9mo ago

I'd have to hear her argument, but...

135 comments

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
  
  Do viruses get snapped too or na
  And da babies in-utero? Did the Infinity Gauntlet go by conception or 24-weeks?
  
  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?
  
  You've opened your inbox to a scientific debate that has raged since virology began.
  
  technically viruses aren't alive. They just use cellular machinery to replicate and thats it.
- So just how much diarrhea DID Thanos cause, anyway?
  
  A shit ton. Bum dum tss.

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.
- Yeah, I have been on antibiotics that wiped out most of my gut bacteria. It was easy to upset my stomach for a few months, then I was fine.
  
  I had the same experience with norovirus this spring.
  Probiotics did the trick, but it was t so much fun.

50% of all ≠ 50% per person
- Right? Taking even the people who disappeared into account, and their gut biomes, would you not consider them all as part of all life?
  If so, there may be some survivors with all of their guy biomes perfectly intact, and others who get unfortunately zilched.

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.

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.
- Yeah, worst case scenario stock prices for probiotic yoghurt would increase.
  
  Looks like Jamie Lee Curtis is joining the MCU.
- 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.
  https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324254#:~:text=The%20second%20most%20significant%20ingredient,walls%20of%20the%20gastrointestinal%20tract.
  
  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.

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.
- Each bacteria is an individual living organism. So I'm guessing that (within this framework) the humans disappeared, but only ~50% (it would average out to 50% across the entire population) of their gut biome (or I guess any other living organism within them) disappeared.
  And as such, in people who did not disappear, ~50% (on avg) of their gut biome also disappeared.
  The math checks out...
  
  So you are saying for the 50%who disappeared, 50% of their gut bacteria fell out (and died)
  
  Yes I agree with this analysis

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.
- 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
  
  10 million sounds great, maybe the housing market would finally self correct.
  
  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.
- ~~Are.. you high?~~ You know that back when I last checked in 2020ish there were 8 billion people, right? Maybe that's what you meant
  Edit 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
  
  They might not be a native English speaker. In my language (Norwegian), the word for “billion” is “milliard”. I think that’s also the case in German.
  
  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.
  
  Oops. Yup, utter failed to put Bs! Put it down to not having had enough coffee today!

She makes a compelling argument.
Subscribes

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.
  
  Thank you for the head cannon update. now marvels version of death is played by Aubrey plaza and it just fucking works
- Isn't "an annoyed Aubrey Plaza" redundant?
- I don't get why we keep acting like this is such a strange idea. Thanos saw the universe as over-populated. So he could have changed the framework of the universe to accommodate this bloat, or he could have preserved the universe's structure as it is and tamped down the numbers to fix the bloat.
  The key here is understanding that he doesn't see the universe as flawed, he sees the life as flawed; why would he fix the unbroken part of the equation to accommodate what he sees as the broken part?
  It's like if your garden gets overrun by gophers - do you eradicate the gophers to get your garden back or do you decide "well I guess I'll just double the size of my garden so we can both share it!"?
  Also the Infinity Gauntlet is neither a genie's lamp nor a Monkey's Paw. There's no clever tricks, no perfect wording needed. It's based on his intent. He may have said "half of all life" but any amount of nuance he wanted to enact in that moment of omnipotence, he had. I'm sure half of the plants didn't die just because he didn't say the word "sentient"
  
  Well, if you're gonna be really nerdy about it, keeping the ability of life to reproduce intact and culling 50% of the population once only gets you one slice of the doubling time back. I'm not the first to point out that Thanos started a galactic war to send the population of Earth back to 1975. Tony's kid would still be alive by the time humanity thwarts Thanos through sheer horniness.
  He'd have been way better off by making every sentient species like 90% less likely to conceive or whatever. Except then most animals and plants would go extinct, so what's the point. It's really very unclear what "resource" Thanos is trying to preserve.
  So... you know, if his take doesn't make sense in the first place, and we do know that he at least impacted animals, because the movie explicitly shows a bird showing up as a confirmation that the un-snap worked, it's not a crazy idea to ponder all the other ways it'd be weird, counterintuitive or self-defeating. Dead gut biomes, suddenly liberated E. coli, sudden deserts and unexpected outcomes of random distributions are all fun thought experiments, I suppose.
  But mostly, it shows that it raises enough questions to break suspension of disbelief a little, which I think is the biggest sin of that particular change. The comic take is absurd, but at least it settles the question.
- Would have made waaaaay more sense if he said "half of all sentient life", but I bet focus groups revealed that the average Marvel fan has no idea what "sentient" means.
  It's still a bad idea, but at least it's a bad idea that historically has been believed by a lot of people. It's got a whole name, Malthusianism.

Come to think about it, whenever a macroscopic organism - ie animals - died it would leave behind about half the microbes living on and in them. When those poor fools got dusted it should have left a puddle of horrible slime on the ground.
- Maybe that was accounted for in the dust/flake animation of the unlucky deceased.

Thanos' snap wouldn't kill 50% of each survivors' gut microbiome, it would kill 50% of all the lil buggies that compromise all gut microbiomes, and if the snap effects individuals randomly, you'd see a normal distribution (I think, I haven't taken stats in a decade). So some survivors would retain 100% of their microbiome, some would lose it all, with a bell curve in between, probably with the peak around 50%.
- That bell curve would be extremely narrow. You have so many lil buggies that basically every human survivor would lose ~50% buggies.

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.
  
  Well OOP said all life, include bacteria, then they most certainly include sperm and fetus.

I think the intention was sentient life as having Thanos stop the film to explain the terms and conditions of his snap would've impacted the pacing of the film.
- He coulda just slipped the word "sentient" in to the monologue where he explains his plan. I don't think that would have impacted pacing at all.

See... see this is the story content that belongs in the extended cut.

As someome who is fucking stupid, what ghe hell is a gut biome and why would 50% of the world population disappearing affect it at all? And why would people be power blasting their bathrooms with diarrhea
- Your gut is full of friendly bacteria that help you digest your food and keep everything running smoothly and efficiency. This vast community of bacteria is called a gut microbiome. People with gut problems like inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome tend to have a much less diverse gut micribiome. Taking a broad spectrum antibiotic can devastate your gut microbiome, letting the bad bacteria thrive while the good ones are offstage, sometimes leading to some of the same symptoms that people with IBD and IBS might encounter, and it can take months to recover.
  Killing 50% of all living things might include 50% of gut microbia, resulting in the potential for bloating, gassiness, stomach cramps, and potentially diarrhoea.
  
  Ahhh that makes sense. Thank you for this explanation, I appreciate it very much.
- Because it just makes sense. Snap, diarrhea. It's simple.
  
  Oh, okay i figured that much but wasnt sure

Even if that were how it worked, which I don't accept, it wouldn't be months, it would be a week or two at most of difficult bathroom time.
The question I want answered is: do half of all the yogurt cups in the grocery store lose all of their culture, or do all of the yogurt cups lose half?

Balance? Fucked up my sour dough starter is what you did Grimace.

Since we're talking about magic, maybe life that's inside or attached to other life not disappeared by the snap gets a pass.
- Then humans would get a pass, since we're attached to our gut biome.
  
  But half of all gut biomes would be erased with the people. The numbers already work.

Do the HeLa cells all die together, or do only half of them die?

Not just the bathrooms, but the livingrooms and childrenrooms too.
!(I would have used "kitchenrooms" but I couldn't bring myself to make that kind of joke)!<
- They were mostly part of the bacteria domain but I slaughtered them like animals.

Is virus alive? We have tons of those as well.
- No, viruses don't mean the scientific definition of life. IIRC, the primary reason why is because, in order to make copies of itself, it must hijack a living cell's reproductive system to do so. It can't simply divide to make more of itself.
  
  That's a very good point! Thank you!

Yeah well, movie Spider-Man cums out of his wrists, so we're in a whole weird area already.

Nah the 50% left would quickly replace what was snapped away to the limits of their environment. They multiply fast.

More like in this dissertation
- distensión dissertatión

Wait, are you telling me marvel isn't thought through all the way?

Could also be a lot of legless torsos flopping about, as well as torso-less legs, and all sorts of other less-precise halves.
- Zebras probably took it the worst.

Well, my corn maze just got really weird...

Well no, That would be 75% if the other 50% already existed within the organisms he killed.
- It literally specifies of the survivors.

135 comments