• lunarul@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    If surviving humans lost 50% of their gut bacteria, that means that those snapped away left 50% of their gut bacteria behind.

  • blady_blah@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • zod000@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      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.

    • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

  • nieminen@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    In reality, since it was more random, some poor soul would have their whole biomes destroyed, and just be rekd.

  • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    he would have to snap his fingers infinitely many times to kill everyone so he is not that powerful

    • Zron@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      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?

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.

  • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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?

  • NorthWestWind@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    If you include bacteria, then probably no human died from the snap. There are significantly more of them

      • NorthWestWind@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        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.

        • ramenshaman@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          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?

          • NorthWestWind@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago

            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.