That would imply that 50 percent of the snapped people’s biomes remained behind. All of the produce in the grocery stores would be covered in an airborne mist of E. coli, and snapped surgeons that were mid-operation would give their patients staph infections, assuming the suriviving surgery team was able to stablize and close them up before they died anyway. Neat.
Also when those snapped people returned with the half of their biomes that also got snapped, you would get a sequel to the diarrhea. Diarrhea 2: Electric Boogapoo.
Do viruses get snapped too or na
technically viruses aren’t alive. They just use cellular machinery to replicate and thats it.
Eh, it’s not really that cut and dry. You could debate either way with plenty of evidence, in the end it’s really a limit to the semantics of language
Edit: here’s a neat article that talks about it
Do viruses get snapped too or na
And da babies in-utero? Did the Infinity Gauntlet go by conception or 24-weeks?
There were zero reports I’ve heard from any TV, movie, or comic reference to the snap of unborn (but possibly viable) babies being left behind (by any species even) when the pregnant mother disappeared in the snap. That suggests the Infinity Gauntlet doesn’t consider the unborn as a separate individual until birth.
unborn (but possibly viable) babies being left behind (by any species even) when the pregnant mother disappeared in the snap.
This scenario didn’t even enter my head when I posed the question. That’s some Stephen King-level imagery though—a snapped mother disappearing only for an amniotic sac to drop in her place.
Following that logic conjoined twins would either both be snapped or neither would.
I think the Gauntlet counted any beings that either depended on another to live or supported another to live as all one unit for simplicity’s sake.
I would love a comic series where each Infinity Stone has a representative entity of some kind and we get to see the “thought process” each goes through in fulfilling the request of its wielder. I’m envisioning a format like the Pixar movie “Inside Out” except each stone’s entity is very judgy on how the wielder is using it.
“Ugh, Goddamit Dr Strange, how many more times do you want to do this Dormamu thing. Its getting really repetitive.” - Time stone
Or when multiple stones have to work together, they have to hash out what each is going to do to fulfill the desired wish. The conversation between all the stones during “the snap” being the longest and most complicated conversation with questions coming up like “okay Mr Soul Stone smart guy, what about pregnant women?! Is that one soul or two, huh?”
And da babies in-utero? Did the Infinity Gauntlet go by conception or 24-weeks?
Now you got this idea in my head, if it would have been possible to know if the Infinity Gauntlet considered conception, couldn’t a species, lets say humans, knowing “the snap” was a possible risk, create massive stores of zygotes kept on ice? Lets say 10 zygotes to every 1 living human. After the snap of “half” that would mean that instead of 50% of humans disappearing it would only have been 2.5%.
Moreover, since every other species would have lost 50% and been in chaos it would have been prime opportunity to conquer other species still in disarray.
Why would zygotes get dusted at a higher rate than adults?
Same rate, but higher * total number* of zygotes dusted because there would be far more zygotes than grown humans.
Finally someone asks the real question. Is there an objective definition to life that Virus may or may not fall under? Or would it depend on Thano’s subjective opinion on the matter?
The scientific definition of life changes constantly, but viruses more often than not fall under “not alive.”
Throughout, viruses have rarely been considered alive. More than 120 definitions of life exist today, and most require metabolism, a set of chemical reactions that produce energy. Viruses do not metabolize. They also don’t fit some other common criteria. They do not have cells. They cannot reproduce independently. Viruses are inert packages of DNA or RNA that cannot replicate without a host cell.
Thanos’ plan was unmitigated garbage anyway.
Humanity reached 4B in 1975 and hit 8B in 2022. On that basis, if half of humanity died when Thanos snapped his fingers 50 years later we’d be back to 8B people again.
——— Edited to billions not millions because I wrote it while under the influence of stupidity.
Are… you high?You know that back when I last checked in 2020ish there were 8 billion people, right? Maybe that’s what you meantEdit surely you had to have meant that. The US alone has almost half a billion people. Most countries have well over that number so I’m attributing it to mistype
That’s obviously what they meant. There was probably some translation error. Just cut people some slack, everyone makes small mistakes from time to time. There’s a few (atleast 2) languages where the native word for billion starts with an m and the word for trillion starts with a b.
Yeah that’s why I added my edit.
I shouldn’t have led with the “are you high” either. Yesterday was a bad day for me. My apologies to the commenter.
That is NOT how species replicate. There are many factors where that number comes from. Including food and space to keep them. I read in college the max for humans is something like 10 million. But most scientists think it’s a already slowing down due to the struggles everyone deals with.
Building additional supply depots removes the cap
That is not the only factor. But yes it would increase food capacity. But species are very aware of their drain on an eco system. We are starting to become more aware. But we know killing off one bug will effect harvests that effect everything including our food’s food.
I think he’s talking about vidya
You mean 10 billion?
Large cities can have more than 10 million people, so I assume you mean the other thing.
Bluntly, half of the occupants of residences would be gone, and their stuff would be up for grabs. It would take a few years to stabilize afterwards, but it would mostly be business as usual for those who survived the snap (apart from the obvious mental trauma).
Enough homes exist for the number of people who live here now, whether those homes are condos, apartments, detached homes, townhouses, or otherwise. A lot of people would be able to move somewhere more permanent, because the housing market would crash pretty hard.
As we refill the homes the population would naturally return to the same level of growth we have seen previously… So after a few years, maybe a decade, max, humanity would be back on the population train straight to 8B again for sometime between 2050 and 2075.
Humans don’t really follow the same population rules as apply to animals, bacteria, or other organisms in general.
I meant 10 billion yes. And this study was specifically for humans. Saying we aren’t animals and we don’t live by nature’s rules just simply isn’t factual. We do things a lot differently but no matter what we still have instincts and those instincts drive us. We can’t just take out the hardwiring.
We can’t take it out, but we can over rule it with reason and logic. We can decide to do something that’s not our “natural” choice.
I know plenty of childfree couples, yet our biological drive is to create children to perpetuate our genes in the species.
There’s a lot of exceptions to the natural human drives that most people experience.
That is just one example. There are many natural drives that we still use. We eat. We breathe air. We drink water. There are plenty of natural drives that we cannot overcome. We are animals and all animals have things that affect their decisions.
Except fasting, sometimes to the point of death. Food is available but we can choose not to eat it.
Breathing can also be overcome by willpower and sapience, you can hold your breath as long as you like (until you pass out and you lose your sapience by way of being unconscious, and the autonomic systems engage which continue to respirate for you.
People have a choice to drink the same way fasting works.
Even fight or flight can be overcome. A notable example of overcoming some of the most basic instincts is the self immolation that some people have committed where they simply sit and burn rather than react in any other way (screaming, running, stop/drop/rolling, etc). There was a very public and newsworthy instance of this from a monk, who literally sat there, basically mediating while he burned to death.
Pretty much anything that you feel a drive for, can be overcome, as long as you have the sapience and willpower to overcome it. Autonomic functions are basically immutable, so something like breathing is impossible to stop if you are not conscious to actively prevent it.
Sapience and willpower can overcome any natural drive or desire as we see fit.
I will recognize that getting people to agree to do something on a mass scale is generally impossible. Like herding cats… It’s doubly hard when that thing goes against their more basic desires.
It’s been known to happen, but the instances are few IMO. Something like reproduction however, without a law or government mandate, it would be hard to prevent people from making more people and growing the population. Most notable example of this is countries where there are limits on how many children you can have. They’re successful, with some fairly horrendous stories of the consequence of non-compliance, and horror stories of what people have done to try to abide by the laws while still having what they desire (perhaps a child of a certain gender?).
One of the natural drives is to have children. Multiple of them. Some, like me and my friends, have chosen not to do that. Sapience > natural drive. Limiting how many children a person may have is difficult, as we’ve witnessed from the countries that tried it, so making MORE children because we have the room/resources for it becomes a more natural outcome if the population was suddenly cut in half.
Hell, if such a thing happened, and by some miracle my partner and I both survived the culling, I’d have a serious conversation with them about maybe changing our minds on the childfree thing. But that’s a discussion that won’t happen because Thanos isn’t real and can’t hurt us.
Killing 50% of your gut bacteria is a big nothing.
These things reproduce on the timescale of hours.
I kill 90% of my sourdough starter every time I feed it, and it bounces back the same day.
Nah the 50% left would quickly replace what was snapped away to the limits of their environment. They multiply fast.
50% of all ≠ 50% per person
If the 50% are homogeneously spread -and it’s implied that it is-, then one may assume 50% per person also applies. Like how he didn’t leave 50% of planets alone and purge the rest.
I would think it’s basically a coin flip for each living thing. It’s possible, for example, that all humans survive, however the probability is so astronomically small, it’s functionally impossible.
Same with gut biome. Even with several billion attempts, the probability that even 60% of any individual’s trillion gut microbes get snapped would be essentially functionally impossible.
Just to give an idea of the unlikelihood we’re talking about here, you can model this as a Bernoulli process with a binomial distribution.
If N is the number of beings potentially snapped, then (√N)/2 is the standard deviation. (If you’re curious about why, you can read more here.) So for 8.2 billion people, the standard deviation is ~90,000. The chance of being more than ~3 standard deviations below the mean is 0.1%. That means there’s only a 0.1% chance of snapping less than 4,099,720,200 people.
E. Coli reproduces so fast that a population can double in size in half an hour, and human feces is 50% bacteria by weight.
If your gut microbiome got snapped it’d be back so fast you wouldn’t even notice. Bacteria are kinda scary.
Wait, do you have a source for the 50% number?
The second most significant ingredient after water is bacterial biomass — both alive and dead organisms; this makes up 25–54 percent of the dry weight of poop.
My bad – looks like I misread the Google summary. A healthy turd is 75% water, and of what’s left, around 25-50% is made up of microbes.
Or the 50% of all people that got snapped took 50% of the gut bacteria with them, leaving the rest with no loss to their gut biomes. (taps forehead)
or the survivors lost all but bacteria, and the remainders were left over in places of the snapped people
Ohh so that’s what the dust is. The leftover gut bacteria.
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Wait… How is that different?
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But half still die regardless of how fast they reproduce/come back
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I have a math problem for you.
10x0,5 + 20x0,5 + 40x0,5 = 5+10+20= 35
(10+20+40)x0,5 = 70x0,5 = 35
You see where this is going?
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Does that mean for the people that got snapped, some will leave some of their sperm behind?
And pregnant woman might leave their fetus behind.
No because a fetus doesn’t mean the criteria of having a soul (:
Also sperm most certainly doesn’t
There was never any such ideas being part of it. It affected plantlife and bacteria as well. The idea of a soul to begin with is not even supported by science, although most people consider it to have some kind of validity, even if it’s not quite definable. But the relevant issue is that it’s all life period.
Look, we’re in the realm where the guy decided to remove 50% of all life… as a resource conservation attempt.
Lovely movies, but the “guy’s a literal death cultist” required way less suspension of disbelief. Jilted incel Thanos pining after an annoyed Aubrey Plaza or whoever would have been way more timely, too.
But if we’re doing it this way… 50% of the plants, algae and plankton would have died too. XKCD MUST have figured out what that’d do to the atmosphere by now, right?
pining after an annoyed Aubrey Plaza
Can’t have your bad guy be that relatable. Everyone would just be cheering against the avengers.
Wouldn’t 50% of them die at the same time as the creatures that they live inside? Like unexisting 50% of humans would in fact unexist 50% of the bacteria in the humans who went poof.
How does this argument make sense?
If it’s all a truly random selection, which I believe it was, then half of all people would cease to exist, leaving half of their gut biomes behind, still alive (albeit briefly). I guess the end result would be the snapped people leaving behind a mist of gross intestinal bacteria which would itself mostly die out without a host. Meaning much more than half of all gut biome bacteria would be killed as a result.
Of course it would make more sense to consider a person and their gut flora as one being, but the joke is about how stupid the initial conception of Thanos’ plan is, not creating an academically rigorous argument.
This brings up an interesting point. The snap would have to run a multi pass check to make sure that by killing half of all organic life, it’s not causing the other half to die off. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be confirming to the will of the user, but then does it “scan” individual life types independently or as an ecosystem unto themselves, in which case is there precedence? Do food producing things get a pass, because otherwise the snap is just shortcut the process for half of the population. If it does leave the food producing ones alone, then really he’s just snapping away apex predators.
Well no, That would be 75% if the other 50% already existed within the organisms he killed.
It literally specifies of the survivors.
