• kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

      • Boxscape@lemmy.sdf.org
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        2 months ago

        Do viruses get snapped too or na

        And da babies in-utero? Did the Infinity Gauntlet go by conception or 24-weeks?

        • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          There were zero reports I’ve heard from any TV, movie, or comic reference to the snap of unborn (but possibly viable) babies being left behind (by any species even) when the pregnant mother disappeared in the snap. That suggests the Infinity Gauntlet doesn’t consider the unborn as a separate individual until birth.

          • Boxscape@lemmy.sdf.org
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            2 months ago

            unborn (but possibly viable) babies being left behind (by any species even) when the pregnant mother disappeared in the snap.

            This scenario didn’t even enter my head when I posed the question. That’s some Stephen King-level imagery though—a snapped mother disappearing only for an amniotic sac to drop in her place.

            • samus12345@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              I think the Gauntlet counted any beings that either depended on another to live or supported another to live as all one unit for simplicity’s sake.

              • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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                2 months ago

                I would love a comic series where each Infinity Stone has a representative entity of some kind and we get to see the “thought process” each goes through in fulfilling the request of its wielder. I’m envisioning a format like the Pixar movie “Inside Out” except each stone’s entity is very judgy on how the wielder is using it.

                “Ugh, Goddamit Dr Strange, how many more times do you want to do this Dormamu thing. Its getting really repetitive.” - Time stone

                Or when multiple stones have to work together, they have to hash out what each is going to do to fulfill the desired wish. The conversation between all the stones during “the snap” being the longest and most complicated conversation with questions coming up like “okay Mr Soul Stone smart guy, what about pregnant women?! Is that one soul or two, huh?”

            • Match!!@pawb.social
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              2 months ago

              imagine the stone suddenly surgically removing your conjoined twin but leaving you with a typical body afterwards. then 5 years later your twin - now noticably younger and alien to you - is reattached

        • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          And da babies in-utero? Did the Infinity Gauntlet go by conception or 24-weeks?

          Now you got this idea in my head, if it would have been possible to know if the Infinity Gauntlet considered conception, couldn’t a species, lets say humans, knowing “the snap” was a possible risk, create massive stores of zygotes kept on ice? Lets say 10 zygotes to every 1 living human. After the snap of “half” that would mean that instead of 50% of humans disappearing it would only have been 2.5%.

          Moreover, since every other species would have lost 50% and been in chaos it would have been prime opportunity to conquer other species still in disarray.

          • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Now I’d love to see a story about a species that has huge numbers of young but also incredibly high infant mortality. So in the snap they mostly lost a bunch of kids who were going to die anyway. Then they decide to take advantage and invade their neighbors, and Captain Marvel comes to help.

      • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Finally someone asks the real question. Is there an objective definition to life that Virus may or may not fall under? Or would it depend on Thano’s subjective opinion on the matter?

        • BenReilly97@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          The scientific definition of life changes constantly, but viruses more often than not fall under “not alive.”

          Throughout, viruses have rarely been considered alive. More than 120 definitions of life exist today, and most require metabolism, a set of chemical reactions that produce energy. Viruses do not metabolize. They also don’t fit some other common criteria. They do not have cells. They cannot reproduce independently. Viruses are inert packages of DNA or RNA that cannot replicate without a host cell.

          Source

        • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Eh, it’s not really that cut and dry. You could debate either way with plenty of evidence, in the end it’s really a limit to the semantics of language

          Edit: here’s a neat article that talks about it

          • GingaNinga@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Thats pretty neat “you cant kill something thats not alive”. Can viruses respond to stimuli? We consider bacteria alive but viruses are debated, wheres the line? are enzymes alive? Are prions alive? cool article.

  • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • HonkyTonkWoman@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        I had the same experience with norovirus this spring.

        Probiotics did the trick, but it was t so much fun.

    • xXSirDanglesXx@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • enkers@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        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.

        • enkers@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          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.

      • Amputret@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 months ago

        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.

  • don@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    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)

  • AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    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?

    • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • teddy2021@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        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.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 months ago

      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…

  • Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk
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    2 months ago

    Thanos’ plan was unmitigated garbage anyway.

    Humanity reached 4B in 1975 and hit 8B in 2022. On that basis, if half of humanity died when Thanos snapped his fingers 50 years later we’d be back to 8B people again.

    ——— Edited to billions not millions because I wrote it while under the influence of stupidity.