• PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    3 days ago

    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.

  • MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • enkers@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        3 days ago

        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.

        • enkers@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          3 days ago

          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.

      • Amputret@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        3 days ago

        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.

    • xXSirDanglesXx@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      29
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      3 days ago

      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.

  • Smoogs@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    Well no, That would be 75% if the other 50% already existed within the organisms he killed.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    3 days ago

    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.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    22
    ·
    3 days ago

    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?

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      3 days ago

      pining after an annoyed Aubrey Plaza

      Can’t have your bad guy be that relatable. Everyone would just be cheering against the avengers.

    • Vespair@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      3 days ago

      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”

      • MudMan@fedia.io
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        3 days ago

        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.

        • Vespair@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          2 days ago

          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.

          • MudMan@fedia.io
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            2 days ago

            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.

        • Vespair@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          2 days ago

          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.

  • CoolMatt@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    3 days ago

    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

    • davidagain@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      20
      ·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      3 days ago

      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.