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?
Wait, are you telling me marvel isn’t thought through all the way?
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.
Balance? Fucked up my sour dough starter is what you did Grimace.
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
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.
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?
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
Nah the 50% left would quickly replace what was snapped away to the limits of their environment. They multiply fast.
Do the HeLa cells all die together, or do only half of them die?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well no, That would be 75% if the other 50% already existed within the organisms he killed.
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.
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.
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.
10 million sounds great, maybe the housing market would finally self correct.
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
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.
Oops. Yup, utter failed to put Bs! Put it down to not having had enough coffee today!
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.
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)
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!
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.
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.
