Hi, silenus:, I … uh … noticed, in the recent cataclysm, you didn’t lose any of your cats. And … um … well, I lost my only cat, so … Gimmie!
As I mentioned in the other Thanos thread, his 50% destruction is just what he said he did. He knows full well this will result in much more destruction. Its what he thinks, his comic book girlfriend Death, wants. Its not that there’s too much life in the universe by 50%, its that there’s a lack of death … too much co-operation, too much mercy, a lack of stronger species eradicating weaker species. More beings live now, than have ever lived before and its only getting worse … Death, for all her power, has a very limited view. She only sees her portfolio diminished. And she can only try to fix it. So she uses Thanos.
You’re telling me in Infinity War HALF the people in the Universe died? Including half the superheroes? (I looked at Wikipedia. A lot! Big names!)
That’s…a bit excessive, don’t you think, for a movie? Comics, sure. Nothing lasts forever in the comics. But movies are more for lack of a better term, real. How can you keep making relatable movies if the world is unrecognizable?
I might end up skipping that one. I prefer my superheroes alive.
I think everyone is expecting time travel shenanigans to perform a reset.
I don’t buy into “But it’s what comics girlfriend wants”. That’s not what’s presented in the film where Thanos is very explicit about his goals and never suggests that it’s anything but that. In fact, when he’s shown doing it by hand, there’s nothing to suggest it’s not just the talky things that get the axe. And he doesn’t have a movie girlfriend.
Based on the film, it just moves Thanos from Chaotic Evil to Chaotic Stupid and makes Infinity Wars a worse movie for it.
The same McGuffin that dusted half the universe has the power to undust same, so we’re clearly looking at a Star Trek: Voyager “reset” sooner or later. The ride, though pointless, might prove interesting.
One thing that I think would happen is that non-essential stuff would be put on hold, and people would be reassigned/retrained in a flaming hurry as well as hiring willing people from the general population with decreased standards. I mean, is it really so important that your cop applicants be under 45 or that they have X many college credit hours if 50% of your population just evaporated? Same sort of thing for firefighters- obviously pertinent physical standards would be relaxed a lot less, but more or less arbitrary ones could be relaxed a lot.
Good luck trying to enforce that. People in power will still be people in power, and they will not be the ones being reassigned to jobs that need to be done. BTW, if a person likes the job they are at, under what authority will they be reassigned to another job they do not wish to do?
So what? So its not Death, the personification, driving things. Thanos is super-powerful, super-intelligent, super alone and has come to the same comic book conclusion – the universe doesn’t need a 50% cull, it needs an attitude adjustment brought about by a 50% cull. On Earth, rebuilding our civilization, back to what those remaining 50% recall, will make us very hard-bitten indeed. The chitari better not show up 50 years later, we’ll not only send an army of Hulks and cloned Black Widows to carve up those flying armored worms, we’ll roast them on bonfires for the after war feast. As was dictated by ancient tradition. Fifty years ago is more ancient than many contemporary traditions.
Well, that’s what you’d say, however, your perception is, sadly, limited.
“Little one, it’s a simple calculus. This universe is finite, its resources, finite… if life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correcting.”
YOU"RE CHAOTIC STUPID AND YOU DON"T KNOW THAT FOR SURE.
"I’m the only one who knows that. At least I’m the only who has the will to act on it. For a time, you had that same will.
*
OK , ARKCON:, YOU LOST ONE CAT. NOW WHY DO YOU HAVE 10 CATS, AND SEVERAL HEADS ON PIKES IN YOUR FRONT YARD?
“Because eff you all, that’s why.”
Smith thinks he knows the score, turns out Neo really is the one who does. Turns out, Clu’s plan, to alter the Equation, put another player, Sam, on the board, doesn’t work, even though it appears that it does, until Flynn Deus Ex’s at the last moment. Maybe its sloppy writing, but the fact that you can pick apart the logic, at the end, doesn’t mean that you could have, even theoretically, driven the action the way you wanted.
I think civilization would recover fairly quickly.
Half of the cops are dead, but so are half of the criminals.
Half of the doctors are dead, but they are caring for half as many patients.
Loss of farmers would cause short-term problems, but long-term, that would make farming a much more lucrative occupation.
The power and water companies have half as many technicians, but they only have to supply half as many customers. And during the recovery, they don’t have to rebuild the infrastructure.
Psychological issues would cause problems, but we would deal with them. If humans were as fragile as the therapy industry claims, we would never have survived the Neolithic. Momento mori artwork would become popular, but we would cope.
The Snap is random. It is very unlikely that zero people in congress die, but it’s also unlikely that exactly 50% die.
The rest of the population death is random, so it is less likely that a congressional district is completely depopulated, therefore the representation is the same.
We have special elections, the seats won’t be vacant for long.
HBO’s the Leftovers covers what might happen when 2% of the population is gone. Things are the same but very different. Expect Thanos cults.
“Random” doesn’t really work that way. It might be that 3/4 of the police disappear, but only 1/4 of the criminals are snapped. Power and water companies have half as many technicians, but the infrastructure needs all of them to operate successfully. Doctors and patients? Again, you don’t know how many doctors and nurses will disappear, but I can guarantee you that even if precisely half the patients disappear, many more will be soon added to the list because of the collapse. Do you really think a hospital can run efficiently if half the personnel is randomly killed? If the brain surgeon in residence is gone, the radiologist can’t step in.
Only a tiny fraction of the world’s population is airborn at any given time. Likewise bus drivers, train conductors, etc. There are lots of things that would cause upticks in the death rate, but I don’t think there are enough of them to affect the big picture.
Planes don’t worry me. They have co-pilots, and the same statistics that govern whether or not I lose half my cats covers planes, too. In fact, spread out over the entire universe, there could be planets where nobody dusts and planets where everybody is floating in the wind. This is the MCU, where there are zillions of sentients. For that matter, what is the “life” equivalency between say an elephant and a paramecium? Everybody on Earth could survive, losing only one of their e. coli.
Under the authority that if they don’t do it, they can find another one somewhere else. The same way they can demand you work overtime, weekends, holidays, etc…
I suspect they’d reassign as much they could to similar jobs. For example, they might suspend doing things like connecting new construction to existing mains and reassign those workers to water main maintenance. Or retrain existing customer service phone operators to 911 operators, for example. Or from say… the part of IT that supports parks and recreation to supporting police and fire.
I wasn’t meaning that they’d take a systems analyst, throw a uniform on him and make him a cop or anything crazy like that.
It depends on the number. If you are talking 4 police and 4 criminals, then yeah sure, 3/4 and 1/4 is a reasonable outcome. But if you look at 4000 and 4000, then 3/4 and 1/4 results are much lower probability and close to 50-50 becomes a much more likely result.
I never had the impression that Death, in the comics, actually endorsed Thanos’ plan. She’s patient, and she knows that she’ll get everyone eventually. Killing off half the Universe instantly wasn’t what she actually wanted; it’s just what some crazy guy with a scrotum on his chin thought she wanted.
And people are still vastly overestimating our resilience. Let’s start by looking at the immediate effects, like within the first few seconds, minutes, or hours.
Don’t think about airplanes; think about cars. If you’re on the road at the moment of the Snap, you’re dead. Half the cars suddenly being driverless means that pretty much everyone is going to crash or be crashed into.
Anyone who lives alone and who gets dusted (or in a larger household, all of whom happen to get dusted) who’s cooking at the time never turns off the stove. Pots boil dry, food catches fire, and there’s nobody on the spot to put it out. A lot of buildings will catch on fire. There are not going to be half as many fires as on a usual day; there will be a lot more.
But there are only half as many firefighters. And they’re not all interchangeable: There’s one guy at each station who usually drives the truck, but maybe, curse the luck, he got dusted. Someone else can step up, but they’re not going to be as good a driver. And so you have a worse driver on the day when nobody on the road is getting out of the way when they hear the sirens (because half the cars don’t even have anyone in them). They’re not going to be able to get to any of those fires to put them out.
Some of those crashing cars, meanwhile, aren’t going to crash into other cars. Some will crash into utility poles. Expect power outages all over the place, again, far more than on a normal day, but with half as many utility workers to respond to them (and they have to deal with the clogged roads, too). And the electrical grid is all connected: A single failure can cascade into a failure for 55 million people, so think of what would happen here. That one took two days to recover from, even with all of the utility workers being alive and the roads being passable.
No, that was 100% Death’s idea - she resurrected Thanos (who had been dead for some time at that point) for that express purpose. She didn’t bank on Thanos becoming omnipotent - and, therefore, more powerful than Death - and kidnapping her until she agreed to be his girlfriend. So for most of the original Infinity War, she’s pissed and uncooperative, but not because she has any problem with half the universe dying. She’s just sick of dealing with his weird stalker crush.
Think of it like every single person flipping a coin. Heads you’re here, tails you’re dust. On average, 50% of each planet will be wiped out. Adding more and more people to be snapped won’t affect your odds.
