oh snap.

Bacteria multiply crazy fast.... as long as the food source was uninterrupted I'd almost guarantee you most people's microbiome would be fully recovered in just a few hours and they'd not even notice.

Yeah 50% loss isn't servere at all for gut biome loss. If you've ever been on antibiotics you've likely experienced that or worse.
- And the big thing that fucks people up is not only the high loss but also the antibiotics slowing or stopping additional reproduction. That keeps the population depressed for an extended period and then you get the shits.
- Basically they'd feel mildly bad for a few days?
- Or had a wicked hangover
Our doubling time isn't that bad either. We reached 4 billion in 1970s. If we round up the current population to 8 billion that's about 50 years. That's all that thanos would add by the snap. Even less probably because we have better medicine now so it would be easier to reach that number.
- I kind of expect developed countries would maintain the current trend of being slightly below replacement value. Probably depends on the psychological impact of the snap. People tend to have fewer children when they know the ones they have are safe.
  But your point is a good one either way.
How long can gut microbiomes survive after the host is dead? Wouldn't a dead host essentially mean near 100% fatality for the gut microbiome meaning that anybody killed by a Thanos snap would also mean a 100% kill rate of their gut bacteria, leaving any survivors to basically keep all 100% of their gut bacteria?
- Well the implication in-universe is that the actual snap was killing 50% of all life, not any death afterwards. If we're counting bacterial life as individual living beings in this 50%, then it shouldn't matter whether the host itself got snapped or not, since the bacteria are "separate" and would be left behind after a snap....
It wasn't an even 50% from everyone though. Some people had no loss of gut bacteria, other people had 75 - 100% snapped away
- That's not how statistics works. Every person will lose almost exactly 50%.
  Estimates for the number of bacterial cells within the average 70kg Human male is around 38 trillion
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome
  Do you know what the chance of 100% of them being snapped is?
  0.50 ^ (38 trillion) = 0.0000000000000...
  The calculator ran out of zeros.

Snapping half the life forms also snaps half of the world's gut bacteria. If we removed half of the gut bacteria from those who weren't snapped, that would be removing 75% of the universe's gut bacteria, not 50%.

Not if 50% of the gut bacteria of the people who got snapped just like fell to the ground, or got stuck to that dusty shit.
- Why assume that though? The Infinity Gauntlet isn't a Monkey's Paw, it reads beyond the words and answers the intent of the wielder. So much so, in fact, that it even includes subconscious thoughts and feelings as part of its interpretation. I see often these ideas predicated on the Gauntlet working on Monkey Paw logic despite that being clearly and specifically not how it operates within canon.
- That's what the dust was.
Wait. If that is how it happened that means when half the population came back they all came back with 0% of their gut bacteria. Holy shit that would be horrible. The population doubles overnight and every single person and animal has the worse runs of their life. Meanwhile they can't get the nutritional needs no matter how much food they eat. Spend the next few months while their family cries as they wither away surrounded by food.
- No, the desired effects was to undo Thanos's snap, not double the human population. This means that all of the gut bacteria got unsnapped exactly the same as everyone else
- Imagine the famine if the next day the world population doubled. Considering that the agricultural production was also reduced
- So many fecal transplants performed and probiotics sold.

No. The bacteria eliminated was all in the people who were dusted for convenience.

But it's not random. Not fair. Not balanced. Entire civilizations of gut bacteria wiped out! To them it was like he wiped out entire planets instead of life forms!
- If you wipe out the people you wipe out the biome. You just want more than 50% killed.

That's assuming that half of the gut biomes of all humans was just left floating around. No, it's more likely that the biomes were snapped out of existence with their hosts.

Whomever wrote the code for the synchronous kill must have been sweating bullets. So many ways that could go wrong.
well when you get snapped all that's left is dust. perhaps that dust is all the microbes in your body that survive the snap. It clearly takes up far less space that if it just disintegrated you.

If we're playing by those rules, then only 50% of every human would die, because we're made of smaller living organisms

That's simply not true by the current definition of organism.
With all the Marvel alien species it was probably true for some of them though.
- Consider the Portuguese manowar, which is a colony organism
100% of the cells of the 50% of people that die, would die.
100% of the cells of the 50% of people that live, would live.
Overall, 50% of human cells still die
- That's some Maxwell's Demon level of precision.

So no different than most days

I worry about you, Lemmings. Eat some fiber or something.
- I ate fiber but now my internet is down. what do I do?

So what you're saying is, the "Up the Thanos" strategy could have worked if Antman simply flew up there while Thanos was emptying his bowels due to the changes to his gut biome. The only difficulty would be swimming up the stream of liquid shit ejecting out at high speeds.

Operation Enter Thanussy

Doesn't that multiply really fast? We'd be back in like a day, maybe two.

Yeah rapid growth. Maybe a day or two of gut trouble but back to normal pretty quick as long as your diet hasn't changed too much.
And that's possible cuz half of all livestock just vanished, so now you're paying 85 bucks for a steak.
- Half the livestock and half the demand. I don't see much problem.

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I think the real problem would be ecosystem collapse.

Ecosystems evolve as complex, interdependent systems with nonlinearities. What happens when you kill off 50% of pollinators in a single instant? 50% of plankton? 50% of grasses? The problem with nonlinear systems is that killing off half of A and half of B won’t have a linear effect if the relationship depends on having minimum levels of A. Assume it’s a random function such that we kill off half of all plants and on top of that half of all rhizobium bacteria which fix nitrogen for many plant species. Now we’re killing off potentially all plants that depend on having a stable population of rhizobium bacteria, which will have a cascading effect throughout the already devastated ecosystem. It’s all about tipping points and sigmoid curves and such.

The truth is that it was a completely stupid idea, and it was what finally broke my love of the marvel franchise. Either you have runaway ecosystem collapses, or the populations will simply return back to their original levels to hit their ecological carrying capacities again. Kill off half of termites, and you’ll probably be back to the same level of termites in a decade or less. Even with people (using the word inclusively across all technological species), you’d have a population surge that within less than a century or so would be brought back to carrying capacities. Populations self-regulate via interaction with their ecosystems. You’re either going to end up with 100% extinctions or system recovery to current levels within a very brief period via normal reproduction and evolutionary dynamics.

It was a massive effort undertaken by an immortal and massively intelligent person that is inherently flawed because the marvel writers apparently never took Biology 101-102. I’m not saying it was GoT season 8 levels of bad, but after watching those last couple of movies I not only never rewatched them, but I checked out of the mcu pretty much entirely after having rewatched the previous movies multiple times each.

The movies did a great job at presenting thanos as an extremist that sincerely wants the greater good by questionable means, but it falls apart because his grand plan is just so stupid. The only way to reconcile the sympathetic character with the dumb plan is to point out he's "THANOS THE MAD TITAN", not "THANOS THE TITAN THAT FULLY CONSIDERS THE CONSEQUENCES OF HIS ACTIONS"
Would have been much better if they just kept his original motivation from the comics: Death is a hot lady and horny thanos does the snap as a gift to her
- My problem isn’t that he’s a Mad Titan, but that the plot makes Ready Player One look like Les Miserables. It’s basically a concept script you’d expect to see coming out from the writer pool from 30 Rock where Tracy Jordan has a six armed alien outfit.
  We all know GoT died the death it did because they had absolutely no idea how to wrap it up and just wanted to be done with it. The mcu money should have been more than enough to do a proper job with transitioning the storyline, but they felt the need to do something blockbusting with it. I would rather have had a Watchmen style conclusion where some people move into retirement homes while the next generation comes forward, but their need to go over the top just turned it into a ludicrous script.
  I really don’t care that much. I was getting a bit tired of the franchise anyway (although the new GotG was pretty great), but it always kind of sucks when you can tell that the creatives involved just don’t care anymore. Contrast that with something like the final episode of MASH.
What if there was an endangered animal with only one surviving individual? Does Thanos snap half of the animal?

Oh and I thought Avengers was a documentary.

Before metamucil:
After metamucil:
- Non credible defense is skewing older and more colon-health conscious than I would have initially expected..
  TIL.