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%.
Not if 50% of the gut bacteria of the people who got snapped just like fell to the ground, or got stuck to that dusty shit.
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.
Yeah, we gotta remember the gauntlet includes the mind stone and the soul stone. Things smarter than just simply granting wishes, as you said.
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,
Thanos does not believe that life begins at conception confirmed.
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.
You just can’t reconcile Thanos being pro-life and pro-half of all life.
Just like with someone who is pro-death penalty, Thanos cannot claim to be pro-life when he murdered half of the universe.
I mean, does it erase 50% of all life, or just roughly 50%?
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.
Except animals definitely were - remember endgame, Barton went into the office looked out the window to a small garden and found birds had appeared. Very indicative that the snap included animals
That’s just government propaganda to make you think that birds are real and not drones.
Makes you wonder what happened to fetuses. I think it’s fair to assume Thanos isn’t pro-life
He was worried about limited resources, so I would assume that non-sapient fauna would be included.
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?
That’s what the dust was.
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
Imagine the famine if the next day the world population doubled. Considering that the agricultural production was also reduced
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.
Fuck Tony stark.
Ok another one. What if the snap happened in late 2019 and suddenly there are billions of people who all need to be vaccinated at once?
Now this is good Infinity Gauntlet critique! This is a legit problem that honestly should have been tackled in the comics
If I remember correctly, it only took a short time to undo the snap in the comics, none of this 5 years later stuff
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
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So many fecal transplants performed and probiotics sold.
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.
Yeah 50% loss isn’t servere at all for gut biome loss. If you’ve ever been on antibiotics you’ve likely experienced that or worse.
And the big thing that fucks people up is not only the high loss but also the antibiotics slowing or stopping additional reproduction. That keeps the population depressed for an extended period and then you get the shits.
Basically they’d feel mildly bad for a few days?
Bingo, or you would, I’m a bit more sensitive so I get slightly worse symptoms. But nothing dramatic.
This assumes it hits everybody’s gut biome equally tho. What if it was random distribution? Some people would get totally fucked lol.
Wonder if it would go down the list of people by name or by birth day if ot wasn’t equally distributed
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Try a few hours maybe. Antibiotics are bad for that long because they keep your micro biome low for a long time.
I’d honestly expect the result to be about as bad as food poisoning which can lasts 48 hours tops. Hence why I said days.
Or had a wicked hangover
I think is depends on which micro-organisms get destroyed.
The snap didn’t always kill 50% of the people in an area. Sometimes it was just one or two people out of dozens and other times it was all except one person in an area.
How do the forces behind the infinity stones classify and quantify different micro-organisms? would it treat the good kinds and bad kinds equally? Would it distinguish between different kinds of micro-life at all?
I said this farther up in the thread, but in some places the infinity stones killed all except one person in an area full of people, and in other places it was just one or two people that got dusted out of dozens. What if it’s a situation like that inside of people’s gut biomes? Like some people getting all their good bacteria killed and some people only getting their bad bacteria killed?
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.
But your point is a good one either way.
How long can gut microbiomes survive after the host is dead? Wouldn’t a dead host essentially mean near 100% fatality for the gut microbiome meaning that anybody killed by a Thanos snap would also mean a 100% kill rate of their gut bacteria, leaving any survivors to basically keep all 100% of their gut bacteria?
Well the implication in-universe is that the actual snap was killing 50% of all life, not any death afterwards. If we’re counting bacterial life as individual living beings in this 50%, then it shouldn’t matter whether the host itself got snapped or not, since the bacteria are “separate” and would be left behind after a snap…
Does this mean that for every human that disappeared there should have been massive piles of bacteria and shit left where they were last standing
That’s the dust you see floating away when someone gets snapped.
Even better, your microbiome covers your entire body (anything exposed to air) and into any organs that are part of the waste processing system.
So briefly after the snap you would see a vague outline of the creature, with a well defined digestive tract (mouth to anus), eyes, nose, ears, sinus system, and bladder. Because bacteria, viruses, and fungi are all quite small, the cluster of gut organisms would probably fall, and the rest would drift away. Imagine being in a crowded space and just breathing in all those bacteria, viruses, and fungi… 🤮 I bet a lot of people would die from infections.
If the creature had any parasitic infections, like a tapeworm, that could also be left behind.
Don’t forget lice!
Eyelash mites that we all have
Right so then couldn’t it follow that human survivors may have no impact on their gut bacteria? If there are only two people and their microbiomes, and the snap kills 1 person and their entire microbiome, then the surviving person would have no or microscopically small impact on their bacteria assuming an even distribution of bacteria across the two people. Basically the OOP is assuming that of the people that died, half of their bacteria would survive, impacting survivors’ microbiomes, rather than assuming 100% of bacteria would die with their hosts, leaving the surviving population’s bacteria intact.
Well yeah, but what about planes? If the pilots died I’m pretty sure that’s a whole plane of dead people.
Depends on the micro-biome actually. An expert chef that’s always taste-testing new things would have a very healthy micro-biome, but a lot of autistic people that only like eating a very short list of things would have their micro-biomes wrecked really bad
It wasn’t an even 50% from everyone though. Some people had no loss of gut bacteria, other people had 75 - 100% snapped away
That’s not how statistics works. Every person will lose almost exactly 50%.
Estimates for the number of bacterial cells within the average 70kg Human male is around 38 trillion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome
Do you know what the chance of 100% of them being snapped is?
0.50 ^ (38 trillion) = 0.0000000000000…
The calculator ran out of zeros.
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.
If it’s alive it had a 50/50 shot.
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?
It’s random and it effected the entire universe. Can your calculator tell you how big the universe is?
No. The bacteria eliminated was all in the people who were dusted for convenience.
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 you wipe out the people you wipe out the biome. You just want more than 50% killed.
I mean Thanos stick was that it was random and dispassionate, and thus morally not biased towards specific values or ideals. Well except for the individual gut bacteria.
but how do the forces behind the infinity stones determine who gets dusted? In some places is was all except one person in a large group of people dusted and only sometimes was it half of the population of an area.
That means that part of what was dusted away must’ve been micro-organisms like bacteria in people’s guts.
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.
Whomever wrote the code for the synchronous kill must have been sweating bullets. So many ways that could go wrong.
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.
If we’re playing by those rules, then only 50% of every human would die, because we’re made of smaller living organisms
That’s simply not true by the current definition of organism.
With all the Marvel alien species it was probably true for some of them though.
Consider the Portuguese manowar, which is a colony organism
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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 dieThat’s some Maxwell’s Demon level of precision.
So no different than most days
I worry about you, Lemmings. Eat some fiber or something.
I ate fiber but now my internet is down. what do I do?
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.
Operation Enter Thanussy
Doesn’t that multiply really fast? We’d be back in like a day, maybe two.
Yeah rapid growth. Maybe a day or two of gut trouble but back to normal pretty quick as long as your diet hasn’t changed too much.
And that’s possible cuz half of all livestock just vanished, so now you’re paying 85 bucks for a steak.
Half the livestock and half the demand. I don’t see much problem.
Yeah but you know they’d use that as an excuse to jack up the prices anyway
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
The remaining cattle had to be dusted.
Oh and I thought Avengers was a documentary.
I power blasted diarrhea a lot in my day.
Now I power blast giant turds and I fart way more…I owe it to a high fiber diet.
Before metamucil:
After metamucil:
Non credible defense is skewing older and more colon-health conscious than I would have initially expected…
TIL.
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.
What if there was an endangered animal with only one surviving individual? Does Thanos snap half of the animal?
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I’ll be honest, I could use a good powerblasting every once in a while.
I felt like I needed one this morning. Instead I got the longest turd I’ve ever seen. It hit the water before it left my arse.
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Two words: taco bell
Magnesium cirate and sugar-free gummy bears combined will get you there and regret what you have done.
Could have been a monkey paw situation. “Half of all life disappeared, you say?” every living thing suddenly missing their left half “Done!”
Everything’s all right then?
Get out.
