Is virus alive? We have tons of those as well.
No, viruses don’t mean the scientific definition of life. IIRC, the primary reason why is because, in order to make copies of itself, it must hijack a living cell’s reproductive system to do so. It can’t simply divide to make more of itself.
E. Coli reproduces so fast that a population can double in size in half an hour, and human feces is 50% bacteria by weight.
If your gut microbiome got snapped it’d be back so fast you wouldn’t even notice. Bacteria are kinda scary.
Wait, do you have a source for the 50% number?
Yeah, worst case scenario stock prices for probiotic yoghurt would increase.
See… see this is the story content that belongs in the extended cut.
Does that mean for the people that got snapped, some will leave some of their sperm behind?
And pregnant woman might leave their fetus behind.
No because a fetus doesn’t mean the criteria of having a soul (:
Also sperm most certainly doesn’t
There was never any such ideas being part of it. It affected plantlife and bacteria as well. The idea of a soul to begin with is not even supported by science, although most people consider it to have some kind of validity, even if it’s not quite definable. But the relevant issue is that it’s all life period.
Well OOP said all life, include bacteria, then they most certainly include sperm and fetus.
Macroscopic creatures are made of different types of cells and stuff… what constitutes a living thing?
People didn’t lose half of their cells, it was all or none.
Emm yeah but that’s the joke.
Or the 50% of all people that got snapped took 50% of the gut bacteria with them, leaving the rest with no loss to their gut biomes. (taps forehead)
or the survivors lost all but bacteria, and the remainders were left over in places of the snapped people
Ohh so that’s what the dust is. The leftover gut bacteria.
Thanos’ snap wouldn’t kill 50% of each survivors’ gut microbiome, it would kill 50% of all the lil buggies that compromise all gut microbiomes, and if the snap effects individuals randomly, you’d see a normal distribution (I think, I haven’t taken stats in a decade). So some survivors would retain 100% of their microbiome, some would lose it all, with a bell curve in between, probably with the peak around 50%.
That bell curve would be extremely narrow. You have so many lil buggies that basically every human survivor would lose ~50% buggies.
Killing 50% of your gut bacteria is a big nothing.
These things reproduce on the timescale of hours.
I kill 90% of my sourdough starter every time I feed it, and it bounces back the same day.
Yeah, I have been on antibiotics that wiped out most of my gut bacteria. It was easy to upset my stomach for a few months, then I was fine.
I had the same experience with norovirus this spring.
Probiotics did the trick, but it was t so much fun.
I want the show where the snapped people come back and then the survivors have to awkwardly explain that they have gotten remarried and otherwise moved on.
That actually happens in some of the TV series from that story arc.
It’s also the glut of the plot of The Leftovers. Absolutely brilliant show, & Proxima Midnight is in it.
There were a few instances of that in some of that later films, but I forget which because of how forgettable they all truly were.
That would imply that 50 percent of the snapped people’s biomes remained behind. All of the produce in the grocery stores would be covered in an airborne mist of E. coli, and snapped surgeons that were mid-operation would give their patients staph infections, assuming the suriviving surgery team was able to stablize and close them up before they died anyway. Neat.
Also when those snapped people returned with the half of their biomes that also got snapped, you would get a sequel to the diarrhea. Diarrhea 2: Electric Boogapoo.
Yeah well, movie Spider-Man cums out of his wrists, so we’re in a whole weird area already.
Do the HeLa cells all die together, or do only half of them die?
50% of all ≠ 50% per person
Right? Taking even the people who disappeared into account, and their gut biomes, would you not consider them all as part of all life?
If so, there may be some survivors with all of their guy biomes perfectly intact, and others who get unfortunately zilched.
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If the 50% are homogeneously spread -and it’s implied that it is-, then one may assume 50% per person also applies. Like how he didn’t leave 50% of planets alone and purge the rest.
I would think it’s basically a coin flip for each living thing. It’s possible, for example, that all humans survive, however the probability is so astronomically small, it’s functionally impossible.
Same with gut biome. Even with several billion attempts, the probability that even 60% of any individual’s trillion gut microbes get snapped would be essentially functionally impossible.
Just to give an idea of the unlikelihood we’re talking about here, you can model this as a Bernoulli process with a binomial distribution.
If N is the number of beings potentially snapped, then (√N)/2 is the standard deviation. (If you’re curious about why, you can read more here.) So for 8.2 billion people, the standard deviation is ~90,000. The chance of being more than ~3 standard deviations below the mean is 0.1%. That means there’s only a 0.1% chance of snapping less than 4,099,720,200 people.
I’m not sure it’s stated, but I thought the planets that had already been purged by Thanos’ armies, like Gamora’s planet and Xandar were spared the snap.
Then I guess so where the microbioms of people whose guts Thanos had already purged.
She makes a compelling argument.
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Look, we’re in the realm where the guy decided to remove 50% of all life… as a resource conservation attempt.
Lovely movies, but the “guy’s a literal death cultist” required way less suspension of disbelief. Jilted incel Thanos pining after an annoyed Aubrey Plaza or whoever would have been way more timely, too.
But if we’re doing it this way… 50% of the plants, algae and plankton would have died too. XKCD MUST have figured out what that’d do to the atmosphere by now, right?
Isn’t “an annoyed Aubrey Plaza” redundant?
pining after an annoyed Aubrey Plaza
Can’t have your bad guy be that relatable. Everyone would just be cheering against the avengers.
Thank you for the head cannon update. now marvels version of death is played by Aubrey plaza and it just fucking works
That may not be just head cannon. The Agatha show is kinda hinting at it.
I think the intention was sentient life as having Thanos stop the film to explain the terms and conditions of his snap would’ve impacted the pacing of the film.
He coulda just slipped the word “sentient” in to the monologue where he explains his plan. I don’t think that would have impacted pacing at all.
