The Avengers: Infinity War -- Thanos's ultimate master plan makes no sense

[DrDeth]

And of course, as debated hotly in another thread- zapping out half the population will certainly kill more than half of any industrialized civilizations. Planes and cars will crash, etc. Power grids may shut down, and even, in a unlikely but not impossible case- civilization itself may fall.

It’s not a good motivation.

[Unpronounceable]

@Quimby

Exactly this. People who say, “Well he kind of has a point and was trying to do good” are wrong and need to reexamine their moral compass.

Nah, they’re just still trying to rationalize the Mass Effect games plot.
(For those not in the know: )

A fleet of AIs kill all technologically capable sentient life in the galaxy every 30000 years or so, so that they don’t get a chance to invent AI that will kill all sentient life in the galaxy…

[Sunny_Daze]

Wait, quick follow up question: was the plan to kill half of the dominant species on each planet? Half of all intelligent life, dominant or not? Half of all life? It wasn’t really spelled out.

[AlsoNamedBort]

@Sunny_Daze

Wait, quick follow up question: was the plan to kill half of the dominant species on each planet? Half of all intelligent life, dominant or not? Half of all life? It wasn’t really spelled out.

Presumably, intelligent life or life with a “soul.”

[Malthus]

@Sunny_Daze

Wait, quick follow up question: was the plan to kill half of the dominant species on each planet? Half of all intelligent life, dominant or not? Half of all life? It wasn’t really spelled out.

I agree, this was never actually spelled out - I just assumed it meant everyone with human-like intelligence.

[XT]

Short answer:

The Avengers: Infinity War – Thanos’s ultimate master plan makes no sense

It makes perfect sense to the average environmentalist, and is relate-able to many others. On the surface, we are constantly told that our resources are dwindling and that overpopulation will result in a collapse of society and massive death and destruction.

Long answer:

But then, there’s the plan itself. He assembles all the infinity stones, snaps his fingers, and BAM! Half the universe just crumbles away to dust. Ummmmm…why?? There’s a brief line or two throughout two-and-a-half hour run time about the universe being finite and that there are too many life forms, but where’s your evidence for that, oh purple one? Your home planet was over-populated and it’s eco-system collapsed? That’s too bad, but why does it then follow that THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE is in danger of being over-populated?

And even in the view of the ‘home planet’ of a highly advanced space faring civilization (which obviously Thanos’s home planet was) such a collapse is probably not going to happen due to overpopulation. Within the home system of his planet are literally all the room and resources for not billions but trillions of purple titans…with room to spare. And this assumes that titans are somehow different than humans in that their population doesn’t trend downward as their technology and society wealth goes up. As a lot of movies, you need to not think too much about this sort of thing and just accept Malthusianism as still valid. To paraphrase Smith, titans are like a virus, spreading and consuming everything but too stupid to use the rest of the resources in their solar system, and also too stupid to figure out how to create the Matrix, so there is no cure except to snap those fingers (or I guess in the case of Titan, to randomly slaughter half the population so the rest will be happy…until they breed back up to repopulate the planet again).

o, the comic book Thanos was in literally in love with the Spectre of Death. His motivations were driven by a desire to woo Death and court “her” favor, and what better way to do that than to sacrifice half the sentient beings in the universe to her as a show of devotion? It’s a motivation that probably could only work in a superhero comic book, but at least it’s an understandable goal: he wants to impress his love interest with a bombastically over-the-top demonstration.

I have to say that, leaving aside the fact that the movie skates over actual science wrt population growth and the effect on a universal level, Thanos’s motivations in the movie were IMHO better than in the comic, which always seemed a bit silly to me. Basically, he wants to kill half the universe to get laid, if you boil things down. As opposed to in the MCU logic of the movies, he really believes that killing half of life (well, I guess they mean half of sentient life, since I doubt they are talking about bacteria and tigers and such) will save the other half, and he has some sort of proof as he’s been doing this already the hard way, planet by planet and has been able to judge the results (Gamora’s planet for instance is supposedly some sort of paradise now that half the people are dead, while his home world of Titan is dead and destroyed due to overpopulation which he warned them about).

[Harrington]

Thanos said the culling would be fair. Bullshit. A lonely bachelor with no children could die and a married couple with 12 children could all live. That’s not fair, given his stated objective and the reason for it. I wonder how the Duggars faired.