But it’s not random. Not fair. Not balanced. Entire civilizations of gut bacteria wiped out! To them it was like he wiped out entire planets instead of life forms!
if only free markets worked that way. Countries that make lots of would panic and try to horde what is left. You also have half the worker to raise the animals, crops, and everything else we need. Half the number of driver does not mean we need half the roads
So what you’re saying is, the “Up the Thanos” strategy could have worked if Antman simply flew up there while Thanos was emptying his bowels due to the changes to his gut biome. The only difficulty would be swimming up the stream of liquid shit ejecting out at high speeds.
100% of the cells of the 50% of people that die, would die.
100% of the cells of the 50% of people that live, would live.
Overall, 50% of human cells still die
Snapping half the life forms also snaps half of the world’s gut bacteria. If we removed half of the gut bacteria from those who weren’t snapped, that would be removing 75% of the universe’s gut bacteria, not 50%.
Why assume that though? The Infinity Gauntlet isn’t a Monkey’s Paw, it reads beyond the words and answers the intent of the wielder. So much so, in fact, that it even includes subconscious thoughts and feelings as part of its interpretation. I see often these ideas predicated on the Gauntlet working on Monkey Paw logic despite that being clearly and specifically not how it operates within canon.
50% of what Thanos considers life since it was powered by his will. Since he seemed to imply that nature (plants and animals) where not part of this it’s safe to assume it was sapient life only.
Do we know if Thanos believed in life at conception or birth? Does someone with a donated organ count as one life, two or zero since they wouldn’t be alive without the organ. If I only ate one foot, or how about one toe, does that make me a cannibal?
Yeah, the Gauntlet wouldn’t leave anything that can’t survive on its own, like gut bacteria, nor remove anything that’s needed for the proper functioning of another lifeform. It’s why there weren’t any fetuses falling to the ground after the pregnant women vanished.
I would assume that conjoined twins would be a both-or-neither situation, since removing one would leave a gaping wound in the other even if they could have survived independently with surgery,
It kinda sidesteps the whole thing, since the standard is life that is dependent on other life to survive is not counted separately. Like the conjoined twins thing I mentioned.
Which is, of course, just a bullshit justification. Reality-altering power, and your solution is to kill people? Not create more resources, or make it so living things require less resources? He’s an unimaginative idiot.
Wait. If that is how it happened that means when half the population came back they all came back with 0% of their gut bacteria. Holy shit that would be horrible. The population doubles overnight and every single person and animal has the worse runs of their life. Meanwhile they can’t get the nutritional needs no matter how much food they eat. Spend the next few months while their family cries as they wither away surrounded by food.
No, the desired effects was to undo Thanos’s snap, not double the human population. This means that all of the gut bacteria got unsnapped exactly the same as everyone else
Yeah you’re correct, my bad. In the films, however.
edit: I guess they kind of tackle the issue, although they for some reason seemed to focus more on where these people go rather than how to handle the sudden resource strain
Don’t worry, the litter of bodies from people that were on planes or high speed trains, or on ships will provide nutrients for the starving masses.
Then suicides and murders as people return to find their loved ones remarried or dead because they committed suicide, should also provide another nutritional bump in the following weeks.
Then the following World War should deal with everyone else.
This is one of the many reasons why I say Tony Stark is a bigger villain to the universe than Thanos.
A sudden LACK of mouths is much more favorable than suddenly DOUBLING them.
I order to keep his family alive, he just brings them all back, many years out of place in a universe completely and totally unprepared for their arrival. Not to mention all the people who died AFTER the snap, as a direct result of the snap, will still be dead.
Tony stark is supposed to be smart. So he should know the consequences of his action, and completely disregards it.
And the series pretends he did the universe a favor.
I think the real problem would be ecosystem collapse.
Ecosystems evolve as complex, interdependent systems with nonlinearities. What happens when you kill off 50% of pollinators in a single instant? 50% of plankton? 50% of grasses? The problem with nonlinear systems is that killing off half of A and half of B won’t have a linear effect if the relationship depends on having minimum levels of A. Assume it’s a random function such that we kill off half of all plants and on top of that half of all rhizobium bacteria which fix nitrogen for many plant species. Now we’re killing off potentially all plants that depend on having a stable population of rhizobium bacteria, which will have a cascading effect throughout the already devastated ecosystem. It’s all about tipping points and sigmoid curves and such.
The truth is that it was a completely stupid idea, and it was what finally broke my love of the marvel franchise. Either you have runaway ecosystem collapses, or the populations will simply return back to their original levels to hit their ecological carrying capacities again. Kill off half of termites, and you’ll probably be back to the same level of termites in a decade or less. Even with people (using the word inclusively across all technological species), you’d have a population surge that within less than a century or so would be brought back to carrying capacities. Populations self-regulate via interaction with their ecosystems. You’re either going to end up with 100% extinctions or system recovery to current levels within a very brief period via normal reproduction and evolutionary dynamics.
It was a massive effort undertaken by an immortal and massively intelligent person that is inherently flawed because the marvel writers apparently never took Biology 101-102. I’m not saying it was GoT season 8 levels of bad, but after watching those last couple of movies I not only never rewatched them, but I checked out of the mcu pretty much entirely after having rewatched the previous movies multiple times each.
The movies did a great job at presenting thanos as an extremist that sincerely wants the greater good by questionable means, but it falls apart because his grand plan is just so stupid. The only way to reconcile the sympathetic character with the dumb plan is to point out he’s “THANOS THE MAD TITAN”, not “THANOS THE TITAN THAT FULLY CONSIDERS THE CONSEQUENCES OF HIS ACTIONS”
Would have been much better if they just kept his original motivation from the comics: Death is a hot lady and horny thanos does the snap as a gift to her
My problem isn’t that he’s a Mad Titan, but that the plot makes Ready Player One look like Les Miserables. It’s basically a concept script you’d expect to see coming out from the writer pool from 30 Rock where Tracy Jordan has a six armed alien outfit.
We all know GoT died the death it did because they had absolutely no idea how to wrap it up and just wanted to be done with it. The mcu money should have been more than enough to do a proper job with transitioning the storyline, but they felt the need to do something blockbusting with it. I would rather have had a Watchmen style conclusion where some people move into retirement homes while the next generation comes forward, but their need to go over the top just turned it into a ludicrous script.
I really don’t care that much. I was getting a bit tired of the franchise anyway (although the new GotG was pretty great), but it always kind of sucks when you can tell that the creatives involved just don’t care anymore. Contrast that with something like the final episode of MASH.
That’s assuming that half of the gut biomes of all humans was just left floating around. No, it’s more likely that the biomes were snapped out of existence with their hosts.
well when you get snapped all that’s left is dust. perhaps that dust is all the microbes in your body that survive the snap. It clearly takes up far less space that if it just disintegrated you.
Bacteria multiply crazy fast… as long as the food source was uninterrupted I’d almost guarantee you most people’s microbiome would be fully recovered in just a few hours and they’d not even notice.
It depends on how the snap worked. It was 50% of all life in the universe. Was that 50% of every species? Or just 50% of all living things? If it’s the latter it’s possible some species were missed entirely while others were completely wiped out.
But no one lost 50% of their own cells, so clearly if it’s alive and can be classified as a single organism. Is the gut micro biome an independent body of organisms, or is it just like any other organ of the human body, and thus would have been unaffected by the snap?
Either everyone lost almost exactly 50% of their gut biome, or, about half of all living organisms lost 100% of it, or, no one lost any part of it. Those are the only three possibilities.
The more interesting question is were viruses affected? Or did the magic stones not consider them life?
Our doubling time isn’t that bad either. We reached 4 billion in 1970s. If we round up the current population to 8 billion that’s about 50 years. That’s all that thanos would add by the snap. Even less probably because we have better medicine now so it would be easier to reach that number.
I kind of expect developed countries would maintain the current trend of being slightly below replacement value. Probably depends on the psychological impact of the snap. People tend to have fewer children when they know the ones they have are safe.
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