When I was young reading this classic manga, I always thought that the world described in was absurd and yet charming with this blend of high tech, simple country life with a few mega pole.
I am now considering that it might be our future. To a curiously accurate extent.
Here’s a (full) description of Earth in the Dragon Ball world:
Politically, Earth has a planet-wide constitutional monarchy. It is divided into 43 "sectors"
Absurd!! I was thinking during the early 90s. Kings are things from the past! Well now here’s the facts:
“The total household wealth in the world has been estimated at $125 trillion in year 2000. 90% of this wealth is held by people in North America, Europe, and high-income Asian countries, and 1% of adults are estimated to hold 40% of world wealth, a number which falls to 32% when adjusted for purchasing power parity.”
Of course it’s worse in 2010 (in the US the top 20% holds 85% of the wealth, note the opinion difference).That just looks like a monarchy, including the fact that this 20% of people can do whatever they want politically. Oh wait they can and they abuse it!
But what makes me think that this planet-wide monarchy could happen is that the 99% other adults are often dreaming about being part of this over-wealthy 1%. Just in the software realm the Apple AppStore works this way, even controlled by a dictatorship people are happy even if the facts are bad, really bad (half of all developers will earn less than $682 per year, read that twice). People believe and you can’t do nothing against that. Hope, even a not-so-smart one is powerful.
Hope ensures the system to go on and on forever to deliver just that, a constitutional monarchy across the world populated by millions of little communities everywhere (decentralization from a corrupted and pyramidal state) with 4 or 5 mega pole simply called East West South North Central City where people would try to make it. It doesn’t seem crazy for me: L.A./NYC, Paris/Marseille, Barcelona/Madrid… It’s already the case. Also we definitely need the same rights, assignments, economic rules everywhere. If we solve all the conflicts of today, it would do that: making everybody ok on how we live on Earth, under the same “mega” state.
Other point, younger I thought the future would be you know, all the future at once, crazy cities and flying cars. But probably it would happen as in Dragon Ball and as in real world today: technology adds itself but doesn’t destroy the older one. We spend insane amount of time in front of computers yet books are still here and worth some big businesses, still.
Let’s go deeper.
“Though less common, intelligent anthropomorphic (and sometimes non-anthropomorphic) animals such as Oolong and Puar are integrated into the population and are well-adjusted and are also accepted as people. (This is similar to fairy tale animals in European fiction)”
I don’t know if intelligent anthropomorphic animals are going to happen but we’re sure crazy about these dogs cats and whatever animal you like. We even use terrorist-class systems to track down people treating kitties badly and the internet is having some sort of obsession with cats dogs and other cute non human living things. And maybe evolution is going to help them getting more like us: some dogs know how to ride Moscow metro to hang around the city.
So to conclude, a world based on a monarchy populated with robots (btw look at this video, I want one too and also, ROBOT NANNIES via Sean), old and weird people, indestructible old machines, little businesses, community-driven jobs, cheap and simple high quality of life with smart animals, ruled by a powerful, arbitrary but distant political system seems plausible.
I don’t know if Akira Toriyama thought about the accuracy of its world… Anyway, looking forward for these capsules…