Just How Rare Are Ability Users, Anyway? (I did the math.)
*whips out calculator* Well, with @scalpel-mom-mori‘s help, I may have an answer to the question that has been plaguing me since I looked into Asagiri’s worldbuilding. God help me.
So, I looked at confirmed ability users who work in Yokohama, and counting the Hunting Dogs, there are 31. If I place BSD as occurring around 2010 off of how widespread flip phones are with a few smartphones, Yokohama’s population is 3.689 million. Going off of these numbers, 0.000840336% of people are Gifted. In easier terms, 1 in every 119,000 people.
Ah, but I have a feeling this number is still a bit high. Due to the Book and the fact that the Port Mafia and the ADA both operate out of Yokohama, there seems to be a higher than normal concentration of ability users in the city. After all, Atsushi wasn’t born there, and neither was Kenji. So, accounting for a slight skew in favor of ability users, let’s say about 1 in 120,000 people are Gifted. Plus it makes the math easier.
Now, worldwide, there’s about 7.8 billion people. This would mean the worldwide Gifted population is about 65,000 people, which is about the population of the Cayman Islands.
A city like NYC, with about 8.4 million people, would have around 70 Gifted.
However, this number accounts for people with artificial abilities (Chuuya) and those who weren’t born with abilities but inherited them (Tsujimura and Kyouka). Subtracting them from the Yokohama total means Yokohama only has 28 naturally-born Gifted.
28 Gifted out of 3.689 million means about 1 in every 131,750 people is naturally Gifted, which is still skewed in favor of ability users.
Using these new numbers, the worldwide naturally Gifted population is somewhere around 59,203. Because of the skew, this puts the number of actual natural-Gifted closer to 59,000 or lower.
NYC would therefore have around 64 Gifted or slightly less, depending on how unusual a city like Yokohama is (and, consequentially, how much the Yokohama data is skewed).
Now, this is a good enough for most purposes, but I watched Dead Apple today, so let’s take a look at Shibusawa and see if his data matches up with my calculations above.
According to Kunikida in the briefing at the beginning of the movie, 128 fog-related incidents were confirmed. The map shown basically puts these incidents at population hotspots around the world–big cities. Now, we get several shots of Shibusawa’s collection room, which shows all his ability crystals arranged in a grid.
I had to use some rough guestimation because many of the shots are at inconvenient angles and the goddamn room is circular. From what I could tell, abilities are stacked 2 deep in sections of 8 visible rows with 7 columns. There are 20 sections divided by pillars, each of which conceal a single column of 8 abilities, also stacked 2 deep. However, one section is a door, so there are only 19 sections of abilities on the first floor.
(8 rows * 7 columns * 2 deep * 19 sections) + (20 dividers * 8 abilities * 2 deep)
Given what is visible, it seems that there are 2,448 abilities on Shibusawa’s first floor. There’s a second floor, but there aren’t enough clear shots of it in either the movie or manga adaptation for me to guestimate with any degree of accuracy. So he really has even more than that.
To use a technical term, that’s a shit ton of abilities. If the Yokohama data is correct, that’s 4% of the world’s ability users. Again, this doesn’t even account for Shibusawa’s second floor.
For the sake of argument, let’s just say that his smaller second floor contains half of what was on the first floor. Total, that’s 3,672 abilities, or 6% of the world’s Gifted. That’s how many people Shibusawa killed for their abilities.
Now, he hit 128 cities according to the Special Operations Division. On average, he picked up about 28 ability users in each city (rounded down). If my math for Shibusawa is at all accurate, it actually props up my first calculation of the approximate Gifted population worldwide. Why?
That’s how many natural-born Gifteds live in Yokohama.
*snaps calculator shut* Thank you for reading, and do please feel free to correct my math or add on. I find it highly suspicious that my math worked out so well.
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