(Obviously, full spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War ahead.)
Thanos is bad with numbers. And justice.
There’s a subset of antagonists that I call “probability villains,” who claim Fortuna’s help in making the decisions for their dirty work. Usually, they choose the simplest, most “random” way possible: a coin flip.
Like Harvey Dent and Anton Chigurh, who kill by the coin, Thanos acquires his MacGuffins through his own force, but then allows Luck to choose the victims of his genocide.
As Infinity War is technically a Disney movie, I’m reminded of a Carl Barks comic called “Flip Decision”1, in which Donald Duck is suckered into a belief system called Flipism (seemingly in preparation for his mathemystical journey a few years later2), deciding every action on the flip of a coin. This doesn’t go well for Donald, as you might expect: he disrupts traffic by flipping to choose which way to drive, crashes his car, ends up in court and fined, and accidentally breaks a date with Daisy. Professor Batty, the scammer at the heart of the Great Society of Flippists, gets away with Donald’s dollar.
Thanos economicus clearly takes his work a step further, by expending tremendous amounts of effort toward the goal of allowing the allegedly apolitical probability of coin flips to sort everyone out: he decides not who, but only how many, live or die.
Even our War’s actors are familiar with this trope: not only is Josh Brolin in No Country For Old Men (along with Two-Face Forever Tommy Lee Jones), but Chris Evans has dealt with a randomized death scenario resulting from resource allocation concerns: in Snowpiercer’s climate-manipulation-leads-to-train-based-caste-system scenario, Tilda Swinton’s front-class Mason tells Evans’ tail-class Curtis that “precisely 74%” of his troops will perish3 in an imminent fight.
74% (nearly 2/e, since we are discussing population models) is probably a bit closer to the actual death toll involved in Thanos’ plot.
Whither “Life”?
We desperately need to know the parameters of Thanos’ magical death mechanism. Is it half of “sentient” life that will die? Half of “all” life? And who defines “life” here?
Are human fetuses privy to this criterion, Mr. Gemfist? If so, up to what level of development? Cows? Cockroaches? Corn? You declared that survivors would have “bellies full” after all populations suddenly dropped to half, presumably with twice the resources they had minutes before?
Amidst witnessing helicopters careening into buildings and SUVs spinning through traffic, I imagined horrific offscreen scenarios. Half the world’s buses just careened off the roads. Half of all trains just lost their brakemen. How much of the world’s population is in transit at this moment? How many people are being operated on at this moment? Due-in-hours pregnant women suddenly feel much lighter. What about someone vanishing on their way to the hospital, leaving their healthy, just-about-to-be-born charges falling to the ground?
For this “full belly” hypothesis to work, the survivors need to know how to fill those remaining: how to maintain suddenly-fractioned governments and economies, universal panic and ensuing madness. But Big T simply walks away, abandoning them to several short-, medium-, and long-term global infrastructure crises.
If an alien ship shows up and procedurally kills half of the people on your world, at least you know how they died, and can start to plan after they’re gone. If that many people just… vanish… we are all going mad quickly. So much for survival.4
Collateral damage due to accidents will eliminate a fair percentage of the remaining 50% immediately. Then, in the upcoming weeks, infrastructure failures will claim many more. Loss of most basic services, including but certainly not limited to: electricity, water and waste treatment, food transportation, processing, and service, access to emergency services, hospital care, medical supply delivery, hospice care, will impact millions more. Will these losses “fairly” impact all, as Thanos claims to intend?
TOTAL DEAD > 50% + (immediate accidents)% + (infrastructure failures)% + (undetected)%
All this built on the theory of one world (Titan), which collapsed due to internal stresses from its own population. Hell of a sample set, Dr. T. Your prescription really lines up with the prognosis.
There is one dubious positive from all this, I suppose: at least we have several more philosophical questions answered. MCU Earthlings have already received recent answers to such questions as:
- Are we alone in the universe? (No. In fact, the aliens are hostile, and have reached us several times now.)
- Does God exist? (Yes. Many of them.)
- Should we fear the mutant threat? (Um… let us have a few more meetings with Fox, and we’ll get back to you.)
We now know what “life” means in the MCU. While we all go mad from the extreme loss and allegedly full bellies, we no longer have to ponder:
- Are animals sentient? (Did any of them suddenly vanish? If so, those were sentient, and the remaining like them are as well.)
- What about plants? (Did any of them suddenly vanish? Ditto.)
- When does human life begin? (You’ve given us an actual measurement, down to the week. Planned Parenthood and the Catholic League will have a field day with that public information.)
Thanks, Thanos, you just answered all those questions in one shot for us with your ill-defined probability model: “each life-bearing node independently dies with probability p = 0.5”.
Now, how do we all survive this massive shock to our ecosystems, economies, governments, technology base, communications, militaries, everything?
“Fair”
Do we all survive with equal probability, after the “snap”?
In ensuring that half will die instantly, independently on the individual level, Thanos’ claim of ultimate fairness-in-life-or-death falls into a common modern American political fallacy: the confusion of, or lack of concern in the distinction between, equality (“fair” treatment means all get the “same” access) with equity (“fair” means allocating resources to level out opportunities). For example, “the poor,” by definition, have a much greater probability of collateral loss than “the rich,” regardless of the Mad Titan’s expected full bellies. Thanos’ notion of fairness is reductive at best.
We could try another parameter dichotomy: how about “good health” against “weak health” as vague, but opposed terms, like “rich” and “poor”? It’s not going to work: “rich”, on average, yields better health outcomes than “poor”. (Please, check other parameters; I challenge you to find allegedly-opposing pairings under which the “poor” fare better than the “rich” under this extreme scenario.)
Let’s consider rebuilding. This… Snapture5 would very likely be considered (at least by American insurance agencies) an “act of God” (haha yeah, literally), and so not payable on most accounts without specific coverage. This sort of “black swan” event6 is so low-probability, yet so completely devastating, as to not register as a thing necessary to build into standard insurance models (although we might expect that some of the ultra-rich MCU inhabitants by now hold some kind of “Marvels coverage”… that’s not built into the usual plan). So, most people that lose property are likely not going to recover it, since the insurance companies won’t, or won’t be able to, pay out. On top of that, the reduction of the economy itself wouldn’t sustain those payouts.
Speaking of insurance payouts, one of the MCU’s primary recurring motifs is dealing with the aftermath of an unexpected, devastating attack7. Considering the disparate nature of wealth in surviving a sudden dire financial situation8, how will the remaining less-than-50% fare? It is required that someone legally, and fiscally, define “fair” for these events, and this definition does not always mean “equal”. For example, settlement payouts to survivors of 9/11 depended on the career of the deceased.9
A Very Mean-Variance Optimization
Thanos appears to suffer from what I’ll call “expectation reductionism”: the thought that probabilistic expectation (or mean, a probability-weighted average of possible values) is the most meaningful statistic of a random variable, to the dismissal of all others. (See, for example, the usual “don’t play the lottery” argument, which only considers the average economic value of a game in terms of repeated numerical wins/losses (negative mean winnings), and not less measurable effects such as potential short-term emotional benefits that are long-term healthier and cheaper than smoking, alcohol, or other drugs.10)
In addition, eliminating half the universe’s population will vastly reduce the variance of living beings. If adaptation to a cataclysmic change is important in recovering, the basic genetic ability to recover of any given species has been severely hampered, but mental ingenuity may win out over sheer variance. (Let’s call this concern a wash.)
Posing the “problem of life in the universe” in purely financial terms, Thanos’ gambit might work as a form of “mean-variance optimization”: for a random individual, if they survive, increase the mean level of resources and reduce the variance of overall disparity. (If they die, it’s probably painless and nearly-instant, and maybe they get to hang out in the Soul Gem?) It makes sense in a toy model in basic finance, but with the large multivariable nature of the interconnected systems involved, the potential individual infinite loss of life versus a possible finite gain in survival against not changing the system (Pascal11 much, T?), and not taking into account the real probability of system collapse, it is a grave miscalculation.
If, say, “the rich” have the same probability of snap-dying as “the poor”, then presumably wealth distribution just gets much more consolidated, not less, if “the rich” leave their wealth mostly to their families (and are more likely to have written wills). Post-snap, due to the “equality” of distribution, there are roughly half the people holding the top 50% of all wealth than there were days earlier. Perhaps the remaining double-ultra-rich will find themselves more charitable in the ensuing panic; perhaps their current notion of wealth will collapse with the nations. More than likely, the ultra-rich will remain ultra-rich.
What form will the wealth of the double-ultra-rich hold, though? If half of the economy just vanished, demand for most goods and services just instantly plummeted (except crisis management, demand there is through the roof). Likewise, supply just as instantly skyrocketed. How does a global economy survive such shocks? (I don’t know; not an economist. I doubt they know either.)
Punching Up
Could Thanos supply unlimited power instead of killing half the universe?
Could Thanos expand space to allow much more room for life instead of killing half the universe?
Could Thanos manipulate reality Matrix-style to provide for all life instead of killing half the universe?
Could Thanos share the notion and emotion of soul with all life, so that they may live in harmony with each other, sharing resources eternally, instead of killing half the universe?
Could Thanos unwind the timing of wars and inequitable policies instead of killing half the universe?
Could Thanos expand the minds of all life to understand the interconnectedness of collective resource allocation and cooperation instead of killing half the universe?
So why does he kill half the universe?
To efficiently do away with the “surplus population.” He claims individual planetary resources are scarce, but he literally controls all of existence’s resources. Also, in time, exponential growth models would imply that this culling of the universal herd will all need to happen again at a later date, and again, and again… until the heat death of the universe.
Thanos might think he’s Genocide Marx, but he’s really Scrooge McDoom.
You can’t retire, Thanos, you’ve got Infinite Work to do now.
Notes:
- Flip Decision (1952)
- Donald in Mathmagic Land (1959) (watch here)
- Snowpiercer (watch clip here)
- There is plenty of Rapture-based fiction—you can run the gamut from the Left Behind series up to The Leftovers, and everything before and in between. The expected psychological distress has been explored.
- … Snapture.
- I honestly don’t know if Nassim Taleb would hang out with Thanos.
- Tor.com’s own Leah Schnelbach has written extensively on this topic.
- This 2016 WaPo article explores the question “Do you have $400 immediately available to recover from an emergency?”
- In 2008, Kenneth Feinberg spoke to NPR about managing the compensation funds for 9/11 victims, and how the disparity in allocations influenced his management of the compensation funds for the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting.
- All that said, I don’t condone playing the lottery. This TED talk by Dan Gilbert has a bit of the usual lottery interpretation, with a dissenting voice from an audience member during Q&A.
- I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to throw in one of my favorite divisive philosophical topics: Pascal’s wager.
“Did Thanos Kill You?” image from the source code of didthanoskill.me, which I am sad I did not write. “Axiom” image courtesy @MichaelSLaufer.
Suppose Michael Carlisle (@docintangible) is a mathematician and writer living in New York.
The bad news for those who survive will be that half their gut flora will have died so they’ll be spending a lot of time on the toilet for the foreseeable future.
A really interesting science show on the History Channel called LIFE AFTER PEOPLE was about what would happen to Earth and our infostructure if man just vanished one day. One of the scariest things is that nuclear plants would do very bad things within just a few years of not being maintained. So, thanks Thanos for killing off so many tech people.
The crazy genius and the all-powerful military leader of comics are the biggest idiots ever because of their ideas of how to fix things. The Thinker of THE FLASH this season makes me want to bang my head at this super genius who needs to read a few sf novels about why his genius ideas are really, really stupid.
There’s a lot left unspecified by Thanos’ snap decision. Ultimately, it’s nebulous and very, very simplistic.
At least the biblical rapture implies a selection process. Although, what if you “don’t want to go”? The Leftovers got a lot of dramatic tension out of the rapture event by showing it’s randomness and that some bad people got taken. The culling was only about 2%(?) though.
So Thanos could’ve tried redistributing or even adequately distributing existing resources. Or alter reality so lifeless planets bear life, literally creating room for space migration. So many other ways to approach a resource problem with a long-term solution, rather than a temporary cap on population that would inevitably lead to a new culling. But then, he is a fascist and extermination is in their tool bag.
So true, all of this. And this is skipping the issue that different planets will have different population levels. Did Thanos just kill half the hunter -gatherers in a stone age culture that had only expanded to a tiny corner of its planet and had thousands of years to expand? Did he just hit a planet that had already experienced its version of the black death and hadn’t even begun to recover? Or a nearly extinct species fleeing genocide?
Speaking of, let’s talk about what happens when scapegoating kicks in. Did the minority group fleeing genocide get blamed for this?
And, yeah, what happens when the city of thirty million that depends on work from all of those thirty million to keep going (plus major infrastructure beyond the city) suddenly has fifteen million die? If they can’t keep up maintenance, how long before the remaining fifteen million are dying of hunger? Food may be plentiful short term (although who’s planting and building farm equipment long term?) but how much hoarding happens after the disaster? Assuming you can even ship the food anywhere?
And how many oil tankers and off shore oil rigs just had big disasters when half the people running them vanished? And what about nuclear plants? Did you just kill of the Alaskan coast?
Reminds me of a story I read where some idiot introduces a virus that’s supposed to result in zero population growth in a MEDIEVAL level society (skip the fact that zero growth requires two births plus a little per woman on average and this one only had one child born per woman because some SF writers haven’t had boys, girls, and where babies come from [or basic math] explained to them).
This world still had PLAGUES and WARS. It had a SHRINKING population (even without the 50% reduction each generation because the author flunked basic counting [yeah, I’m not letting that one go]).
Circumstances are going to VARY. A solution that would fit your world (assuming it would have worked on Thanos’ world, which is arguable at best–he’s the kid reading a history book with an untried theory on how one thing would have made everything better but hasn’t even asked any historians what they think or if there’s anything wrong with his logic) may kill off another.
My theory is that Thanos fixated on population reduction because his society embraced a particularly nasty form of unrestrained capitalism that required unlimited growth and unlimited exploitation. In a framework where anything but maximum growth is anathema, and people reproduce accordingly, forcible population reduction looks more reasonable. Once he lived through the collapse, he got a little irrational about the subject. He’s become so enamored of the hard choices that he hasn’t tried to re-evaluate his premises.
As I said on the main spoiler thread, it’s not a question of available resources but a question of distribution and organization.
Ironically, the fact that Thanos accidentally killed much more than half the population is actually good for Thanos, because killing half of everyone fixes exactly fucking nothing.
Life reproduces exponentially. I looked it up: Earth hit a population of 3.5 billion for the first time in the 1960s. Wow, way to buy the universe an extra 60 years, Thanos, good work. If you want to make a dent in population numbers that actually stays dented, you need to be aiming closer to 95% — that’d knock you back to at least the 1400-1500s.
It’s almost like Thanos is a crazy person with a bad plan or something!
You just know if someone points to the sentience and when-does-life-begin questions as answered after Thanos does his thing, someone else will say “yeah, in the opinion of those stones on his glove, sure, but actually ….”. Unless you’ve got an answer for reconciling stubborn opinion, you don’t really arrive at an ‘answer’ for anything else. (Then again, I’m sort of throwing all of science out the window with that statement, which isn’t typically my position … oof.)
It’s not you who throws science out of the window, but people who get straight, scientifically-backed answers and say “nuh-huh, fake news”.
An thus we get a long example of exactly why Thanos is called the MAD Titan.
He’s nuts.
How exactly does it work, though? The stones interpret his will and combine their power to make it happen?
@austin: it’s not spelled out, but yes. It’s God’s will/it’s Thanos’ will. It’s a very old SF concept, where protagonists of these type of stories simply willed what they wanted. Think of John Carter willing himself to Mars. Or the Green Lanterns using will to power their rings.
@@@@@2. Sunspear, So… you’re saying it’s all Nebula’s fault?
</jk>
Based on observations, 50% didn’t instantly die. There was time between the first and the last to make adjustments to the headcount for collateral damage, if you were so inclined.
@@@@@5. CapnAndy, that’s why changing Thanos’ motivation from impress the ‘girlfriend’ to extreme environmentalist didn’t make much sense to me.
Not sure if I understood this. The macro picture (source code) is great though.
Add to all this is how many children are now parentless? Who is going to round up the kids, make sure they’re taken care of, when too many people are grieving their own losses? What about farm families that are wiped out? All the animals that will need taken care of, and no one to do so, esp. the milk cows. What about remote communities? I could list off all the different ways that removing half the population would create even more havoc than help.
@@.-@
In the short run, at least. In the long run, available resources are going to depend on the survivors consolidating and continuing the flow of resources. But with half the population gone, basically at random, who knows what information will be lost, and not knowing who could step into their place. It’s a messy, messy thing.
One other thing to bring up here is that because of the sudden loss of people who are experts in sanitation, logistics, engineering, energy developers, etc., there’s going to be a lot worse ecological damage when failsafes fail to save the universe from related disasters.
But that’s what happens when someone locks into a simplistic answer to a highly complex set of inter-related issues.
I’ve seen, here and elsewhere, people calling Thanos an ‘environmentalist,’ and I think that’s misguided. I’ve only seen the movie once, so maybe I missed something, but I don’t recall him ever particularly expressing concern for the effects of overpopulation on the environment. He’s concerned with the effects of overpopulation and scarce resources on the members of population. Offhand, I’d call him an extremist Malthusian before an environmentalist, although I’m sure someone who’s made a closer study of eighteenth century economic theory could correct me on that.
@@@@@ 15 Make that a cardboard extremist Malthusian.
@11. jamiejag: “So… you’re saying it’s all Nebula’s fault?”
Yes.. yes, I am.
Actually, the directors or writers of Avengers 4 are saying that the outcome of the story won’t follow the comics counterpart. (couldn’t find the link again.) They say they’re not interested in replicating a story that’s already been told. They rule out Adam Warlock playing a role, since he doesn’t show up till Guardians 3. And they say no prior comics will help in guessing the storyline.
Of course, this can be partly massive misdirection. Set photos show Cap in his first Avengers suit, so it seems like there’s time travel involved. This may use some elements of Jason Aaron’s Avengers story where Cap had the time stone.
So you think with your puny human mathematical knowledge you are wiser than the universe-wide mathematical knowledge of a God? Also so it takes you pathetic planet a few decades to recover proper functionality. That is just a tiny speck of said planet’s lifespan. So stop whining and rejoice in Thanos’ mercy.
@17 – Sunspear: Time travel, or Stark’s holographic memory exploring tech. A prop for that was seen on set for Avengers 4.
@18 Lucerys shhhh….. don’t let the humans in on the real joke. This is a website where humans argue about human lie stories! Let them have their sad, mortal fun. It is all they have.
1. Add into this awesome article and its very well-argued conclusions, and the post-credits scene’s obvious shout-outs to Rapture fiction from the 70’s onward and that genre’s place in the personal nightmare life of a significant proportion of Americans. . .there is some very suspicious math going on with the survival probability of “super-life”.
Based on the deaths that we see onscreen (plus reasoning that Jessica Jones and Luke Cage have survived, but that we don’t have data on Matt Murdock at this point, or on surviving supervillains, or any data on mutants since Marvel is still playing coy about that. . .), we are still at a death rate of FAR more than 50% for people with superpowers (defined broadly to include purely technological superpowers). The most obvious explanation is fourth-wall shocking the audience, but it’s still really suspicious that, if you take a few minutes to think about it, the results of didthanoskill.me provide a massively inflated probability of survival if you visit the website while superpowered. I don’t think this is likely to be a writers’ error. (If it is, it’s a howler of one from which there will be no recovering.) I think somehow the repercussions of this deviation from absolute chance will affect Part II, along with the collateral damage depicted in the post-credits.
2. Will Luke Cage season 2 deal with any of the social or theological issues?????
3. We’re getting totally trolled on the question of whether animal life is subject to the Snapture, because we saw Rocket survive. Which. . .proves absolutely nothing about the survival rate of non-talking animals.
On an unrelated note, I was one of the ones he killed apparently :)
http://www.didthanoskill.me/
@22 Paintsplatter I was killed in Chrome and spared in Firefox. Call it what you will.
@19. Magnus: It could be holograms. But the set pictures I’ve seen have an additional intriguing element. The Avengers present, Cap, Stark, Ant-man, Banner, all had the same jewel-like placements on their gauntlets or wrists. These could be placeholders for added CGI, like Cap’s shield. Or they could be one of the Stones, which would follow some of the comics stories where the Gems are distributed among an Infinity Watch.
The directors have said they aren’t interested in retelling a story whose resolution is known from a prior comics one. But obviously, they did just that by telling the story of the Snapture.
@ 23. DrM
I got the opposite. And when I tried IE my screen exploded.
Well, Thanos plan isn’t entirely foolish.
You see, there’s historical precedent.
The Black Death.
The Black Death wiped out hundreds of millions. The rich, the poor, the inbetween. It was impartial.
And after it had passed, Europe thrived. It completly changed things. Bargaining power for labour, balance of power geopolitically, everything.
And the changes sparked the Renaissance.
—————
Of course most plagues of that damage just leave the population devastated and the nation never fully recovers. Like the American plagues, or the 6th century Byzantine plagues.
But hey! Maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll have a Black Death instead!
Thats what Thanos is banking on, anyway.
“Resolve Malthusian population pressure” is a plausible motivation for a character. Not a long-term or imaginative solution, as observed above, but more serviceable than the comic’s “I’m trying to impress the embodiment of Death,” especially since the MCU hasn’t established such universal-concept characters, and they’d probably seem out-of-place if it tried.
(FTM, the existence of “magic” still hasn’t been fully integrated. Did one of the alien Ravagers use it in a post-credit scene in GOTG 2? Is it the source of Wanda’s power? Loki’s? Ghost Rider’s? –over in MAoS on TV.)
Since it’s so easy to poke holes in Thanos’s solution, it would’ve been nice for the movie to hang a lantern on it, but I guess the characters didn’t really have the time or the facts. Only Gamora had a clue about it, and as soon as she said “as long as I’ve know him, he’s wanted to kill half the universe with a snap of his fingers,” the other Guardians should’ve asked “why?” But maybe they’ve given up on psychoanalyzing their adversaries. Most of the MCU heroes are of the fisticuffs-first-questions-never mold, and we haven’t spent a lot of time with the more thoughtful ones (Dr. Strange, T’Challa, Nick Fury, Vision) who might consider “can we talk him out of this?” or at least “can we keep him talking?” As a spy and infiltrator, Black Widow should be accustomed to probing her target’s motivations.
I did in Firefox, but survived in Chrome and IE.
And while the article and comments raise very good points about bus crashes, plagues, nuclear meltdowns, there’s actually more than that even – there will be folks who lost a spouse and a child, who just lose the will to live. Someone will take it as an excuse or sign to set off bombs or commit terror attacks. Somewhere, there’ll be a small jail, where all of the jailers die but a prisoner or two is left locked up, with no one that remembers to check to see if someone is there. Then you have the various post-apocalyptic stereotypes of the gangs of criminals, and the religious zealots…
Accepting Thanto’s assumptions, he really hasn’t changed anything. He has merely delayed the inevitable. Is he planning on repeating his action every 100 millenia or so? Life will continue to grow and flourish, consume and develop. He has just pushed the timeline back, not changed its eventual conclusion.
There are a lot of good thoughts here. At least in the short term, on Earth, the impact of a 50% drop in the population (plus losses that are a direct result of the initial 50% will not be more of everything to go around, but a dramatic economic depression. There are probably enough folks left in essential industries to keep infrastructure running and farms producing food. The real problem is suddenly we have twice as many cars, tvs, houses, etc. than we need. The Construction and real estate industries will immediately collapse. Cars and technological items might take a little longer but ultimately, there might be so many bargains in the used market that there is little reason to buy new for quite a while. In fact, the whole supply chain of everything that is consumed in the developed world is now filled with a glut of materials…. which mean that the factories in the developing world will likely need to shut down for quite some time. Even businesses that are not built on physical products will see their sales dropping 50%… which even if they have half the workers to pay as before still mean they have quite a few bills that can’t be paid….
I was following along until you took a purely fictional and entertaining theory and compared it to something that actually happened (9/11).
Not sure how that fits but that is just IMO.
We already had answers to whether other animals and plants are sentient or not, both in the MCU and in the real universe. Rocket and Groot are sentient. In the real world, we have reason and science. Obviously animals are sentient — we are animals. Other species also clearly have intellects and emotions as well. It’s harder to see with plants, but they have analogs to all our senses, communicate with each other, and respond to stimuli. Their cells are not so different that there would be some magical cutoff that animals are sentient and plants aren’t.
As for Thanos, I walked out of the theater going, “I agree with his motives, but not his methods.” I would have snapped my fingers and cut fertility to half. The Avengers wouldn’t have even known what I did until after a few years. I’d also probably tinker more with fertility rates over time to bring back endangered species and such, but that’s just me.
Jason @@@@@ 32
Even that doesn’t work, because societies are different. Those hunter-gatherer societies usually have a stable population despite normal fertility. If a society suddenly has a plague to reduce population or an increase in technology that increases carrying capacity of their worlds[1], you might want them to be above replacement for a bit. (Even on Earth, the problem with hunger is that our distribution methods are flawed than that we can’t grow enough food for everyone.)
I will grant that thinking about fertility is better than Thanos’s plan as it at least grasps that life makes copies of itself. Harder to show on the screen, though.
Thanos seems like the sort of villain that knows a bit of biology and thinks he understands it better than he does (normally these tend to be more into evolutionary biology than population ecology). And maybe losing his homeworld messed with him enough that he chose a simple, elegant solution that lets him be in control of everything… but is wrong on more than just the ethical level.
[1] Even this is a lot more complicated when you consider other species. Agriculture let humans pack a lot more people onto most land, but the species we displaced wouldn’t consider it a boon.
IIRC Thanos is one of the Eternals, meaning that unless he’s killed he probably wont die. So eventually in a few thousand years or however long it takes he could just do it again. I think one of the points is that he just doesn’t care about the post snap upset, or the individuals. Even if it is closer to 90% of sentient life, it’ll eventually level out and stabilize, even if it takes a couple decades, maybe a century or two.
One place where being poor will be an advantage over being rich after the snap is the rich are more likely to be exposed to short-term accidents. On a plane; passenger in a car; have the ability to travel at all? You are richer than most.
Thanos is insane. It’s really just that simple.
@35/Jason Doege: Poor people travel too. They travel on foot, which is probably safest under the circumstances, although they might be overrun by suddenly driverless cars. In rich countries, poor people hitchhike, or they use old bicycles or special offers for slower trains. In poor countries, there’s overcrowded public transport – quite deadly if the driver suddenly disappears.
Yeah, so many problems:
If he killed 50% of people then much more died.
Didn’t his big warship require a lot of resources? And all the damage he did before he had the stones? If he didn’t do all that then maybe instead of 50%, he would have had to kill 30% to preserve his balance.
Thonos’ plan was a combination of climate change and bronze aged mythology.
Too many people on earth who cant fix it. A fix is needed to many and only 2 options exist. Add that with the flood stories of Sumeria/Abraham…and you see what he is doing. If ‘advanced’ life cannot control themselves he will.
And on the seventh day he rested after his work was done and watched and the sun set. Most storries can trace elements to past stories mixed with a current event. Something to ground you something that is current to you.
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Thanos’s plan is pretty stupid for Earth, at least. If you cut Earth’s present population in half, you get the population of 1965. So his great Malthusian exercise merely turns the clock back 50 years. As someone who was spared by Thanos, if I were to watch my salt intake and get plenty of exercise I might with (more) luck live to see the world right back where it was Before Thanos.
The overall effect if Thanos’s plan seems to lend a population advantage to fast-breeding races which, if resource exhaustion is his concern, is completely backwards. The fast-breeding will more quickly recover their numbers, and go on to compete for resources for the still-reduced slow-breeding races which otherwise would have used their resources more slowly.
Ugghhhhh, when I went to see Infinity War, I was of the understanding that there would be no math…..Chevy forever (except, you know, the last 20 years)
@41. Why not terraform a bunch of planets. If he is now the ultimate cosmic being of the MCU, he could literally make living room for excess populations. There have to be millions of empty planets in one galaxy alone.
Maybe someone will actually point out to him in part 4 where he went wrong… and then the gauntlet drops off.
There’s lots of lit out there were a population is cut by 50% (or more) in an extremely short span of time (hell, even in history; look at the Black Plague), and must regroup and reallocate resources. I would think that the immediate aftermath, other than the considerable psychological effects, would be fairly smooth. Sure, there will definitely be looting and various mischief, but the real issue won’t occur for a good 6 months to a year, especially from an agricultural standpoint. The food supplies, especially processed foods, will last quite some time, but once fresh food rots and processed food expires, are the systems in place to keep feeding the remaining population on a reduced scale? Even basic drinking water supplies will need extensive filtration (especially if there are the inevitable rotting corpses somewhere on the line).
And a note on the insurance thing: Do you really, honestly, truly believe there isn’t an insurance rider for living in a Marvel Universe (or any comic universe for that matter)??? For all the roadway standoffs, random house-smashings and general property destruction that occurs in comic-world, you’d think that anyone living in NYC, LA, SF or other major city would either not be able to get ANY insurance, or their premiums would already be skyhigh.
Good article. perfect example of what happens when you try to fix complex problems with a simple solution. As for what happens to society when large chunks die off…
Look at the black death and the 1918 Flu pandemic. At least with Thanos you don’t have millions of bodies to deal with. On the other hand … that can also cause issues with wills. How do you prove someone died without a body?
My guess? After the shock, if you have good people taking charge they will start going over the empty properties or else those with little will just move in.
And while there’s > %50 fewer mouths to feed there’s also %50 fewer food producers…at least until others take over the empty farms and start making them productive again.
That depends on how the dusting works. Is it fifty percent of farms that are culled, or fifty percent of the people on each farm? The former gives you that problem, the latter, that is survivable. It wouldn’t be much fun, but in the short term there should be no empty farms; especially since they would be able to cut back on production. If the dusting is fairly evenly spread then that is the situation pretty much all over, not much fun and some of the surviving specialists are going to have to pull double duties, and there will probably need to be some sort of draft to get people trained for the specialist roles, but it is survivable at least in the short term. Long term it depends on how able the planners are to respond to the ongoing situation.
Too indiscriminate. A proper Judgement Day only needs to wipe out the psychopaths by firing an energy weapon that resonates & overloads their unique brain structure via global satellite network.
If he killed the low IQ and useless half, that would be an OK plan. Everything you are talking about are nuances, the point is – he didn’t distinguish between people in quality, if he did, all superheroes would stay alive. “In 50 years population would double again” that’s a universalistic thinking, like if all people were the same. If only smarter people live, people have more chances to build a sustainable civilization. When stupid and weak people don’t reproduce – thats good, evolution approves. Then, overall genetic quality of manking would increase, and quality of life too, isn’t that obvious.
@47. Storm: And how do you determine who’s smarter? A person stuck in menial labor because they didn’t have access to education may be objectively more intelligent than one who got an inheritance and a head start. There are a lot of variables that keep people back, some of them institutional.
Your talk of “low IQ and useless half” and “stupid and weak people don’t reproduce – thats good” is called eugenics. It’s what the Nazis practiced. You want that on a universal scale?
@48/Sunspear: Adding to that… There’s so much wrong with comment #47 that I don’t even know where to start. Obviously, the worst is the idea that genocide can ever be “an OK plan” in the first place.
Next, evolution doesn’t “approve” of anything. Evolution isn’t a person or a philosophy, it’s just stuff happening. And it doesn’t necessarily create better organisms, only better adapted ones. There’s a difference.
Intelligence isn’t the only quality that makes a person “useful” or valuable.
Ascribing different value to people according to “usefulness” is not only morally appalling, it’s stupid. Everybody does something well, and you never know which qualities will be useful when the world changes.
Finally, what does generic usefulness even mean? Useful to whom? Useful for what? There are so many dubious concepts here that it makes my head hurt.
We’ve gotten a little off track, here–I think it’s safe to proceed with the understanding that any pro-genocide statement in the comments has already run afoul of the basic community guidelines outlined here.
I guess Thanos is not that bad if he “only” kills half of the population of earth, given that we have currently use multiple times the natural resources the planet can provide for everyone on a sustainable basis.
Climate change and natural resource depletion will likely kill way more people in the future. Like 7 of 10 people instead of 5 in 10.