense
I was trying to handle how we might technology our way to danger sense. As far as I can tell, there is no way we can achieve this with current technology, and research is limited or not published yet. I will speculate wildly on how this may one day be possible. My first assumption would be that a suit as form-fitting as the ones seen on the silver screen is possible. Embedded in the material, you have sensors and tiny haptic motors that would vibrate on the part of the body to give you a perceived precognitive effect. This would be similar to how autonomous cars can break when an object is in front. The way to achieve this sensing would be through LIDAR and possible thermal sensing of the suit. The main limitation here would be capturing and processing this data fastest enough, and then the user adapting to a whole new set of stimuli to trigger a reaction. Because the human body is not evolved to react to this novel stimulus, such as the way you react when something is hot or sharp, I am not sure this would be possible unless wearing was constant so that the boundary between you and it would dissolve. You can find further exploration in this Because Science “How Spider-Sense Works” video for more on spider biology.
Genetic Editing
As I mentioned in the beginning, I wanted to stay away from the genetic editing portion of this because it removed much of how portion of the answer. After all, that is still being actively developed.
With the advent of a genetic tool like CRISPR, we could engineer humans with spider-like attributes one day. This is closer to what the comics mean when Spider-man has super strength. However, scientists are still debating what can and cannot be done when making changes to the human genome. So, unless something changes drastically in the coming years, there is extreme caution in this area of research for the time being.
For more on this area of research, there is an excellent documentary from NOVA titled Human Nature, and we had a podcast discussing this documentary found here. Another great resource discussing the complexities is the book by Walter Isaacson's The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (Amazon.)
The Take-Away
When I started looking into this, I was only somewhat aware of technology going into each of these areas. However, when taken together to create what is effectively a super-soldier program, you combine at a minimum of four current state-of-the-art technology platforms to develop a suite of abilities.
Ultimately, what makes Spider-Man so compelling as a character isn't the powers in and of themselves. Instead, it's how man uses those powers for the greater good. I'm sure many of the researchers in these areas are just as inspired by these stories as I am.
It is important to remember everything starts with an idea, and then it becomes how do we make it real? When they created Spider-man, they had no way of knowing that the abilities of the character would be plausible. While we are still further away than I would have hoped, the threads are there to one day make Spider-man a reality we just need to keep pushing the technology further.