Nah the 50% left would quickly replace what was snapped away to the limits of their environment. They multiply fast.
Well no, That would be 75% if the other 50% already existed within the organisms he killed.
50% of each living thing, so each kind of bacteria you have in your gut is reduced by 50%
Not 50% of all the bacteria
I have a math problem for you.
10x0,5 + 20x0,5 + 40x0,5 = 5+10+20= 35
(10+20+40)x0,5 = 70x0,5 = 35
You see where this is going?
Seems like if you killed half of a bacteria that would kill the whole thing, wouldn’t it? You can’t just chop a bacteria in half. I don’t think…
It depends on the bacteria, when in it’s lifecycle half of it is killed, and what half is killed. To keep things short, the odds are in the bacteria’s favor. Suppose if half the bacteria in your gut died right now how long do you think it would take for the bacteria population in your gut to return to pre-snap levels? A month? A year? Decades? How about less than an hour. Bacteria reproduce exponentially and on average, a bacterial generation lasts 20 minutes. Meaning that every 20 minutes the population doubles, assuming there are no deaths in the population during this time. If there is space for bacteria to grow, they will.
Wait… How is that different?
I responded to a different comment explaining more.
Micro biology changes a lot faster than what you see in complex multi-celluar organisms.
But half still die regardless of how fast they reproduce/come back
Thanos’ plan was unmitigated garbage anyway.
Humanity reached 4M in 1975 and hit 8M in 2022. On that basis, if half of humanity died when Thanos snapped his fingers 50 years later we’d be back to 8M people again.
That is NOT how species replicate. There are many factors where that number comes from. Including food and space to keep them. I read in college the max for humans is something like 10 million. But most scientists think it’s a already slowing down due to the struggles everyone deals with.
You mean 10 billion?
Large cities can have more than 10 million people, so I assume you mean the other thing.
Bluntly, half of the occupants of residences would be gone, and their stuff would be up for grabs. It would take a few years to stabilize afterwards, but it would mostly be business as usual for those who survived the snap (apart from the obvious mental trauma).
Enough homes exist for the number of people who live here now, whether those homes are condos, apartments, detached homes, townhouses, or otherwise. A lot of people would be able to move somewhere more permanent, because the housing market would crash pretty hard.
As we refill the homes the population would naturally return to the same level of growth we have seen previously… So after a few years, maybe a decade, max, humanity would be back on the population train straight to 8B again for sometime between 2050 and 2075.
Humans don’t really follow the same population rules as apply to animals, bacteria, or other organisms in general.
I meant 10 billion yes. And this study was specifically for humans. Saying we aren’t animals and we don’t live by nature’s rules just simply isn’t factual. We do things a lot differently but no matter what we still have instincts and those instincts drive us. We can’t just take out the hardwiring.
We can’t take it out, but we can over rule it with reason and logic. We can decide to do something that’s not our “natural” choice.
I know plenty of childfree couples, yet our biological drive is to create children to perpetuate our genes in the species.
There’s a lot of exceptions to the natural human drives that most people experience.
That is just one example. There are many natural drives that we still use. We eat. We breathe air. We drink water. There are plenty of natural drives that we cannot overcome. We are animals and all animals have things that affect their decisions.
10 million sounds great, maybe the housing market would finally self correct.
Building additional supply depots removes the cap
That is not the only factor. But yes it would increase food capacity. But species are very aware of their drain on an eco system. We are starting to become more aware. But we know killing off one bug will effect harvests that effect everything including our food’s food.
I think he’s talking about vidya
Are… you high? You know that back when I last checked in 2020ish there were 8 billion people, right? Maybe that’s what you meant
Edit surely you had to have meant that. The US alone has almost half a billion people. Most countries have well over that number so I’m attributing it to mistype
Oops. Yup, utter failed to put Bs! Put it down to not having had enough coffee today!
That’s obviously what they meant. There was probably some translation error. Just cut people some slack, everyone makes small mistakes from time to time. There’s a few (atleast 2) languages where the native word for billion starts with an m and the word for trillion starts with a b.
Yeah that’s why I added my edit.
I shouldn’t have led with the “are you high” either. Yesterday was a bad day for me. My apologies to the commenter.
They might not be a native English speaker. In my language (Norwegian), the word for “billion” is “milliard”. I think that’s also the case in German.
Wouldn’t 50% of them die at the same time as the creatures that they live inside? Like unexisting 50% of humans would in fact unexist 50% of the bacteria in the humans who went poof.
How does this argument make sense?
If it’s all a truly random selection, which I believe it was, then half of all people would cease to exist, leaving half of their gut biomes behind, still alive (albeit briefly). I guess the end result would be the snapped people leaving behind a mist of gross intestinal bacteria which would itself mostly die out without a host. Meaning much more than half of all gut biome bacteria would be killed as a result.
Of course it would make more sense to consider a person and their gut flora as one being, but the joke is about how stupid the initial conception of Thanos’ plan is, not creating an academically rigorous argument.
This brings up an interesting point. The snap would have to run a multi pass check to make sure that by killing half of all organic life, it’s not causing the other half to die off. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be confirming to the will of the user, but then does it “scan” individual life types independently or as an ecosystem unto themselves, in which case is there precedence? Do food producing things get a pass, because otherwise the snap is just shortcut the process for half of the population. If it does leave the food producing ones alone, then really he’s just snapping away apex predators.
Each bacteria is an individual living organism. So I’m guessing that (within this framework) the humans disappeared, but only ~50% (it would average out to 50% across the entire population) of their gut biome (or I guess any other living organism within them) disappeared.
And as such, in people who did not disappear, ~50% (on avg) of their gut biome also disappeared.
The math checks out…
So you are saying for the 50%who disappeared, 50% of their gut bacteria fell out (and died)
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.
That’s a very good point! Thank you!
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?
The second most significant ingredient after water is bacterial biomass — both alive and dead organisms; this makes up 25–54 percent of the dry weight of poop.
My bad – looks like I misread the Google summary. A healthy turd is 75% water, and of what’s left, around 25-50% is made up of microbes.
Yeah, worst case scenario stock prices for probiotic yoghurt would increase.
Looks like Jamie Lee Curtis is joining the MCU.
See… see this is the story content that belongs in the extended cut.
Come to think about it, whenever a macroscopic organism - ie animals - died it would leave behind about half the microbes living on and in them. When those poor fools got dusted it should have left a puddle of horrible slime on the ground.
Maybe that was accounted for in the dust/flake animation of the unlucky deceased.
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.
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?
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.
As someome who is fucking stupid, what ghe hell is a gut biome and why would 50% of the world population disappearing affect it at all? And why would people be power blasting their bathrooms with diarrhea
Your gut is full of friendly bacteria that help you digest your food and keep everything running smoothly and efficiency. This vast community of bacteria is called a gut microbiome. People with gut problems like inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome tend to have a much less diverse gut micribiome. Taking a broad spectrum antibiotic can devastate your gut microbiome, letting the bad bacteria thrive while the good ones are offstage, sometimes leading to some of the same symptoms that people with IBD and IBS might encounter, and it can take months to recover.
Killing 50% of all living things might include 50% of gut microbia, resulting in the potential for bloating, gassiness, stomach cramps, and potentially diarrhoea.
Ahhh that makes sense. Thank you for this explanation, I appreciate it very much.
You’re very welcome.
Because it just makes sense. Snap, diarrhea. It’s simple.
Oh, okay i figured that much but wasnt sure
I was kidding around, it’s a silly leap, and the post is silly, so I was just suggesting something silly myself. Someone else seems to have done the legwork though.
So was I! I’m having a good time here, you having a good time?
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.
