Do the HeLa cells all die together, or do only half of them die?
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
Because it just makes sense. Snap, diarrhea. It’s simple.
Oh, okay i figured that much but wasnt sure
I was kidding around, it’s a silly leap, and the post is silly, so I was just suggesting something silly myself. Someone else seems to have done the legwork though.
So was I! I’m having a good time here, you having a good time?
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.
You’re very welcome.
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.
I want the show where the snapped people come back and then the survivors have to awkwardly explain that they have gotten remarried and otherwise moved on.
There were a few instances of that in some of that later films, but I forget which because of how forgettable they all truly were.
That actually happens in some of the TV series from that story arc.
It’s also the glut of the plot of The Leftovers. Absolutely brilliant show, & Proxima Midnight is in it.
They must’ve done it in the hyperbolic time chamber.
Wait, are you telling me marvel isn’t thought through all the way?
Well no, That would be 75% if the other 50% already existed within the organisms he killed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not sure it’s stated, but I thought the planets that had already been purged by Thanos’ armies, like Gamora’s planet and Xandar were spared the snap.
Then I guess so where the microbioms of people whose guts Thanos had already purged.
No, because the survivors of Asgard still got snapped even after getting rocked by Hella AND Thanos, right?
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.
What if somebody lost ½ their gut biome & a nut mid boink?
Like… coitus is in full swing, swimmers are swimmin, breast milk is brewin’, & poof… nothing but gross poots & blanks?
I mean a nut contains life, no? Ovary? Uterus? Knuckle children?
That 50% becomes tricky!
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?
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.
Isn’t “an annoyed Aubrey Plaza” redundant?
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
That may not be just head cannon. The Agatha show is kinda hinting at it.
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.
To be clear though, I also agree that the comic book version of Thanos’s motivation was way better. Like not even a competition. But I don’t think the MCU version is so nonsensical so as to be unbelievable as a motivation.
I dunno man, “a madman thinks he understand the universe way more than he really does” doesn’t break suspension of disbelief for me. I agree with you that his plans are flawed, but he’s not infallible. I’m not trying to gage whether or not his plan makes sense, I’m trying to gage whether or not him believing it makes sense. History is full of arrogant men with half-baked plans for salvation; I don’t see how Thanos is any different.
That’s fair, I suppose. I’d just argue that the movie forgot to… correct him? Endgame even makes a point about how nature is healing and the air is cleaning.
If the point was that he was wrong and misguided, the movies didn’t make that clear. Instead it was just “he’s ruthless and evil, but he maybe has a point” as an angle, which is a really weird way to frame your omnicidal nutcase.
I get why, relatable villains are more interesting, especially if you’re going to have the entire movie revolve around him. It’s just that they went about it in a way that raises questions.
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.
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?
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)
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.
Thanos’ plan was unmitigated garbage anyway.
Humanity reached 4M in 1975 and hit 8M in 2022. On that basis, if half of humanity died when Thanos snapped his fingers 50 years later we’d be back to 8M people again.
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
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.
Oops. Yup, utter failed to put Bs! Put it down to not having had enough coffee today!
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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!
