r/Marvel • u/LoverOfE-Olsen • 12h ago
Film/Television 5 years after Thanos snapped his fingers and half of life across the universe disappeared, the world hardly moved forward. If this happened to our world and the snap never reversed, do you believe the impacts would lead to our extinction or an eventual utopia?
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u/No-Magician6169 12h ago
Maybe I could finally find a affordable house.
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u/Longjumping_Fun2576 12h ago
This is why venture capitalists are buying them up at record speed instead.
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u/unlistedartist000 12h ago
yeah thats one thing ive thought about a lot. what happens to all the houses that end up empty? did they have an emergency census to see who was gone, who wasn't? pets left behind? etc.
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u/PhillipJ3ffries 12h ago
There is already so much empty housing in the US. Hasn’t effected affordability at all
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u/Bwleon7 11h ago
Low housing in areas people want to live in is the issue.
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u/icameforgold 11h ago
Plenty of areas with lots of houses at an affordable price that are nice. If what you mean by "want to live in" is HCOL areas like LA or New York City or the nicest part of the popular part of a city. Then no, that's ridiculous. You shouldn't expect it to be a right to live wherever you want without having to make some concessions.
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u/thaynem 11h ago
The problem is that the places with affordable housing also don't have a lot of jobs.
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u/laughman20 10h ago
We just about had that problem solved, with many companies going to work from home, and the push for high speed internet country-wide.
Then they reversed course when they realized these CEOs investments in downtown office building real estate was losing money and their properties were becoming worthless, and forced everyone back.
The answer is almost always greed.
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u/thaynem 10h ago
Yeah... As someone who prefers working from home, and doesn't want to live in one of the big metropolises, even if housing was affordable, it's pretty frustrating.
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u/laughman20 10h ago
It’s super frustrating because folks started to move and live where they genuinely wanted to live, without worrying about not finding a job they enjoyed.
For example, people who like living in the country (maybe like what you’re saying) but still want to work for a large corporation, and loved their job doing so.
What doesn’t make sense from a business standpoint, is it even helped with hiring the right person for the job. No more hiring in specific areas for a job, at a centralized location. Like you can now hire country-wide, and have a bigger basket to pick from for a solid employee. But no, let’s only hire people in our few specific hubs instead.
Shit gets me worked up, sorry for getting on my soapbox lol
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u/ChaseballBat 11h ago
Yeah but most of those houses are rentals which are counted month to month, the actual abandoned houses are in disrepair or in cities no one wants to live in.
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u/Ozymandias12 10h ago
Pretty sure in Endgame they briefly mention the world’s governments conducting a census
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u/kaisong 8h ago
Doesnt matter, the thing is that corporations would still be able to buy out all the housing. Even more so when theres a bunch of houses where the breadwinner no longer can make payments.
They didnt snap away corporations as a whole, it would require literally the entire thing to have every single employee thats middle management and above to dust. and even then i think shareholders would still have enough of them to come together to put together a board and continue it.
5 years after and i think a lot of poeple would come back to houses where they no longer live in or could afford to get back
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u/boticelli77 12h ago
Oh buddy. A lack of housing isn't keeping you from owning a house. Companies like blackrock that buy up properties and keep the cost high are to blame here.
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u/No-Magician6169 12h ago
Sure, except for the fact that I don't live in the US.
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u/boticelli77 12h ago
And blackrock doesn't operate in JUST the US. They are a worldwide parasite.
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u/No-Magician6169 11h ago
Sure, but it's not relevant here.
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u/ChaseballBat 11h ago
In the US only 2% of single family housing is owned by corporations. I imagine it's less when you get out of the US.
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u/ChaseballBat 6h ago edited 1h ago
Can I see that report, people often mix up SFH with dwellings. But a multifamily is considered dwellings.
Edit: cool this loser blocked me for asking to see his source. I'm not even pro corporate SFH ownership. No business should be allowed to own a SFH
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u/boticelli77 11h ago
I'm curious as to what small corner of the world you live in that isn't Europe, middle east, Africa, Latin America, Canada, Japan, Australia, and the Asia pacific? I'm not saying they exist where you are, I'm just wondering how you have avoided them mostly lol.
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u/ChaseballBat 11h ago
FYI the market share of corporations owning housing is like 2% or something. Not to say, that corporations shouldn't be allowed to buy housing, but it's not entirely because they are buying it. It might push the needle a little higher but not our of unaffordability. Unaffordability comes from local supply and demand, the government needs to incentives developers while simultaneously building social housing, it is tricky to navigate most countries have a population that is anti-socialism.
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u/Legendarien1 11h ago
They can only keep the housing costs high because they buy up properties and induce artificial scarcity.
If half the population was snapped away, like 20% of the housing market would get freed up overnight, their entire business model would collapse
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u/Sea-Art-8391 12h ago
estimate how much of our infrastructure depends on specialists who would just be gone. You don't lose half the population evenly across every profession, you lose clusters. Entire power grids go unmaintained because the five guys who actually understood that regional system all vanished. Nuclear plants, water treatment, the supply chain for insulin, all of it teeters on tiny groups of people with niche knowledge.
The first year would be the real killer. Not from chaos or violence, but from cascading failures nobody saw coming because nobody left alive knows how to stop them. A dam fails in one region, takes out a downstream chemical plant, poisons the water table for three states. That kind of thing compounds fast.
Extinction is dramatic but not impossible if we hit certain thresholds. Lose enough crop pollinators and grain transport in the same window and you've got famine on a scale that makes history look like a rough winter. Utopia only works if we assume the survivors all cooperate and share knowledge freely, and we both know that's not how people work when resources get scarce.
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u/Persies 12h ago
Now that I've been in engineering for going on 20 years it's actually terrifying how much of our infrastructure is maintained by specific individuals that no one knows about. I always heard "no one is irreplaceable" when I was growing up, but now that I'm a principal engineer I've realized that couldn't be farther from the truth. To the point where we have succession plans at work so that key engineers are required to train a replacement in case something happens to them (or they leave).
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u/Hunterofshadows 5h ago
To this day I’m salty about how they just hand waved away effectively all of this.
Not only ignoring the massive problems of people initially disappearing but also the fact that bringing everyone back is in some ways WORSE than when they disappeared
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u/depp-fsrv 12h ago
Hmm, I guess they were ahead of it's times where, "Art Imitates Life", your description is kinda like the mass firings of the U.S. Government, where all the senior knowledge just went poof and people are doing 3-5 people's workloads now.
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u/Optimal_Location_616 12h ago
Neither. It would just take some time until we would get to the current state.
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u/PopeSpenglerTheFirst 11h ago edited 8h ago
If it was half of all humans, we could survive but every economy would collapse and there would be a centuries long rebuild phase.
If half of all “life” (plants, animals, insects etc) then that is the end of the human race and most likely the end of complex life on Earth for a long time. We can’t lose half our plants and still have a biosphere for very long.
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u/Fuzzy-Tale6717 10h ago
This is a good point. Since thanos is trying to correct the universe so that it does eventually flourish, I'd think he leaves the plants and such that need to remain for life to flourish. Like gamorras home planet
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u/ProphAussie 1h ago
As far as I know, plants & flora weren’t included — otherwise it’d defeat the purpose of Thanos’ snap … my understanding was it was half of all intelligent & sentient life - To reduce consumption, entropy and wider spectrums of chaos that deteriorate and/or bring ruin to worlds.
Hence his dream of a “flourishing universe” in the wake of his achieved goal.
From my understanding - Black Widow stated a lot of environmental aspects did improve, but the cost was still acknowledged as too tragic.
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u/marc15v2 10h ago
I think we can safely assume that plants, plankton, bees etc likely don't have souls and are therefore safe from the snap.
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u/The-Catatafish 7h ago
No we can't because a soul does not matter.
Marvel has confirmed that.
Its canon that he snapped 50% of all life including plants and animals. After hulk is snapping you can see birds returning that were snapped. However, plant life snapping is not shown in the movie. Yet, its confirmed it happened.
Which is one of the reasons his whole plan is so goddamn stupid. He snapped 50% of the food ressources.
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u/marc15v2 7h ago
Marvel confirmed that how and when?
Kevin may have said it to justify Groot. But it's in a literal forest and not a single tree/plant or blade of grass gets dusted.
So that's clearly utter nonsense.
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u/The-Catatafish 7h ago edited 7h ago
Bro what?
Animals: Half of all animal life (including pets, livestock, and wild animals) disappeared. This is supported on-screen in Avengers: Endgame when birds are seen returning to the compound after the Hulk's reverse snap.
Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige confirmed in interviews that the snap targeted "all life," meaning half of plant life was included in the 50% reduction, even though mass plant disintegration wasn’t explicitly highlighted visually in the movies.
Its not nonsense only because you don't like it. Lmao.
I didn't even mention groot where is that coming from?
Honestly, beeing like "that's clearly utter nonsense" when you are just living under a rock when we talk about a movie that's 10 years old is nothing but embarrassing. At least research for 15 seconds before making smug comments like that.
https://screenrant.com/infinity-war-thanos-snap-animals-plants-killed/
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u/marc15v2 6h ago
Your own post makes my exact point perfectly clearly.
Kevin said it. It didn't happen IN the movie, visually, at all.
So did it happen?
I can accept animals, fine. But not as much as a leaf gets dusted. So clearly, that's nonsense.
And I said it about Groot, because he's a tree and got dusted.
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u/Evil_Weevill Hawkeye 7h ago
He never specified sentient life.
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u/marc15v2 7h ago
No, but the soul stone is required to target all life to be halved.
So it can't be done as he wishes. So it won't happen.
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u/DoctorMelvinMirby 8h ago
Just because he is evil and beyond desperate for that Krabby Patty recipe doesn’t mean that Plankton is without a soul!
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u/jfdonohoe 12h ago
There would be an initial collapse and chaos after the snap but we would rebound and probably flourish as Thanos predicted. It’s the return after the blip that would be devastating. That immediate of a strain on the system would blow everything apart. The Falcon and the Winter Solider touched on it but I don’t think they realistically explored it
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u/kayej17 12h ago
Very hard to say but i think the world would take a long time to be back stable assuming there's only 4 billion people on the planet but would eventually rise back up. I just keep thinking about the snapped people back that returned and the endless problems they caused
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u/UtterlyNatalie 12h ago
The world isnt stable as is. It probably would be more stable after the snap.
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 10h ago
The world isn't unstable from lack of resources, mainly lack of useful global management, logistics, and corruption
Dumping half the population wouldn't solve those issues, we'd like see more things just go to waste.
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u/ItzMeHaris 12h ago
The world would enter a second Great Depression. But this time, people would genuinely be depressed instead of the market going wild. This would lead to War, obviously.
The world would be chaotic for around 10-20 years, but after that, things would begin to settle. Humanity would prevail.
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u/Smoke_Short 12h ago
We are in the second great depression but go off
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u/JimHeckdiver 12h ago
50% takes us back to the mid 1970s. Would there be social issues? Yes. Collapse? Not a chance. In fact, I think there would be a SIGNIFICANT baby boom as a result.
The real problem happens when 4 billion people come BACK without the food supplies ready to absorb the demand.
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u/raggedsummerdress 3h ago
Losing half the population would cause the biggest economic and societal collapse in the history of the planet. Human civilisation would never be the same - even if we got back to 8 billion, the society they built would be unrecognisable to us.
The 2008 GFC and subsequent recession had its major cause in one small specific part of the mortgage market, where the foreclose rate went from 1% to 4%.
That 3% rise in people failing to pay their mortgages brought down some of the largest banks in the world, and plunged half the world into a years long recession. Economic systems are so intrinsically linked and finely tuned that brining them to their knees is scarily easy.If 50% of the worlds people disappeared, the societal collapse would be so profound that “trivial” disasters like WW2 or Loki’s attack on NYC would only be discussed in the context of how they contributed to the snap.
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u/Wagmatic3000 7h ago
The population would go back to what it was during the 1970’s. We were fine back then. We just have to make sure Disco doesn’t come back.
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u/No-Magician6169 12h ago
The black plague wiped out around 50% of all europeans in about 5 years. Probably something along the lines of that.
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u/Sly_Wood 4h ago
I think it was a 1/4. Similar devastating events have happened in smaller scales like battle of cannae. We recover.
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u/Cucario_19 12h ago
Dudo que nos lleve a alguno de los 2, y en todo caso, no nos llevaría a algo bueno. Practicamente todos los que quedaron en nuestro mundo estar afectados emocional y psicologicamente muy mal por lo que paso, y seguro desapareseran, no se, presidentes, ejecutivos, quien sabe, el mundo tendría que rearganizarse masivamente. Me soprende lo bien que lo manejaron en marvel la verdad.
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u/mattchewy43 9h ago
All I know is there would be a political add saying the opponent supported Thanos.
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u/Longjumping_Fun2576 12h ago
For god. But for also bad. My employer fired over half it's IT department last year. They said AI would replace them. AI has not.
We are limping along. On the one hand, no one says we can't do anything, or they're fired. Also there's no money. So it can't cost anything.
It's like ripping out every traffic light and stop sign, every guard rail, and speed limit sign.
Does traffic move faster? Sure. But you're all going to die.
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u/TheDGP42 12h ago
Hardly moved forward? There were whales in Hudson Bay, nature was returning, everyone had a place to live, it was turning utopian. I don't care what anyone says, Thanos was right on that one.
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u/fancy_crisis Galactus 11h ago
If this just happened and we didn't have something like SHIELD, SWORD and what was left of the Avengers we'd all be dead. The level of social strife, the collapse of international trade and fuel infrastructure, the loss of engineers to maintain the multiple nuclear reactors we have all over multiple countries, all of these things one at a time can put the world into chaos. All at once, plus all the other things I'm not thinking of, would kill us dead.
Tl;dr Thanos is a psychopathic moron who lacks imagination and actually just wants to feel big while killing lots of people.
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u/FloodUW 10h ago
I think we'd adapt just fine. We're human beings, we're good at adapting. It's why we existed on every continent (except Antarctica) even before modern civilization. I wouldn't sell us short.
I'd honestly say that we'd be closer to tribal/local utopia than we would be to eradication.
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u/SlaveMorri 10h ago
Yeah, cos we are doing a super good job at that right now….
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u/FloodUW 10h ago
I know the word sucks right now but we truly won the lottery with where we exist in human history. This is by far the easiest time in history to live as a human, but individually it's hard to feel that way
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u/jasberry1026 9h ago
Thank you. Finally someone else gets it. Our way of life sucks because we have on nostalgia glasses. For many Americans, the 50s and 60s were the best time to be alive. But for who?? Ask black people who lived in that era, or gay people, how good their lives were.
Go farther back, we were dying from the flu, countless women and children died in childbirth, and war was even more present than it is now, and more brutal. Death from an infected stab wound weeks after the initial injury? No thank you, I'd rather get shot and bleed out in a few minutes.
Life has always been a struggle. Life IS struggle. But I will gladly take the struggles of today than any other time in history.
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u/fancy_crisis Galactus 10h ago
You can't really adapt your way out of nuclear fallout clouds and poisoned-for-a-century watertables but I admire your optimism.
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u/Dry_Click6496 9h ago
Nuclear power plants dont just fail because one shift team isnt there. There are literally dozens of people working in these things. And they are designed to work even without anyone directing it for a while.
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u/fancy_crisis Galactus 9h ago
What if half of every shift isn't there? And the other half aren't reporting in for work because they're being murdered for a can of peaches or trying to evacuate their families? Oh and also, all the shipping of materials, the managing of coolant flow, all that's stopped for basically the same reason.
We're staring down an apocalypse right now because some fucking morons bombed a country to get a half chub and disrupted our national oil shipping infrastructure for just a couple months. Imagine that happening with everything else that would happen if half the population of earth evaporated all at once. Human society is a house of cards that has been built up primarily so the ones at the very top can live in luxury for the short time they're on this earth. It is fragile and can collapse extremely easily.
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u/GetThatAwayFromMe 12h ago
The MCU depiction of what happened to Earth post-snap is probably the most unbelievable aspect of the entire superhero genre. As others have said, so much war. Half of governments gone, half of those that own huge amounts of wealth gone, those that maintain our infrastructure/food/health gone. The psychological trauma would only be dwarfed by people trying to survive an apocalyptic world. Covid showed how unhinged our society can become and that wasn’t anywhere near what losing half the population would do. “The Leftovers” was a pretty good example of the trauma, paranoia, and power struggles that would result in a mass event like this, and that was based on a 2 percent disappearance.
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u/TigerUSF 12h ago
Itd be apocalyptic. If half were snapped, another 20% would die from war, famine, etc. It'd take decades to recover.
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u/akaynaveed 11h ago
i think someone would find a way to blame one demographic of people for it.
and put them in concentration camps.
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u/No-Medium6647 9h ago
Yah, maybe extinction.
Problem is... Thanos was NOT right. The movies repeatedly state that Thanos snapped 1/2 of "all life" so the other half would have more "resources". He didn't say "sentient life". He said "all life".
And since life feeds on life, he also snapped half the so-called "resources".
Not to mention half of all gut biomes. We'd shit ourselves to death before we starved.
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u/Unoriginal_Pseudonym 7h ago edited 5h ago
This is the part that always gets me. Crops and livestock are resources and they've now been halved, so the situation doesn't change much at all since the consumers and resources decreased proportionately
If he wasn't so dumb, he could've doubled or quadrupled the amount of resources available and created the space for them since he literally could do anything with the infinite stones. No one would be trying to kill him either.
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u/No-Medium6647 5h ago
Yah, and it doesn't take into account that pretty much all lifeforms are composite creatures. We're mostly composed of microbes and mites. Species-specific genetic material is only a 1/4th or so of any animal. Most of our bodies are just other species crawling all over each other to keep us alive.
Eyebrow mites have a job. So do gut microbes.
It's not just people who would have their gut biomes demolished. All the other animals with guts would get sick and many would die.
So just the after-effects of the Snap would be devastating to life. Way more than half would die.
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u/Cryptophagist 9h ago
Maybe. I think the stones would be able to take into account all the options the user wants in the outcome no?
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u/KnightJarring 9h ago
Maybe. It depends on how the stones interpreted what Thanos was 'snapping' for. Thanos tells Strange that Titan collapsed because of lack of resources and too large a population. I think then his snap would of just done away with those dominant humanoid species that use those plant/animal resources and not the resources themselves. Unless the stones are like the archetypal genie, twisting the wishes of those unsuspecting lamp-rubbers.
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u/No-Medium6647 8h ago
Yah definitely just maybe.
I would say there is movie evidence to support my position, though.
During the blip, the world is depicted as quiet and colorless, emptier, and not just of people. That's not direct evidence, but this might be:
After the Hulk reverses the snap, the characters notice birds chirping outside. Birds that weren't chirping before. If birds got snapped, then we can assume that "all life" really meant "all life" and not "all sentient life".
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u/dfassna1 6h ago
If we’re talking about resources realistically losing half of bacteria and plants and stuff would be devastating, but the ingredients for life are still there. The soil is still fertile for crops, the water is still there, the space is still there. The conditions are still right for life to reproduce and fill the void.
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u/No-Medium6647 5h ago
Agreed. It would depend on conditions and species. Like cows might go extinct from losing half of their gut biomes in all of their various stomachs. Some animals might be hit harder than others. The smaller lifeforms would have a better chance at survival. It's the composite creatures that would be hit the hardest.
Humans? We'd be high on the list of species lacking the flexibility to survive the experience.
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u/Doppelfrio 3h ago
The half of all gut biomes is already covered by half of the animals they inhabit being removed. The remaining animals would still have complete gut biomes
It seems like plants at the very least were not affected (which makes sense because his plan was to allow the remaining half to have more resources), however, Ant Man seeing those birds after Hulk reverses the snap suggested that half of the animals were also taken…
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u/No-Medium6647 1h ago
Yah I just walked into the house after seeing Encore and I was watching closely this time.
The exact quote is, "half of all living creatures" and that fits with animals but not plants.
Also, in Infinity War, when Thanos snaps they're in a forest surrounded by trees, and we don't see any of them turning to dust. Further evidence that it's all living animals, not just any form of life.
Maybe Thanos was a vegetarian. Seems on-brand.
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u/LividCalligrapher689 12h ago
Utopia only if strictly the religious people got snapped.
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u/Snoo_15594 12h ago
more than 50% of people are religious
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u/XeroShyft 12h ago
As he said. Utopia
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u/LividCalligrapher689 8h ago
This guy gets it. They are the ones driving every problem humanity is facing. It inherently creates division.
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u/Necromancer_Yoda 10h ago
That is the majority of the world population. Everyone left would mostly die of starvation and only a few would survive to rebuild.
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u/Florpsen 12h ago
I think neither. To make it completely statistical, not caring for personal grief and hardship, the last time the World Population was around 4 billion people was in the 1970s. So it would be a set back of around 50 years.
Some nations might collapse and fragment, depending on who gets snapped, and new countries might rise from the ashes but in my mind humanity would bounce back after a few years of stagnation.
Although, now thinking about it, some remaining Christian extremists could become crazy violent. They might interpret the snap as "God's Rapture", and decide that they are left on earth to fulfill the Events as prophesied and start spreading war and chaos. (I only speak about Christian extremists because as a Christian myself I know about the Judgement Day stuff and I have no idea about other religions so I keep my mouth shut about them.)
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u/Awesomebacon711 12h ago
more people would be pissed off thanos chose genocide over just doubling the resources for all eternity like the asshole he is
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u/jr_randolph 12h ago
I guess when thinking about it...overall the world didn't seem to change but I would assume there are areas that are completely different due to the snap. People that have chosen to live a different way...formed new communities...cities that have gone up or down in progress.
Even with our characters, we saw some that chose to continue protecting and in new ways, and we saw someone like Clint just say fuck it. We weren't able to have any content on life during those five years to see a full picture.
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u/Nersheti 12h ago
He’s called the Mad Titan for a reason. He’s crazy. On our planet at least, the problem is not a lack of resources, not on a planetary scale. Its the distribution of those resources. You’ve got guys with multiple homes, huge yachts, fleets of cars fighting over who can do s better job going to space, and others who are struggling with base nutrition and hydration while harboring diseases developed nations eradicated ages ago. In many developed nations the amount of food thrown away for various reasons could easily feed the hungry. Technology exists to bring water to those that need it. Medicine exists to fix those diseases.
Having half of life on our planet would not change any of that, especially if it were indiscriminate. This is because it’s easy to see that Thanos was crazy. He didn’t do what he did because of anything we did. There is no cause and effect.
Best case scenario, after the initial collapse of services, some utopian enclaves may arise, but over time, as the world reconnects, they would be increasingly difficult to maintain. And any of those would have to exist in locations that are resource rich already. You’re not going to have a paradise randomly appear in Ethiopia because an insane alien killed a ton of folks. If anything, life for those people would probably get worse. Any outside did they were getting would stop while the people that were sending it deal with their own problems. Any power vacuums that arose would be filled quickly by the kind of opportunists that thrive in that part of the world. Maybe I’m cynical, but I definitely do not see a utopia eventually arising because of the snap.
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u/PhillipJ3ffries 12h ago
Neither. It would be more of the same. There may be some positive environmental effects, but they would be short lived without a major change to the way we do things and our reliance on fossil fuels
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u/lofgren777 12h ago
Most of the remaining humans would die when half our gut bacteria vanished.
The resources that we need are mostly biological organisms – plants and animals to eat – and most of those would die off for the same reason.
There would be an explosion of bacterial evolution as microbes tried to fill the new and abandoned niches.
The earth would be largely bare of multicellular life in a matter of years.
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u/Easy_Difficulty_7656 11h ago
I always thought half the population reappearing after 5 years would be the worst part. If nothing else there would be massive famines as the world’s food production levels would have adjusted to the lower population level. Not to mention to the unrest caused by people returning to find all their property and wealth either gone or redistributed
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u/Confident-Stand5453 11h ago
Eventually people would forget and move on. History is full of disasters and we always moved on afterwards. Plague, war, earthquakes, famines. All of them have killed large percentages of the population in large regions.
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u/Longjumping_Pool6974 11h ago
I don't think it would lead to extinction, but there would definitely be a lot of problems. Half the population equals half the work force gone. Half the Drs and paramedics, cops and firefighters gone. Half the truck drivers who move goods around the country gone. Half the farmers who grow food gone.
Those who survive would quite likely succumb to depression or turn to drugs or alcohol as a coping method. And then you would have predators (drug cartels and human traffickers) swooping in and preying on those people as hinted at in endgame with the exchange between Hawkeye and the Yakuza boss.
In short, I think the world would be a very different place for years to come and certainly not the Utopia Thanos imagined
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u/Killer_insctinct 11h ago
It will lead to the same situation and Thanos would need to snap again amd again
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u/Witty-Lawfulness2983 11h ago
I think it depends largely on what half of the politicians were to snap away… if it were a CERTAIN party it’d turn into Apokolips
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u/_that_reddit 11h ago
Our population was half of what it is now in the 1970s. So I'd say it would set us back about 50 years.
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u/KautoKeira 10h ago
So there's many layers to the snap, some of which don't really get explored by the movies or the people talking about them.
Obviously, half the population of the universe is wiped out. Viewing from the perspective of Earth, you have most of your living family disappearing, friends, and so on. Awful, and that does get explored in the movies.
However, they don't get into talking about how infrastructure suddenly gets affected. A whole company's structure could be wiped entirely. Import and export, delivery and post, hospitality industry, it has an effect on everything in life. Sure, in a couple of years a good amount of these things could be solved, but the scar of it will never heal fully.
Thanos claims he does this due to resource scarcity, and half the people on any given planet means double the resources. Let's look at that.
The food industry as it is producing food now would be overproducing food. It would require massive downscaling. On one hand, this would probably help the planet quite a bit in terms of climate and just the freed up space. Same goes with fuels and minerals. The problem is a vast amount of people in those industries died out and they're not a particularly popular industry to get into so it would take years of education and incentivising to even start employing.
Something we see historically in the case of the Black Death, when such a huge portion of the population dies, it actually ushered in a great age for those that survived. Money was plentiful, people could afford and own properties, there was prosperity after getting over the trauma of so many deaths.
However, I can certainly see that if it happened today, if even one of the current billionaire elites survived the snap it would just lead to them hoarding even more. I can imagine some of the positives mentioned will be undone by people seeking to profit off of the desperation in the first few years while rebuilding the infrastructure.
It's hard to say what losing around 4 billion people would do, but it would take a long time to repopulate and all the currently used space would feel empty.
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u/Nano_gigantic 10h ago
The world population is around 8 billion now. It was 4 billion in 1974 and the world kept right on spinning. I don’t see how resetting us to the same level as the 1970s leads to our extinction.
It would be EXTREMELY disruptive and there are multiple things that could cascade into disaster, but the population change itself wouldn’t be insurmountable.
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u/minyhumancalc 10h ago
The closest example in our civilization is probably the The Black Plague, which decimated Europe over the course of about 5 years, killing around 1/3rd of Europe's population. Europe was stalled for many decades afterwards, but it did lead to what Thanos envisioned: stronger civilizations that would go on to conquer the world. Within that, the life of the survivors improved, breaking Europe's feudalism and leading it on the path towards the Industrial Revolution.
I think the timeline for Endgame would be quite accurate. 5 years down the road, people are still traumatized by the event, a lot of abandoned houses and the destruction of the idea of neighborhoods. Smaller community would probably be abandoned as people fleed to the cities. Im sure violence wouldn't be uncommon in more undeveloped countries as well. That said, governments would probably have taken back control; individuals re-elected and a sense of order would retain. Maybe a few countries devolve into Civil War, but I think most, if not all democracies, would've survived.
Whats far more interesting is the people all being brought back 5 years later and I'm kinda annoyed the MCU glossed over that decision by our heros. The chaos of people's life savings, property, relationships being completely ruined for both those who return and those would survived. FATWS somewhat addresses this, but in such a surface-level way and without really any accurate or cohesive world-building. The rest of the MCU pretends the world was unaffected by this. Really, that would've been more disruption and cause more wars and chaos than half of people dying.
Less people stalls civilization, but typically it returns. Double the people would lead to further wars
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u/Cultural_Comfort5894 10h ago
The people experiencing that phenomenon would be severely depressed and somewhat crippled with uncertainty
20 years later things should be a new normal
How good or how bad would depend on who survives and has immediate power
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u/SenseiT 10h ago
That was always a giant plot hole for me. If overpopulation and the problems that rose because it (like starvation) were the catalyst for Thanos’s actions then removing half of ALL living things would not solve that. Sure there is half the people but now there are half the cows and chickens and corn plants and bacteria in our guts. Half the people to operate the machinery or deliver the goods. Just having more room wouldn’t really solve much.
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u/akgiant 9h ago
The issues is largely that the Avengers reversed the Snap. Sadly we never really got into the true impact of Thanos's actions and by extension the consequences of the Avengers undo it.
Look how catastrophic effects in the real world bring about change in some way. Earthquakes, or hurricanes that can bring communities together. War shapes entire generations and the political dynamics that follow. America is seeing those consequences in real time with the reject of facts and critical thinking.
Looks at how different recent events that share hauntingly similar scenarios to our own past, but our reactions as humans have changed. We're largely desensitized to all of it since we rarely feel its true weight until it directly affects us, even then, many believe bad faith actors who spin for their own webs instead of bringing people together under a common cause for the betterment of mankind.
I think Marvel should absolutely explorer these themes and how it mirrors our own worlds reaction. Perhaps that's why we're getting Mutants after Multiverse. A chance for us to look inward and let go of division, fear and hate.
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u/Art0fRuinN23 9h ago
Neither. I think it would lead to the current status quo, it would just take time to get back to it because I believe that institutions would survive and be largely unchanged. They'd never stop doing whatever they do for good or ill. I don't believe humanity will ever achieve utopia but I also believe in our ability to adapt and survive, so while we may never live together in harmony, I think extinction is off the table.
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u/Odd_Cauliflower_8004 9h ago
eventual utopia, also because we would begin to actually work around the concept that if we grew too much another crazy person might do the same.
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u/gggggenegenie 9h ago
One thing that always surprises me is that MLB ceased to happen. They'd just call up a stack of players from the minors and crack on.
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u/keiblerclown 9h ago
I think it's honestly incredibly nuanced. If anything, there's a strong possibility that most countries' entire infrastructures collapse with the loss of those specialists who keep shit running.
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u/DarkTheImmortal 7h ago
Probably neither. The global population was half of what it is now in the 70s, only around 50 years ago. Now, there would almost certaily be a period of grief as losing 4 billion people all at once would be devistating emotionally, but it is by no means world ending, and we'd be right back to where we were in a relatively short period of time.
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u/Bleauyy 7h ago
People wouldn't pick up the slack. Also the snap wouldn't perfectly divide all jobs, just people in general. We could get super screwed and lose all nuclear engineers, desalination technicians.
In the film they showed trash buildup. Which would occur most likely, people would be too depressed to be proactive, wars currently being fought may suddenly become one sided.
Depends on how "random" the snap actually is. We could get lucky and it removes everyone avoiding tax, claiming benefits whilst healthy, terminally ill to die within a week and people about to be euthanised! :D
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u/rammus-bot 7h ago
Wouldn’t we get sick or something since our bacteria and demodex family and friends would be gone? I think we’d go extinct if the wrong scientists got snapped
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u/supervgb 7h ago
This reminds me that one of scientist saying, It's really good idea that removes half of all life🤣
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u/GreyBeardEng 6h ago
Neither. A lag for 5 to 10 years then right back on course to self destruction. As Ultron/Vision said:
Ultron: "They're doomed..."
Vision: "Yes... but a thing isn't beautiful because it lasts."
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u/felipesene Loki 6h ago
Well first there’s the impact it would cause in the whole world’s ecosystem, nature would have to balance things, if the snap managed to not disturb the ecosystem then humanity would suffer severe setbacks in economy and several sectors but I believe those would be survivable, then in a few years humanity would rebuild and in a few CENTURIES it would return to exactly how it was before, as the old saying goes: life goes on, thanos was an idiot for thinking killing half of everything would change anything permanently
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u/retannevs1 6h ago
Clarification: did we also lose 1/2 the fish and wildlife, insects, bacteria, and half the vegetation?
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u/Charles12_13 6h ago
Society would collapse but it would rebuild itself very differently and if the other 50 are brought back, god the amount of chaos that would cause
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u/Malencis 6h ago
Honestly? i depends on who got snapped. whoever is left over that takes the reigns could either set humanity up for a golden age with overwhelming resources compared to populace, or try to take control of it all fro themselves. not to mention who is left over with control of the worlds arsenals
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u/yutyutgrunt 6h ago
Well since our world went from a population of 4 billion to 8.3 billion 40 years… we would have a sad generation and then be right back where we started in 40 years
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u/zahm2000 5h ago
One thing I never got straight — did the snap kill half of all forms of life or just half of sentient life? I’m assuming it’s sentient life, since we didn’t see any plant life disappearing.
But if the Snap did take out half of all life - including crops, livestock and other food sources - then it’s unlikely you’d get the utopia scenario.
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u/TheUrzulan 4h ago
Utopia isn't possible as people are and ever will be capable of evil. A version of modern western society is probably as close as we can get.
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u/Proudnoob4393 4h ago
Kinda depends on who the 50% that are left are. If a certain president happened to not be snapped he would take advantage of the chaos and spread more fear to try and gain more authority. Eventually we would have WW3 and lead to more death and destruction
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u/Vandal_A 3h ago
Neither. It happened to Europe during the plague (among other examples) and people just muddled along like always
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u/Agent1stClass 3h ago
Neither. Civilization would stumble along and regain its bearings.
Maybe not in five years… Maybe with a few improved experiences.
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u/Gummies1345 3h ago
Depends on which "half of all life" we talking. This half does have to be choosy really, could make all the west side vanish or population is sprinkled. Plants are living too, so half of them gone would be pretty bad. But really the super dangerous part is the important top soils, that we use for growing crops, half of those micro organisms would be snapped as well. Imagine like all of the North America fertile soil suddenly went barren.
So the worst possible outcome would be half of the planet gone. Humans all alive on the west side, east side is all gone. But all the plants, most of the animals, and most of the west side of the planet is just barren. I don't see humans or Earth really surviving if so much is thrown out of wack.
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u/shinryu6 2h ago
Neither. Eventually given enough time the universe would repopulate as newer lifeforms arise and it would be at or over its old population and needing another snap anyways. Sure some civilizations likely just catastrophically collapse and die out, but new life can always arise to replace the old if the new proto-planatary conditions are met for life to develop millions upon billions of years from the snap date.
Even if Thanos wiped the entire universe’s population out in one go, eventually life will arise again from some new planet that doesn’t even exist yet; he’d have to effectively do some convoluted wish to kill and sterilize the universe forever more, but that hardly does anything for his balance philosophy in the mcu.
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u/67RicePudding 1h ago
Across a sample size that large, almost every population would be 50% gone, equally stratified across all
Collapse? Yeah that sounds right. Most people need at least a few days off work to grieve after a death, especially one like a child. Now if every human on earth has lost someone, if not everyone, how will they manage? We'll see a minority tough it out to keep things moving but most will be in shock and grief.
Every world government goes into martial law and emergency military rule as their entire society is thrown into complete chaos. Most of the world is hierarchical structures running smoothly to keep the lights on, food growing, trash out. That would all stop, and it would be a complete and total collapse of infrastructure.
Utopia is impossible, but so is extinction. Half the population gone is 4 BILLION people left. We were at that number in the 60s and humanity was fine for the 40k years leading up to it.
I'd say what they showed is pretty realistic. Many neighborhoods in states of decay, turned to ghost towns. Global memorials for the fallen, cities once bustling with people now bare.
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u/ProphAussie 1h ago
As far as I know, plants & flora weren’t included — otherwise it’d defeat the purpose of Thanos’ snap … my understanding was it was half of all intelligent & sentient life - To reduce consumption, entropy and wider spectrums of chaos that deteriorate and/or bring ruin to worlds.
Hence his dream of a “flourishing universe” in the wake of his achieved goal.
From my understanding - Black Widow stated a lot of environmental aspects did improve, but the cost was still acknowledged as too tragic.
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u/sailorfaggy 1h ago
Covid happened and while it didn’t exactly killed half of the world population it did affected everything
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u/BotherResponsible378 12h ago edited 12h ago
Infrastructure would collapse. Supply chains would collapse. The amount of death that would follow would be unbelievable. Thanos would effectively kill significantly more than half of everyone.
Disease, famine, lawlessness. It would be a complete and utter breakdown of society. I'm sure we would claw back together but civilization as we know it would collapse. It could take years or decades before we recovered.
Anything needing you continuous human operation fails immediately. Millions to billions of secondary deaths.
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u/One-Hat-9764 7h ago
Not to mention the amount of crashed airplanes, cars, and tons of accidents right after the blip happens if pilots and co pilots end up getting blipped, any person driving gets blipped, etc. they would have to clear the wreckages too caused by these and clear cars that owners were blipped so that people can use the roads.
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u/minus15t2 10h ago
The fact that earth barely moved forward in 5 years is honestly my biggest gripe with this movie.
I get it... The people in power have been decimated, there's an enormous amount of grief and guilt going around...
But theres still 4billion people on the planet... That's the same number of people as in the 70s...
Streets still got sweeped, garbage was taken to landfills, powerplants worked, trains and buses ran.
For me, it's the random fucking kid outside Lang's house, whose just cycling down the street crying... After 5 years... The guy was maybe like 8 when it happened, he's not going to be perpetually sad and crying 5 years later...
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u/Illustrious_Sky_2331 10h ago
but the world in the 70s was built for 4 billion people
after the snap, the world was expected to maintain infrastructure built for 8 billion with only 4 billion, it makes sense there would be disreapair
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u/minus15t2 9h ago
Disrepair I get.. but garbage and rusted cars and rusted boats just piling up without anyone making an attempt to clean it up is not realistic.
There was enough money, resources and leadership to take a census of the missing and build a massive pristine memorial to them...
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u/Illustrious_Sky_2331 9h ago
don't know where you live but you can literally find all that stuff piling up on city streets irl right now
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u/TendoSoujiro 6h ago
You've put it pretty well.
The guy you're replying to is brain dead as fuck. Does he live in some kind of fantasy where work and tasks get done directly proportional to the population of the world? Bro must be sheltered as hell or something.
I can also absolutely see a fucking kid cracking and tearing up after being reminded of the most catastrophic event the world has EVER seen just 5 years later. Scott in that scene has absolutely no fucking idea or context of anything that occurred and the kid doesn't know that. If any genocidal event took place in the past 5 years that affected me I sure as fuck am going to remember and still deeply mourn it 5 years later, what the fuck?
Just losing 1 close family member would fuck you up especially as a kid. The kid in the scene didn't even cry and even if he did I would have completely understood. I work with kids who are still visibly dealing with the ramifications of a family member dying from fucking COVID19, dude.
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u/BodhingJay 12h ago
The human population on Earth has been doubling every few decades
If Thanos doesnt come back to keep snapping at least that often then we're just going to find ourselves back in the same postion we are in now
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u/Powerofx1 12h ago
War, it’s always war. Many world leaders would blip and the big remaining nations would look to conquer those territories.