See… see this is the story content that belongs in the extended cut.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah well, movie Spider-Man cums out of his wrists, so we’re in a whole weird area already.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
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…].
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
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
