MovieChat Forums > Avengers: Endgame (2019) Discussion > half of animals and plants died in the S...

half of animals and plants died in the Snap


If that's the case, wouldn't that almost defeat the purpose? Given how much of our resources are from them, especially food.

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I noticed the ash from the Hawkeye daughter floating away in front barn at the first of the movie.

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I don't think half of animals and plants died.

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Thanos said that he was eliminating half of all life in the universe, not just intelligent life. So yes, plants and animals as well.

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Wiping out half of the food supply wouldn't have made any sense because his whole purpose was to have enough resources for the sentient beings that weren't snapped into oblivion.

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Why are you assuming Thanos' plan made any sense?

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Thanos plan didnt make sense because at bet it would delay the overpopulation problem by couple generations and in many cases, such as earth, it would not do much about it to begin with.

Currently there are 8 billion people on earth. Half of that would be 4 billion. The amount of people we could keep sustainable (without diminishing resources that does not get replenished) is between 0.5 to 1 billion. Even after Thanos snap earth would have 3 billion people too many.

And you may dismiss overpopulation as a nonissue, but i beg you to look up how artificial fetilizer is made. Were running out of materials to make it in 20-30 years and when that happens - mass starvation for large groups of population. Wont be fun.

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May I recommend the Soylent Green solution?

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Soylent Green is a very politically unfeasible solution. Furthermore you would have to deal with the potential of disease transmission between humans. Also as we see in North Korea or Venezuala, even startving people that resort to eating dirt do not canibalize others, so it would be a very hard sell to the population.

Mass starvation (like the Ukraine after WW2) is more likely.

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I think Kevin Feige said the same thing.

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That depends on how Thanos defined life. Currently humans have no definition of life that includes viruses but excludes rocks.

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In the scene Hawkeye's family disappears, birds go silent too.

There are a lot of problems with the logic behind the snap too. Half of life means very specific elimination of half of every single species, or randomly half of every living creature? There are billions of billions of ants, but only a few pandas. In a room full of all the ants and all the pandas, if you randomly eliminate half of them, chances are you end up with zero pandas.
Even if the snap is species specific, how can you say that a species can sustain itself when half the population is removed? Can we humans support the infrastructure if a random half of us are gone? A lot of interesting things to discuss here.

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Additional reasons why Thanos' plan was ill conceived from the start.

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Most of resources used are not living organisms. Also, do we have any evidence that plants were snapped at all?

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Depends how you look at it. Vegetables and fruits, are they not plants? Food is pretty important. No evidence I'm aware of, just a thought

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First of all, are plants alive? It depends on the definition of alive you are using and the definition of alive thanos is using. Furtheremore, fruits are NOT alive. They are seeds of plants. They are alive in the same sense a zigote is allive - only by potential in becoming so.

Also if half the people dissapeared, would half the food dissapearing really matter, since you got half the mouths to feed?

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Ooh, interesting response.

I see your point about fruits technically being seeds since they themselves aren't alive. Makes more sense. I know I was wrong but I still hope you got the point I was trying to make, which is essentially how far down the ladder would the Snap go in regards to wiping out *all* life. Because now I wonder if that took out half the zygotes too. But if he took out half the animals and left the plants alone, I guess we could argue he took out half of the sentient beings rather than half of all living beings. Admittedly that's getting caught up in semantics. I can't imagine Thanos proclaiming "I will destroy half of all sentient life!" Doesn't have quite the ring somehow.

But I would say, if half the people are gone, and half the food is, that would still be a problem, because it would even out the same as before.

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I think the infinity glove isn't like the monkey's paw where you have to super carefully phrase everything or it will come out kooky. So I'm sure that if he just thinks "All sentient beings" while snapping, that would be what happens. The magic glove will carry out the desired intent, not the specific phrasing.

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Well, if we look at Thanos philosphy, he believed that sentient creatures eventually overpopulated the planets, used up resources and broke the natural sustianability of the planets (and then spread to other plants to do the same). So in his mind the sentient life may be the one thats problematic and thus removing only that forms of life would still achieve his goal.

It would remove half the food at the current time, but not the planets potential to produce food. We may have to use, say, 10% of the first harvest as seed instead of the bellow 5% we use now (though replanting from same harvest is a practice mostly unused nowadays, cheaper to buy seeds from producers).

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Of course seeds are alive. They have a living plant embryo contained within in them in a dormant state. You add a bit of water and the resume growth. They have mitochondria and utilize cellular respiration almost immediately.

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I have never heard any definition of life that did not include plants. Viruses are a different issue.

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The whole idea of overpopulation is stupid anyway, since capitalism needs constant expansion in order to survive.

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You're an idiot

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If you can't prove me wrong with a decent argument, you are actually pointing at yourself.

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You have to have new people so the others can have a desire to be richer than them. If no people then it will cause just a thing with the rich knowing there place.

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I don't think plant life. The scene like Hawkeye daughter the tree stayed. The bird at the Avenger site appearing but the tree was there before. I didn't see any plant like disappearing in the first movie just people.

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It makes Thanos a hypocrite since that means killing half of all endangered species. Thus resulting in said endangered species going extinct before too long. Goodbye the Black and White striped tiger. All because Thanos was probably ignorant of the fact there was some animals that were close to going extinct.

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Yeah I know 'Killing half of all life in the Universe' sounds cooler but eliminating half off all Sentient life forms with civilizations/mass consumption would have made more sense and even then half would not be enough to make a real long term difference anyway.

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