A quixotic quest for the ultimate Dragon Ball power-level answers

polygon.com:

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and Dragon Ball Z power levels.” — Mark Twain

In 1907, a Massachusetts physician named Duncan MacDougall performed several experiments on dying dogs and people. MacDougall hoped to weigh his subjects’ souls as they died, measuring their wasting bodies on precisely calibrated scales. In the end, one of the dogs lost weight, and five of the people lost and gained weight in unpredictable ways. But one subject lost 21 grams at the moment of death. After millennia of evolution from the pneuma in The Iliad and qi of ancient Chinese humoral medicine,this figure of 21 grams was the first attempt at quantifying the vital force of a human being. MacDougall was never able to put any more dying people on his scales, and his experiments were fundamentally flawed, of course, but his dismal nonsense represents an attempt to bridge the gap not only between the quantitative and the qualitative but between the profane and the sacred, between the known and the felt. It’s hard to blame people for being tempted by Promethean power: they learn the error of their ways, one way or another.

I do blame Akira Toriyama, though, for introducing this morality play in the pages of Dragon Ball Z in 1988. Just as it backfired on MacDougall, it backfired on Toriyama. And now, after mining Dragon Ball Z power-level numbers, it backfires on me. I wanted to understand just how strong Goku and his fellow fighters were based on years of fan-driven mathematical speculation. I wanted to come to a greater conclusion. But I severely underestimated the imagination of forum-dwellers.

The soul of Toriyama’s was once mysterious. In the original Dragon Ball, ki was a mystical energy developed through meditation and