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If surviving humans lost 50% of their gut bacteria, that means that those snapped away left 50% of their gut bacteria behind.
More gut bacteria for the rest of us, that’s what I say!
That’s not how it worked. He killed 50% of gut bacteria by killing 50% of the hosts.
Depends on whether “50% of all life” means half of the contiguous lumps of cells we call “creatures” or simply half of all living matter.
You literally see individual people dissolving, and others being unaffected. How is this unclear?
Haven’t seen it, I’m just reading about it here, I’m not even sure who Thanos is LOL.
Source? I’m pretty sure random bacteria would still be around a while if your brain activity went to zero.
The source is Thanos supposed IQ score.
This is refuted by his approach to only cut out half the tumor.
½?
Yeah my interpretation is that half your cells would die - didn’t even consider that if half your brain cells died it would probably kill you instantly.
or 100% of the 50% that are destroyed are the gut bacteria in the humans etc that got snapped
The alternative is even more disturbing: snapped humans leave behind a cloud of poopy gut microbes.
What do you think that dust was?
In reality, since it was more random, some poor soul would have their whole biomes destroyed, and just be rekd.
That would be incredibly unlikely. Due to the huge number of gut microbes, the chance to even lose 5% off of the median, even with billions of trials, is functionally zero.
Maybe in your gut biome, but mine is just two or three really, really large bacteria
So, what are their names?
What are their names, and do they bite?
Have you ever been prescribed a wolf?
That just sounds like the gut biome version of a spworm.
Losing 50% of your gut bioma will be fixed in an hour or two.
The snap was always the dumbest part of the entire avenger series. Let’s say for example, you have a bunch of deer that are eating the forest bare, so you let hunters kill half of them… Then what happens next? You have the exact same problem in a few years. The snap solves nothing.
Also if you can snap your fingers and do this, why can’t you snap your fingers and make twice the food supply?
The snap is just stupid, even in a world made-up physics-defying superheroes.
To be fair, it made slightly more sense in the comics, though still batshit. In the comics there was no noble purpose like they tried to shoehorn in for the MCU. IIRC, Thanos was literally doing it to impressed Death (the cosmic entity) to gain her affection.
makes more sense for sure
Even worse than that. 50% of all life dies, right? That’s 50% of the plants too. If you know anything about food chains, taking 50% of everything leaves the top of the chain massively overloaded.
Yeah but I thought about this I realized that whenever somebody vanished from the snap it would leave behind a slurry of gut microbes and a (different looking) dust from all of the skin mites, microbes, and stuff that just live all over the human body. Meaning the aftermath would have been even messier.
Fewer than 50% of the cells in “your body” contain your own DNA.
There are many more bacteria, since they are much much smaller than “your own” eukaryotic cells.
Where you end and your “gut flora” begin and end is not as clear as you might first believe.
he would have to snap his fingers infinitely many times to kill everyone so he is not that powerful
That’s an interesting question as to whether the infinity gauntlet rounds down.
Like, if there were 3 survivors of a species and thanos snapped the universe, does the gauntlet round up to 2 survivors, or down to one?
I thought it was just an instantaneous, every living thing has a 50/50 chance of living or dying. No rounding, no species specific exceptions.
or down to one and a half?
It’s bullshit space magic, it probably considers what Thanos thinks of as life. Why it snapped the birds is a different plot hole altogether, because it means he snapped away half the food, too.
So will bacteriophages and viruses be snapped as well? Does it mean that scientists can utilize the Thanos snap to determine for good whether viruses are alive?
If you include bacteria, then probably no human died from the snap. There are significantly more of them
That’s not how percentages work
Moreover, that’s not how probability works in independent events.
It’d be like saying “I flipped coin A 1 billion times and got half a billion heads, so now that I’m flipping coin B 100 times, I probably won’t get any more heads.”
It should be fairly obvious that you can say the exact same statement about tails, and get a completely contradictory statement.
Say, there exists 2 humans and 98 bacteria. Consider all cells of a human one life.
50% of ALL life doesn’t care which species the life is, and therefore there’s a chance that 50 bacteria die. The probability of that happening is 98C50 / 100C50 = 98! 50! 50! / (100! 50! 48!) = (50)(49) / ((100)(99)) = 0.247
For my previous argument, I did not actually do the math. Now that I have done a little bit, the probability seems to converge at 25%
Obviously, this is based on the interpretation of “all life”. For my interpretation, “all life” includes every life in a single set, and apply the 50% snap to that. For some others however, it may be interpreted as each species in their own set, and the 50% snap is applied on each set individually.
But if there are 7 billion humans and n bacteria, and 50% of them are snapped, wouldn’t approximately 3.5 billion humans and n/2 bacteria be snapped?
The problem is the ambiguity of the statement. Is it 50% of each species? Or is it 50% of all life as one set?
If it’s the former case, then sure 3.5b humans and n/2 bacteria gets snapped.
But if it’s the latter case, we group all 7b and n bacteria into one set and snap half of them. This 50% can consist of 50% humans + 50% bacteria, but there’s also a chance for it to include 0% humans + 100% bacteria. Therefore, the amount of humans snap is a random variable instead of a constant.
If you want to be really technical the survivors would also lose 50% of all the other cells in their bodies and probably wouldn’t live another few months. I’m not a doctor so I won’t try to put a number of weeks, days or hours on it, let alone argue that number, but hey knock yourself out.
/edit based on another comment - even if you could stay physically intact with half the cells in your body dying, half of your brain cells dying would probably kill you instantly.
