Well, Tony Stark wasn’t the only one who had a kid in the last five years.
Tony Stark insisted that the solution not involve erasing his daughter from existence, which is a bit less selfish a motivation than the way you’re casting it. And erasing her (and every other kid under the age of five) would absolutely be a “consequence.”
Concur. Plus, they were messing with forces beyond their experience. Sure, they thought they’d gotten the math right, but who knew (besides us)? If you rewrite the trolley problem so that inaction kills 6, but action kills 1 unless the trolley derails and hits 10 or 3, and there’s a 10% or 30% chance of that then deciding The Right Thing to Do gets trickier.
“Is it the right thing to do?” is a very interesting question, because I think it depends on how you think of “right.” Was it moral to undo the murder of billions of humans and an incalculable number of aliens? Yes, of course. Was it a good idea, after five years of the universe trying to cope with the loss? No, that sounds like a terrible idea, for all the reasons stated above.
The snap would have done terrible damage to logistics and infrastructure across the planet. Thanos doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who would have picked and choosed to minimize collateral damage. I think he gave everyone a 50/50 shot and didn’t much care about the aftermath. Realistically, five years later maybe the world has finally recovered to the point where things are moving again, people are farming and trade is happening and maybe things are improving. Dump billions of people back onto this recovering system and there’s no chance it wouldn’t end in disaster. The Avengers should have considered an alternate way, bring the lost people back on a duplicate Earth or bring folks back on a staggered schedule or do some other magic to make sure the return happens smoothly.
That said, folks living in the MCU refer to the whole period as “The Blip” which I suppose tells you what you need to know about how much it impacted people. For better or worse, the MCU canon is that this terrible event caused a lot of suffering and societal changes but by and large life went on and civilization didn’t collapse after either snap. Based on hindsight (and the fact the writers weren’t interested in telling a more realistic story about the apocalyptic effects of either snap) it’s hard to justify any argument that the second snap was a bad idea because there is proof that it was a good idea.
Absolutely? More like “possibly.” After all, there’s no reason to think those children would have been conceived over the next five years without an apocalypse. Heck, the movie starts with Tony talking about a pre-snap premonition that he and Pepper had a child named Morgan.
So we’re left with an existing outcome (half the population destroyed) and a possible outcome (some people might not conceive a comparatively percentage of children).
No, they would absolutely be erased. Some percentage of their parents would still re-conceive, but a lot would not - a lot of relationships don’t survive grief over the loss of a child - and those that did re-conceive would not be having the same kids. You’re simply not going to be able to recreate the exact same circumstances for conception in both timelines: you’d need the exact same sperm to get to the exact same egg to get the exact same kid, otherwise you’re just making siblings. It’s like the Butterfly Effect, except in this case, the butterfly is the size of Mothra.
Tony Stark isn’t psychic. He had a dream about starting a family with the woman he’s in love with, and guessed right on the gender.
Anyway, the film explicitly says they can’t fix the Snap by traveling back in time and undoing it.
I could consign you to something far worse… 
Or pretty much any one individual.
Exactly.
Well, if you Un-snap to 5 seconds after, then all those children can still be born, yes? And altho yes, those Children then “never were, but might be” you would save all those who died or suffered from the secondary issues with the 1st Snap. Likely far far more lives would be saved by a 5 second after Un-snap.
Exactly.
True, they can’t Un-Do the snap, but apparently? they could have set the 2nd Snap to five seconds after. That would be a Blip.
Nope. Butterfly effect. You’ll never create the exact conditions that led to that one particular sperm meeting that one particular egg. You could give the kid a whole bunch of siblings, but any kid that was born in the five year gap would be gone forever.
No, they can’t change history at all. The movie is very explicit about this: you can travel in time, but you can’t change the course of events.
That was interesting, but it doesn’t really grasp the real reason behind the fundamental conservatism and lack of progression or fundamental change in the MCU:
If superheroes changed the world too much, it would rapidly become a background to the action that the audience would not be able to relate to.
DD, I’m going to gently chide you on this. In a prior response you said -
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.
So you’re trying (in service of having a fun discussion, but still!) to have it both ways.
Okay, so, taking a step back, most of us are having fun debating the real-world consequences of both events, which in world, are hand-waved away other than for jokes, emotional investment, or plot points.
Which leaves us with what I think most of us are addressing, if such a circumstance were to occur and the second snap occurred with ONLY what we see on-screen in terms of preparation, would the scenario been nearly as safe / happy / ‘good’ as shown?
And I think most of us are arguing ‘hell no’. That’s why we’re considering just how much planning was involved in the snap ‘off-screen’ whether it be powers, preparation, or magi/supertech. One of my personal theories (that hasn’t been brought up yet in the thread) is that since we know Steve Rogers went back, he could easily have done some ‘off the books’ preparation, especially considering the influence of his wife. If we can take the example of the success of Arnim Zola, it’s pretty easy to see a hidden group stockpiling sufficient supplies to allow survival of the returnees, especially with 50+ years to prepare.
Which wouldn’t have involved a direct change of the past, just movement of goods and supplies around to other locations.
We’re still dodging the moral/ethical question though, because we haven’t decided on whether you mean absolute or situational morals and ethics. Absolutes morality would say yes, of course you save/return them all. Situational is what most of us have been arguing, and now we’re back to the prior question - if all we see is all we get, then how bad would it have been?
But to repeat my earlier point, sure seems to have been a minor issue, so even the situational ethics seem to be clear on saving them all.
I don’t recall this, but more to the point, it begs the question of whether there is a distinction here between trying to change the course of events via time travel vs. by use of the stones. Didn’t snap #1 change the course of events? Didn’t Thanos learn what the depleted, time-trippin’ Avengers were up to and change his actions? The outcome may have ultimately been the same, but events leading up to it clearly changed.
“When all six are directly wielded together, nothing is impossible for their bearer.” - https://www.marvel.com/items/infinity-gems
But okay, let’s roll with impossible, even for someone for whom nothing is impossible. Given the volatile havoc the second snap would wreak – something an obnoxious jerk-genius like Stark would have realized – he might have chosen instead to spare everyone the unalterable disaster/tragedy by using the power of the stones to create a mass illusion that A.T. (After Thanos), the world returned to normality sans snap #1; and that he could do this in such a way that no one else in the movie would be able to detect. Exercising such dick-like initiative strikes me as wholly consistent with his character (see: creating Ultron) while the power of the stones can hardly be overestimated (ETA: I forgot he couldn’t bring back Black Widow, so I guess there are limits to the stones’ power). We might also speculate that Stark infused his consciousness/essence/”soul” into the stones before meeting his fate so that he could continue to actively sustain the illusion and that such an ability would not depend on the stones being together in one place (or even one time or dimension) to make it all work; just as long as none of them were destroyed. If indeed this is what Stark did, the movie would end indistinguishably from how it ends now.
Re: the OP, in such a “world,” Stark’s actions could be judged, but only by someone/entity aware of them and who cared about humanity’s fate enough to bother to judge. For those for whom the illusion is now reality, there could be no judging Stark. And from the audience’s perspective, any judgments would be subject to change pending sequels and retconning.
I dunno, wouldn’t that mean Stark mind-raped zillions of people ‘for their own good’? Not sure that’s RTTD.
Isn’t that a contradiction? If they can’t change anything, why is Stark warning them to not change anything?
From MCU ethics, something terrible happened (the snap) and the Avengers reversed it, so it’s good.
The MCU tends to be very forgiving of unintended consequences.
I suppose the real question is how long after the snap would it be okay to reverse it. 5 years, you can probably adjust to. But 10, 20, 30 years later? Or what other major events would it be ok for The Avengers to reverse (assuming the time police from Loki don’t stop them)?
Except Endgame makes noise about branching timelines, and in a lot of them there was no blippy snap at all.
Which the movie contradicts. Well, if it thought about it, that is. Was old Steve just hiding in a building since WWII, getting old and not doing anything? Obviously he changed something. (I actually think his moral code wouldn’t let him stay out of events, knowing what he knows. Yet, Hydra still infiltrated SHIELD when he could have done something to stop it. He could have stopped Loki before the Battle of NY. There’s a moral quandary for you! )
To the OP question, I wonder about the effect on other planets, that have no knowledge of Thanos or Avengers or anything, and hence no idea what happened. One day, half their people vanish with no explanation, then, a while later, they all come back, again with no explanation. What do they think? Maybe they think the first snap was the rapture, and society changed in accordance. Then they found the rapture was a lie. Now what?
Or what if, as a result of the snap, someone on their planet pushed The Button, utterly destroying their planet in a nukular fireball. What do the newly unblipped do then, in this post-apocalyptic wasteland?
Any moral analysis needs to address these as well. And since we don’t have sufficient knowledge, it’s unanswerable,
Sure you would. I would too. We can probably agree that some vast level of goodness is worth a small level of injustice. The rest is just negotiating the smallest acceptable gap between the goodness and the injustice. Inserting a level of personal responsibility - telling someone that they have to pull the lever or kill the fat man, makes it even harder.
Really good point. In the Winter Soldier show, the bad guys are angry because of the socioeconomic fallout of people returning. Reversal of open border policies, property rights being muddled, etc. The show gives us very explicit examples of Bad Stuff, but makes no mention of billions of “torment and misery.”
Why? Because what would be the point? The reversal has two purposes.
Purpose the greater: all massive comic book tragedies must be reversed. This is the law.
Purpose the lesser: an ongoing background hook for the next phase of the MCU.
“The planet earth is an unlivable hellscape of torment and misery” is not a good hook for the MCU. Instead, they went with “we’ll use the blip as a framework to discuss real-world issues of race, class, and property.” That’s probably better.
There’s two whole scenes devoted to talking specifically about this subject: one when they first propose time travel, and Don Cheadle asks why they don’t just go back and murder Thanos as a baby, and again when Bruce Banner meets the Ancient One and talks her into giving him the stone.
You can’t change the course of events through time travel. You can, of course, change things in your normal, linear time line. But if you try to change the past by, say, killing Thanos, you don’t really prevent the Snap: you create a new timeline where it didn’t happen, but the timeline where it did still exists. When Thanos travels forward in time and dies there, he created a second timeline, where Thanos and most of his fleet vanished without an explanation, and was never heard from again, years before he could complete the Infinity Gauntlet.
Maybe, but it wasn’t Stark who undid the Snap, it was Bruce.
Stark is worried that time travel might erase his daughter before they figure out how time travel will work. It’s an excuse to do a little “Refuse the Call/Answer the Call” character arc with him, and a way to give an info dump about how their model of time travel works. Once they have a working time machine, he doesn’t bring it up any more, because they’ve realized that it isn’t really a relevant concern for what they’re doing.
There are no timelines in Endgame where the Snap didn’t happen. It’s implied that a couple might have been created by the events we see (Thanos traveling forward in time definitely would have created one, but we don’t actually see it. I think Steve staying with Peggy also created one, but that’s more debatable.)
But yeah, “branching timelines” is exactly the explanation they give in the film for why you can’t use time travel to undo the Snap.
No, it’s actually a remarkably consistent time travel story. Up there with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure for really putting thought into how their system would work.
No, I suspect he was busy dismantling Hydra before they could completely take over Shield, rescuing Bucky from the Winder Soldier program, and getting the world ready for dealing with Thanos in 80 years.
But all of that would have happened in an alternate time line, which we don’t see on screen.
Okay, we’re probably getting too far in the weeds here addressing the movie itself, but I want to address this point. It’s correct that the method of time travel used in the movie cannot change the past and only creates alt timelines. However, using the Time Stone (or the full Gauntlet) does allow you to change the past. Thanos even says he’s going to rewrite history instead of just killing everyone the second time around. So they could’ve used the Snap to undo the last five years.
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.
Thanos said he was going to unmake the universe and rebuild it from the ground up the way he wants it. I don’t think he said anything about using time travel to do that.