# Was the 2nd Snap (Avengers Endgame) the Right Thing to do? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 16, 2023, 12:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-2nd-snap-avengers-endgame-the-right-thing-to-do/978289 "2023-01-16T00:16:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![AlsoNamedBort](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alsonamedbort/32/3213_2.png) [@AlsoNamedBort](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AlsoNamedBort)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2023, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-2nd-snap-avengers-endgame-the-right-thing-to-do/978289/81 "2023-01-19T19:04:28Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > If using the Time Stone would have allowed them to undo the Snap without creating an alternate timeline, that seems like something the Ancient One would have mentioned when Bruce is explaining why they need to borrow the Time Stone. Well, using the Time Stone is extremely dangerous and not something she would trust a non-wizard to use. We’ve already seen multiple times that the Time Stone can rewind time. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2023, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-2nd-snap-avengers-endgame-the-right-thing-to-do/978289/82 "2023-01-19T19:57:13Z")
> [@ParallelLines](#): > > But in the first quoted section and in your OP you’re postulating that there is a harm to the world or the society that is EQUALLY not in the films or comics. In Spiderman far From Home, shortly after the return, there is NO mention of any misery, torment, or shortages, just a bit of social awkwardness of coming back and finding half your peers are five years older. Everything else is 80-90% normal. They hint of it, but since the films concern themselves with other issues, that is not the crux of the film. But also, the filmmakers did not seem to have actually considered how bad it would be. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2023, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-2nd-snap-avengers-endgame-the-right-thing-to-do/978289/83 "2023-01-19T19:59:23Z")
> [@AlsoNamedBort](#): > > Well, using the Time Stone is extremely dangerous and not something she would trust a non-wizard to use. Except she ends up giving him the stone anyway, with the express purpose of letting him become basically omnipotent. Seems like letting him use the Time Stone by itself would present much less of a trust issue. > [@](#): > > We’ve already seen multiple times that the Time Stone can rewind time. We see it “rewind time,” but we don’t see it used to fuck with causality. Like, he uses the Time Stone to repair a building (and trap a bad guy inside a wall) but he doesn’t make it so that the wall was never damaged - everyone watching will wholly remember seeing the wall get destroyed, then get put back together. He’s not changing the past, he’s using the stone to sort of move an undestroyed version of the wall forward in time, to the present. Does that make any sense, or have I gone all timey-wimey? Anyway, the point of the thread isn’t “reconcile the entire MCU,” it’s “discuss this particular situation from one particular movie.” _Endgame_ explicitly rules out time travel as a way of undoing the Snap. For the purposes of the thread, the rules established in _Endgame_ are the rules that matter, even if they’re contradicted in a different movie. ---
**Author:** ![Max\_S](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/46a35a/32.png) [@Max\_S](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Max_S)\ **Post date:** [January 19, 2023, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-2nd-snap-avengers-endgame-the-right-thing-to-do/978289/84 "2023-01-19T20:25:07Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > Anyway, the film explicitly says they can’t fix the Snap by traveling back in time and undoing it. Exactly. Remember they had a time machine… There’s a reason they didn’t simply kill Thanos in 2014 and call it a day. In fact they end up killing 2014-Thanos anyways (Stark’s snap). Nebula kills her younger self and doesn’t fade like Back to the Future. I would fear that “resetting” the universe back to five years ago would simply amount to time travel, thus creating two alternate timelines: one where the “snap” worked, and one where it didn’t. ~Max ---
**Author:** ![DigitalC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ebca7d/32.png) [@DigitalC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DigitalC)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2023, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-2nd-snap-avengers-endgame-the-right-thing-to-do/978289/85 "2023-01-20T23:54:40Z")
For some of the people who survived bringing everyone back would definitely be a bit problematic, but that pales in comparison to how much better not being dead is for literally half the universe. ---
**Author:** ![Love\_Rhombus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/love_rhombus/32/10694_2.png) [@Love\_Rhombus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Love_Rhombus)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2023, 12:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-2nd-snap-avengers-endgame-the-right-thing-to-do/978289/86 "2023-01-27T12:09:54Z")
It may also be somewhat valuable to divorce this discussion from the comics because the Gauntlet with all the Stones is omnipotent in the comics, but not in the movies. Comic Thanos could snap people away all day long if he wished with no burnout. MCU Gauntlet was a one-shot deal, so Tony’s Snap was a rushed “wish.” As for alien races-I guess they’re SOL unless Captain Marvel manages to explain stuff to them. Not a job I’d envy. I’m slightly curious where the idea that half of, say, the cows vanished was mentioned. I had always thought it was just half of the intelligent life since they were the ones destroying and overusing resources. ---
**Author:** ![Folacin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/folacin/32/3195_2.png) [@Folacin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Folacin)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2023, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-2nd-snap-avengers-endgame-the-right-thing-to-do/978289/87 "2023-02-04T13:27:52Z")
> [@Love\_Rhombus](#): > > As for alien races-I guess they’re SOL unless Captain Marvel manages to explain stuff to them. Not a job I’d envy. Hopefully not too late of a revival - the above is a point I hadn’t considered. On Earth, there are people who know what happened and can explain it (not sure if they did, but they could). On Vulcan, it’s a “Leftovers” scenario - half the living things just disappeared, and no one knows why. Then, five years later, everything comes back, once again with no way to know why. Ignoring all of the initial disruption and then assuming society didn’t collapse (it probably did) the secondary disruption of the return - I’ve got to think that a lot of people are going to be turning to religious theories for what happened. ---
**Author:** ![k9bfriender](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/k9bfriender/32/3283_2.png) [@k9bfriender](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/k9bfriender)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2023, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-2nd-snap-avengers-endgame-the-right-thing-to-do/978289/88 "2023-02-04T13:49:59Z")
> [@Folacin](#): > > On Vulcan, it’s a “Leftovers” scenario - half the living things just disappeared, and no one knows why. Then, five years later, everything comes back, once again with no way to know why. Ignoring all of the initial disruption and then assuming society didn’t collapse (it probably did) the secondary disruption of the return - I’ve got to think that a lot of people are going to be turning to religious theories for what happened. A fair amount of the universe outside of Earth seems to have interstellar communication and transport. So, even if they didn’t know why it happened, they would know that they were not the only ones affected. But then, there are probably a whole lot of backwaters that are like the Earth of the real world, no contact or knowledge that there is _anything_ out there. For all of them, religion probably became a much bigger force. ---
**Author:** ![Horatius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/horatius/32/3572_2.png) [@Horatius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatius)\ **Post date:** [February 7, 2023, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-2nd-snap-avengers-endgame-the-right-thing-to-do/978289/89 "2023-02-07T15:34:54Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Some people will have been cooking at the time, or otherwise tending a heat source: A lot of those will end up starting fires, as well as fires started by crashing vehicles. So we’ll have a lot more fires than usual that day… when half of the firefighters are gone and the roads clogged. Old Lady Leary’s cow just kicked over every city in the world. I read an apocalypse novel once where most of the population of North America disappeared as with the Snap. The toxic cloud of smoke caused by essentially every city in NA burning down caused world-wide damage, that lasted for years. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-2nd-snap-avengers-endgame-the-right-thing-to-do/978289.md?page=4)