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「百の夜と千の空」 (Hyaku no Yoru to Sen no Sora)
“100 Nights and 1000 Skies”
I have been waiting so long to see this episode animated.
General Impressions
Where do I even begin with this week’s post? With the knowledge of not only what Byakuya did but the rationale and reasoning behind it, god how can you not just love the guy for being such a stand up human being?
Man, I’ve said it in other posts before, but anything involving parents and their children in anime always gets me super worked up. My favorite example being the bond that Tomoya and Naoyuki from Clannad shared, but I dare say that Byakuya and Senku are coming in at a real close second. That said, none of this would have been possible without the collaborative effort from everyone else that came plummeting back to the earth from space. Through an indescribable amount of sacrifice and an insane amount of foresight, it probably would have been impossible for Senku to achieve all the things he did so quickly.
The biggest feat being the creation of the 100 stories that managed to transcend generations and empowered them to overcome tens of thousands of years that mankind took to find its footing on this planet we call earth. Leveraging the concepts of what past civilizations used to pass along knowledge, it was actually quite brilliant how Byakuya managed to pack so much knowledge is such a “small” amount of space.
At the end of the day though, what may have left the biggest impact was the thought that the original six survivors who came from space all knew that they’d eventually pass on without being able to see the fruits of their labor. With the loss of loved ones succumbing to illnesses that were once considered trivial and others disappearing off into the horizon never to return, it must have been an insane mental battle to keep moving forward. God, just thinking about it is making me tear up a bit as I consider just how sad it is to know you missed someone by just a few thousand years only to get hit with their will (and love) from beyond the grave.
As always, another fantastic episode that highlighted all the great things that make this show such a fun one to watch. That said, it looks like things won’t stay quiet for long now that Tsukasa is ready to take up arms against Senku and his newly expanded Kingdom of Science. While it remains to be seen just what he has planned to handle this new threat, by the looks of things it seems that he at least has a plan ready to go.
P.S. SAO post coming in late tomorrow — it’s busy at work and I’m gonna die. Thank you for your patience <3
Preview
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Unless there are other developments later on to explain it, there’s a hefty amount of suspension of disbelief required here, which is a shame given the show is about SCIENCE, because unfortunately 6 people are nowhere near enough to create a long-term healthy population from. Well OK perhaps the villagers aren’t all that healthy because it seems that Ruri’s pneumonia may have been as a result of a weakness inherited from members of the original population, but they’ve still somehow managed to keep going for almost 4,000 years.
Kind of explains why there aren’t nearly as much of them as you’d think there would be after all that time.
Well, having a population form only 6 people isn’t as problematic for me as the fact that astronauts require quite a long time of physical therapy after returning to earth due to bone density loss, so as much as Byakuya is cool, his act of saving the first three people after landing is quite outlandish.
That’s for long term stays in space though, the average stay on the ISS is something like six months for that kind of bone loss to happen. If you take into account that at the time of the incident they were just learning about each others eating preferences there’s a likelihood that they hadn’t been up there for that long, maybe a week tops if even that.
It can be done. It’s not ideal, and there might be some genetic deficiencies among the population, but it’s not like they can’t make babies at all. The gene pool that they were dealt was also diverse to begin with, what with the astronauts being from America, Japan, Russia, China, etc.
Assuming you have a genetically diverse population to start with, current thinking is that you need at least 80 people plus a plan to avoid too much inbreeding (maybe in the 100 Tales somewhere?), or twice that if you’re going to let people breed at will. That said, it seems that the entire Native North American population may have descended from as few as 70 people, but that’s still a lot more than 6.
I won’t lie — I never saw it this way.
But now that I’ve read the comments, I can totally see how you could view it that way.
I’m conflicted.
@Angelus: To your point about enough diversity and genetic makeup, I think that point gets addressed in the future but I ain’t no spoiler-er.
It really isn’t much suspension of disbelief for most people.
If you aren’t an expert in genetics / never bothered reading up on Lowest Viable Population or whatever it was called, common sense would be that it’d be okay to marry second cousins (offspring of grandpa’s sibling).
In that case, intuition would be correct that 6 people are enough to avoid marrying your first cousin or closer. In fact, you only need 4 people!
If you are an expert…
Science changes all the time, especially since these are predictions.
I am fairly confident that no one has actually done an actual long-term study with humans to check how many people you need before you have issues! I don’t think anyone would agree to voluntarily take part!
Not to mention, these guys are all astronauts, who are pretty much at the peak of humanity (might be a slight exagerration) gentically (in terms of physical capabilities and mental prowess).
Andddd, it’s not like it’s impossible.
Honestly, the only poor thing imo is that they picked Japan of all reasons, surely there’s a better spot, but that’s because plot.
Not a major spoiler, but since it wasn’t explicitly stated in the anime for some reason:
Show Spoiler ▼
In that case, intuition would be correct that 6 people are enough to avoid marrying your first cousin or closer. In fact, you only need 4 people!
You need to think this over a bit more. Firstly you’d have to ditch the idea of marriage as with monogamy everyone would end up being effectively first cousins within a few generations. But even assuming you were managing things more scientifically and mating people like a pedigree pet breeder would in order to reduce inbreeding, you’d still run out of viable pairings soon enough. This is why you need a much larger number of people to start with.
And yes, there have been “experiments” because there are isolated island populations that started off with perhaps a couple of dozen people, but after only a few hundred years they have ended up pretty inbred with high incidences of genetic abnormality.
I know that I’m going to sound like a curmudgeon, but I’m hoping that any real astronauts up on the ISS would be able to do better than this.
First with an entire planet full of technical resources that they could be making use of they get themselves stranded on an undeveloped (except for one rowboat) island. This island somehow rejoins with the mainland 3700 years later, so it couldn’t be that far away.
Second they immediately start producing babies instead building a sailboat large enough to reach the mainland. A Polynesian double outrigger would have worked well.
Finally two of the adults get themselves killed trying to reach the mainland in the rowboat.
Yes, this also broke immersion for me. People with the knowledge to still make use of modern technology, and let all that knowledge get lost for thousands of years, and let everything built by humans decay into nothing. I don’t think they got their priorities right. I mean, they still had internet for a while, so I’m sure they knew where they were. So many years passsed and they hardly lifted a finger towards reaching what was left of civilization.
Of course if they did that we wouldn’t have this story, but it strains suspension of disbelief.
You’ve raised good points, and I’ve had similar thoughts as well.
But consider that a particular level technology has a certain “infant mortality”
threshold, i.e., there’s a minimum number of people who have to understand the
technology to maintain the technology from generation to generation.
Consider just the simple production of cow’s milk to “modern standards.”
How many people does it really take to product a single gallon? I’m guessing 250+.
Think about it, the feed – you need someone with the technology knowledge of
producing feed, its storage, and all of the other aspects of producing feed
consistently. How about veterinary medicine? We saw what Senku went through to
produce a simple antibiotic – and his treatment was a guess at the diagnosis.
There’s veterinary diagnostic technology necessary to maintain the health of
the herd and so on… When you start to consider the details, there’s a lot
that we take for granted with our “modern” lifestyles…
Now, I can see how the small group of people would revert to very primitive
survival methods. Yeah, there are raw materials around, but maintaining
the knowledge of technology would be near impossible, IMHO. If the survivors
had insisted on maintaining their modern technology, they’ve starved, I sure…
The part that was difficult (and I know this sounds mean) was the (apparent)
monogamy. I don’t think 3 monogamous breeding couples would have worked.
There would have had to have been mate cooperation to ensure the survival
of the humans beyond a couple of generations. But that breaks the family
element of the series…
All in all, the series had more ups than downs and I’m looking forward to
see what happens next…
The thing is, for many years after petrification, the world had books. A whole lot of them. Centuries of human knowledge there for the taking. Even if they were really shorthanded, I would think trying to perserve that knowledge would be better that 100 stories being the only thing passed on. Because as long as they had some stored knowledge some Chrome would show up who would try to reproduce a lot of things. And their civilization level remaning in the stone age for +3000 years when the founders were cultured people? Yeah, a stretch. I’m not saying they could keep all the advancements of humankind, but things remained way too primitive.
I’ve seen different opinions on this, but Byakuya’s rough grave marker is implying that all the adults had died before any of the children had grown up, and that reading and writing was now lost. All they had left was the oral tradition of the 100 Tales, and even that became distorted over time.
@ruicarlov – good points, but books without a reference point,
especially for complex technologies, are nothing more than
reference material for knowledge that already exists. This is why
teachers (i.e. humans who have worked the technology themselves)
are needed to explain the basic principals to students. Take for
example a book on any subject you do not know. If the book doesn’t
establish a bunch of anchor points, you’re lost pretty quickly.
If you don’t understand the concept of kneading, you’re not going
to make a decent bread. A book might describe what “kneading” is,
but if you don’t see it for yourself, it’s just luck if you do it right.
Just my 2¥…
@Angelus — that makes a lot of sense and would explain so much!
….. Stone Wars? Is that the name of the next arc?
Well seen every episodes so far not bad and funny. Too bad they didn’t add something cool if they found some thing advance in their science adventure or treasure hunt like in Halo and develop something super advance nothing on earth. Instead of his modern science stuff, even the it pretty interesting in the Stone World.
Also if there Stone War, hope people in the fan fiction crossover Story work on a Transformers Prime or Halo War 2 very soon.
It is okay, the Anime and the manga do not have to explain the “harm” thing now here, in how these Generations life on. It is not so important
harm=harem
Rukia’s knowledge of these Songs and Wisdom
Well, there ca be an other way to “misuse” it
You Guys, know the unknown SiFI “Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda”? Ask uncle Google or perhaps Youtube and look for Episode 1 from 1st Season and you get the gist what i mean
3. Die Erleuchtung (To Loose The Fateful Lightning)
i am just lucky and happy that Dr. Stone do not walk this dark Path so far an i hope it stays so
https://randomc.net/image/Dr%20STONE/Dr%20STONE%20-%2017%20-%20Large%2019.jpg
https://randomc.net/image/Dr%20STONE/Dr%20STONE%20-%2017%20-%20Large%2006.jpg
So were all kids dumb or did the astronauts fail to establish basic knowledge about modern science/technology? You know, like books? 100 stories, is that all?
I would have expected a higher level of civilization after over 3000 years.
And yeah, I’m disappointed that the village is just the result of the astronauts having sex.
I guess that they kept us in the dark on purpose whether Byakuya also reproduced, but considering that there’s Kohaku and Ruri, it’s obvious.
Also, even if Senku is not his son, him having similar hair and the same red eyes I expect another plot twist. Can’t be a coincidence.