Dr. Stone and the Question of an Uncertain Future

            I’ll get it out of the way quickly and say I really enjoy Dr. Stone. The premise of the series is a mysterious wave covers the world in modern day and turns every human, but no other living thing, to stone. 3,700 years in the future, a young prodigy named Senku wakes up and starts enacting a plan to restore every human and rebuild the world with science, along with the formula that revived him from his stone prison. 

Trouble arises when one of his first allies, a young man named Tsukasa, who is possessed of superhuman strength and great intelligence, decides that the corruption of the old world must never be allowed to rise again. Once the two realize their visions are incompatible, lines are drawn, plans are lain, and a battle begins for the future of humanity in the new, primitive world.

​It’s hard not to enjoy Dr. Stone on a basic level. The characters are likeable, there’s humor and heart, and it’s an absolute blast to watch Senku work. His encyclopedic knowledge of biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and engineering allow him to take a situation that would leave most of us starving to death or dying of exposure and, step by step, make everyone’s lives better. It’s a rare enough thing for the hero of a story to be the smart guy, but Dr. Stone takes it to another level, especially given that every science fact Senku presents is one hundred percent (or to quote Senku, ten billion percent!) accurate. Despite this, the show is never snobbish about how important Senku is. He does have a unique skillset, but it’s made clear he isn’t good at everything and almost always needs help. It would be easy for the series to go full STEMlord and exalt scientists on a pedestal, but much of the series focuses on how people of all skillsets and abilities are important to the creation of civilization. There are times when the series feels like it is drifting away from the initial premise, but the intervening story is never dull, and eventually it does loop back around to the characters and plot elements it seemingly left behind. Well worth checking out if you get the chance.

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​            But none of that is what I really wanted to talk about in this article. Much of what truly interests me about Dr. Stone is the philosophical underpinnings of the fight between Senku and Tsukasa. It would have been easy to present Tsukasa as a brute, a barbarian chieftain who takes what he wants because he can and does little else, so our pro-science hero can look all the better against him. That the series does not do this is highly to its credit. Tsukasa looks at the natural world he’s returned to with reverence. He fears that if humanity was restored, it wouldn’t be long before every bit of it was once again torn down and polluted. He sees the adults of old deciding that everything must once again be divided up along the lines of nations and property, and the have-nots once again being at their mercy. He sees science bringing back weapons of mass war and devastation. Thus, he decides a pure, natural world ruled by those young enough not to be tainted by those old ideas would be best, and those who oppose it must die. It’s not a philosophy without logical and moral problems, but it’s an understandable conclusion that someone might come to.

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At the core of this conflict is how we deal with our own uncertain future. We’re confronted regularly now with ideas that the world of tomorrow might not be better than the world of today, and for most of us, it’s a frightening prospect. So what do we do? How do we fix it? Do we look backward, trying to find something in ourselves that we lost and reclaim it? Or do we go forward, confidently assuming that there is no problem we can’t solve if we work together? I can’t say I have the answers; I’m just a guy who writes about anime on the internet. Perhaps it’s a simple question of optimism and pessimism, but then again, perhaps not. In any case, good fiction presents us with opportunities to think about ideas that don’t have easy answers, and even if I didn’t love all the other stuff, for this alone, I would love Dr. Stone.
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