That always bothered me too even in my teenage years. I knew that there was no way 6 mil would deliver all the capabilities that were being portrayed. Already knew the neural interface and the power-to-weight performace were too sophisticated. Forty years later we have just fairly decent prosthetic limbs, and no bionic eyes.
(BTW, in the Spanish-dubbed version I saw on first run in the 70s they did not translate the title literally. Instead they called the show “El Hombre Nuclear” – The Nuclear-Powered Man.)
The original surgery may have only cost 35 mil, but that doesn’t take into account additional expenses. There were the additional surgeries Steve needed after various anatomical wrenchings with his new arm on certain unupgraded body parts, The R and D involved in making an installing said parts, and the ever present “administrative” expenses.
The cost could rack up impressively. Six billion was a bargain.
A super-strong pair of legs or an arm are nearly useless without matching upgrades to pretty much the rest of your skeletomuscular system. A real “cyborg” would have to be a robot chassis carrying your head and internal organs, a little like General Grievous.
Depends on what $6 billion buys you. Let’s say you get a covert operative who can do the follwing:
[ul]
[li]run 60 mph on foot for hours without tiring,[/li][li]jump 30 feet vertically[/li][li]break through walls and reinforced doors[/li][li]kill people with a punch, or wipe the floor with a dozen attackers[/li][li]swim underwater at 20 knots without making engine noise[/li][li]do all these things without carrying gear.[/li][/ul]The value of such an asset would be that s/he could be a one-person Impossible Mission force: go places where supposedly no one could go, and do things a lone person supposedly couldn’t do, at least not without raising an alarm.
What would be important enough to warrant the expense? Anti-nuclear terrorism perhaps. Or rescuing/abducting/assassinating high-value targets. Or critically important espionage.
The thing is, spies don’t do any of those things nowadays. They mostly convince their bosses that they’re normal working schmoes while downloading databases onto USB memory devices. If it’s butt kicking you want, generally you can just send in a SEAL team.
But let’s say that covert operatives have to do all those things. I don’t see “bulletproof” on your list. Steve Austin certainly wasn’t bulletproof. And, unless they bend science a whole bit in the movie (which they will), they can’t make him bulletproof without adding a crap ton of weight and bulk.
“Hey, who’s the covert op at this embassy party?”
“Well, my guess is that it’s the 1500 pound dude in the size 60 tux who just fell through the floor”
So you have a $6,000,000,000 investment that isn’t bulletproof and you’re sending him on missions in the parts of the world where the only people not carrying AK-47s are the ones carrying RPGs. Unless invisibility is part of the new package, I imagine things will go like this:
“Praise be to Allah, that infidel just ran past us at 60mph.”
“Let us shoot him.”
“Let it be said, let it be done.”
followed shortly by:
“Gentlemen of the appropriations committee, I’m afraid we need another $6,000,000,000. No, we can’t tell you what we spent it on.”
