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.
50% of each living thing, so each kind of bacteria you have in your gut is reduced by 50%
Not 50% of all the bacteria
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?
Seems like if you killed half of a bacteria that would kill the whole thing, wouldn’t it? You can’t just chop a bacteria in half. I don’t think…
It depends on the bacteria, when in it’s lifecycle half of it is killed, and what half is killed. To keep things short, the odds are in the bacteria’s favor. Suppose if half the bacteria in your gut died right now how long do you think it would take for the bacteria population in your gut to return to pre-snap levels? A month? A year? Decades? How about less than an hour. Bacteria reproduce exponentially and on average, a bacterial generation lasts 20 minutes. Meaning that every 20 minutes the population doubles, assuming there are no deaths in the population during this time. If there is space for bacteria to grow, they will.
Wait… How is that different?
I responded to a different comment explaining more.
Micro biology changes a lot faster than what you see in complex multi-celluar organisms.
But half still die regardless of how fast they reproduce/come back
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.
Yeah, worst case scenario stock prices for probiotic yoghurt would increase.
Looks like Jamie Lee Curtis is joining the MCU.
See… see this is the story content that belongs in the extended cut.
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
Well OOP said all life, include bacteria, then they most certainly include sperm and fetus.
Macroscopic creatures are made of different types of cells and stuff… what constitutes a living thing?
People didn’t lose half of their cells, it was all or none.
Emm yeah but that’s the joke.
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.
She makes a compelling argument.
Subscribes
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.
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.
So just how much diarrhea DID Thanos cause, anyway?
A shit ton. Bum dum tss.
Do viruses get snapped too or na
You’ve opened your inbox to a scientific debate that has raged since virology began.
I’m aware ;)
I’m just here to remind you we’re all makin’ durty with your inbox this evening [bowchickawowow…].
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.
imagine the stone suddenly surgically removing your conjoined twin but leaving you with a typical body afterwards. then 5 years later your twin - now noticably younger and alien to you - is reattached
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.
Now I’d love to see a story about a species that has huge numbers of young but also incredibly high infant mortality. So in the snap they mostly lost a bunch of kids who were going to die anyway. Then they decide to take advantage and invade their neighbors, and Captain Marvel comes to help.
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.
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
Thats pretty neat “you cant kill something thats not alive”. Can viruses respond to stimuli? We consider bacteria alive but viruses are debated, wheres the line? are enzymes alive? Are prions alive? cool article.
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’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.
No, because the survivors of Asgard still got snapped even after getting rocked by Hella AND Thanos, right?
Then I guess so where the microbioms of people whose guts Thanos had already purged.
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.
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?
Isn’t “an annoyed Aubrey Plaza” redundant?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Yeah well, movie Spider-Man cums out of his wrists, so we’re in a whole weird area already.
More like in this dissertation
Do the HeLa cells all die together, or do only half of them die?
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.
