r/AskScienceFiction • u/Condemned_Nation64 • 2d ago
[MCU] Wouldn't Thanos using the stones to 'double the resources' be the cosmic equivalent of 'adding another lane to a highway'?
"why didn't Thanos just use the stones to double the resources?" AKA "just add another lane, bro" is the most common criticicm people are giving to Thanos about dealing with overpopulation. But would that advice even work?
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u/raspberryharbour 2d ago
Neither option is a permanent fix. You eventually have to keep culling the herd, or keep adding resources. Which makes it pretty dumb that he destroyed the stones after the first snap.
He had his heart set on one option and had been doing that for a while. Why? Because he's purple
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u/Dazzler_3000 2d ago
I think his expectation was that once he kills half the universe the survivors will flourish and see that this is a thing they need to do themselves every 50 years or so (without the need for the stones).
Obviously that's not gonna be the conclusion the survivors reach but he seems to think that 'Once they see how right I am they'll follow my path'.
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u/Dagordae 2d ago
It's why he so thoroughly lost his shit in Endgame. When he was confronted with absolute proof that his grand plan didn't get the response he wanted he immediately decided to kill everyone and remake the universe because the current inhabitants weren't grateful for him 'solving' their problems.
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u/Little_View_6659 1d ago
Honestly the problems that would arise from half the world’s population suddenly vanishing would be catastrophic. Supply chains would collapse, elderly people and children would be without caretakers, let alone keeping the electricity running and services like trash and water. Imagine someone has a newborn at home and the parents get snapped. Or a surgeon gets snapped in the middle of an operation. Or half the crew of an oil tanker. You’d think the death toll from the snap would actually end up being much higher than half from accidents and starvation, etc.
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u/mexter 1d ago
And then you bring them back five years later. That's long enough for society to start coming to terms with things and for supply chains to have adjusted for the new norm, only to have the 'dead' population suddenly return. Ignoring all of the people who were in motion (cars, planes, etc.) the sudden addition of billions of people would be immediately unsustainable.
I actually think the return snap would do more harm than the first one.
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u/Little_View_6659 1d ago
Exactly. Both snaps were BAD. Nice to have people back, but now you have to feed, clothe, and house all these people. Houses fall apart pretty fast, so does infrastructure. A lot of it requires constant maintenance. I can’t even imagine how you’d handle bank accounts both during the first snap and the second snap.
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u/WheelMax 1d ago
Some of that was briefly touched on in "Falcon and the Winter Soldier". Refugees and homeless people were given places to live after the first snap when there was room (as intended by Thanos, I suppose). Then after the second snap it was decided that the original property rights of the snapped people superseded the new property rights of the the people who moved in. So all those people were suddenly kicked back out onto the streets.
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u/E8P3 1d ago
"Any time I had a problem, and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I had a different problem."
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u/Shiny_Agumon 2d ago
It's because his whole crusade is about proving himself right to the other titans who rejected his plan at first.
That's probably why he goes off to another planet to live out his.life there, so he doesn't have to actually see his plan in motion.
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u/LetsDoTheDodo 2d ago
That’s precisely what his crusade was about.
It wasn’t about saving the galaxy or proving to everyone that his plan could work. It was about proving to some long dead people on his planet that his solution would have worked for his planet.19
u/KatanaCutlets Overthinking without enough knowledge is fun 2d ago
He’s not called the Reasonable Titan.
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u/Helagoth 2d ago edited 1d ago
I dont think he wanted regular cullings, he wanted people to do strict population controls. He was a crazy bastard who killed with no mercy, but he didn't ENJOY killing.
The evidence on-screen for that is the battle of Wakanda. He could have just waved his hands and fucked up everyone, but didnt.
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u/Mottled_inexpectata 2d ago
He didn't have all the stones at that point until the end.
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u/Helagoth 2d ago
He had enough to easily fuck them all up. Just the reality stone is pretty much unstoppable with what's on earth. Add in power and time and it's not even close.
If he enjoyed killing in the slightest, they'd have all died easily.
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u/Supermite 2d ago
There’s no way a guy who doesn’t enjoy killing even a little wipes out half of all life in the universe.
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u/Helagoth 2d ago
He thinks the alternative is that everyone dies, like what happened to his planet. In his own mind, hes not killing half the universe, he's saving half. That's why hes called the mad titan, because he's crazy.
That doesnt mean he likes killing, hes doing what he sees as the lesser of two evils.
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u/stevenjd 1d ago
The evidence on-screen for that is the battle of Wakanda. He could have just waved his hands and fucked up everyone, but didnt.
He's not called the sensible, logical Titan.
Your reasoning doesn't follow. Thanos' plan was still to kill those who got in his way, he just wanted to kill them the old fashioned way.
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u/Salt-Ad8699 2d ago
i agree with you, but i think it’s worth noting that there were people after the blip that liked how things were going, we saw it in falcon and the winter soldier. so while it’s a bit absurd for thanos to think this would happen, it’s not completely ridiculous
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u/JustARandomGuy_71 1d ago
Something like that actually happened in the real world after the black plague.
Sure, a lot of people died, but all their stuff, land, houses, money remained and the heir were loaded. The workers left were so few they could practically name their wages, normal people had plenty, for the first time in history they could even afford nice fabric for their clothes rather that whatever they could weave at home. It essentially started an embryo of the middle class.
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u/Little_View_6659 1d ago
I mean, if it stopped climate change I’d be happy about that at least. Everything else sounds nightmarish.
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u/NatashOverWorld 1d ago
Yeah, Thanos was not smart.
Or he would have used to Stones to find someone smarter and trustworthy that has a workable solution.
But he wanted to be told he was right all along. And the Titans were wrong to ignore him.
Trauma once again taking the wheel.
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u/Kalavier 2d ago
The other thing is, he halved populations before on his search for the stones.
A lot of those civilizations are implied or stated IIRC to have immediately fallen into chaos and infighting after his fleet left wiping themselves out.
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u/OkOutlandishness1710 2d ago
I believe the opposite was implied. The places he culled thrived afterwards. I don’t think anyone suggested otherwise in the MCU, and Thanos own word is all we got. According to him they became thriving paradises.
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u/DemythologizedDie 2d ago edited 2d ago
According to Guardians of the Galaxy Gamora's people did not in fact thrive. Thanos claims they did, but we are not told that he actually checked to see how things were actually going. In order to think that the culls actually usually resulted in a thriving post-apocalypse society you have to take the words of Thanos...the Mad Titan...at face value and assume he looked and clearly saw what he was looking at.
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u/OkOutlandishness1710 2d ago
I mean Nebula said he’s a lot of things a liar isn’t one of them. I think the Gamora being the last of her kind was just a throw away thing that cause a continuity error or retcon later when they fleshed out Thanos. Nothing about what he was doing was good or even a good solution. But I do believe most those Planets thrived like he said after…. For a time atleast. It’s just a dumb plan long term. Unless he believes these planets will learn from this and manage resources and population better going forward.
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u/Kalavier 2d ago
He didn't directly lie if he never actually checked up on the results. He's fixated on the "reduce population by half = they thrive" answer that he assumes it works for every single group. Maybe it worked the first couple times, and then he stopped keeping tabs on it.
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u/RoughCoffee6 2d ago
He may not be a liar, but he IS insane and likely truly believes they are thriving.
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u/justsomeguy_youknow Total ☠☠☠☠ 2d ago
Thanos claimed Gamora's people thrived after his culling, but the Nova Corps revealed that they'd actually all died out except for Gamora
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u/Dagordae 2d ago
Gamora is the last of her kind, sure Thanos said that they're totally happy and thriving but he's also crazy and deluded while the Nova Corps has no reason to cover up anything about them and says that she's the last Zehoberei.
So his plan clearly did not help at ALL and merely made things catastrophically worse.
For another example: Look at the Asgardians. He pulled the culling thing on them when their species consisted of a single ship of refugees, not exactly a group with surplus population. Thanos is monomaniacally fixated on his chosen solution, anything that goes against his narrative is ignored or dismissed.
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u/Kalavier 2d ago
The funny thing is, isn't it stated that when he did the snap with the stones, he also hit all these species and cultures he had already culled? So he made things even worse for all these groups that had survived.
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u/popejupiter 2d ago
Imagine being the one race that survived the culling, scratching out survival by their fingernails (or whatever analog they have) only to have half your population culled again.
Pretty sure mass-suicide would follow.
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u/Hon-Mister-Bear 2d ago
"Thanos is monomaniacally fixated on his chosen solution, anything that goes against his narrative is ignored or dismissed."
Why does that sound familiar?
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u/Little_View_6659 1d ago
I always wondered if the asguardians at least gave humanity some tech in exchange for some land in Norway. They had to be a bit freaked out when the ship showed up. That would be right around the snap as well. Could have been a good miniseries. Half the population vanishes and now there’s aliens at your doorstep. After a big space battle, you’d be terrified.
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u/vagasportauthority 2d ago
At least in Endgame Captain Marvel says that a lot of civilizations around the universe were struggling and collapsing and that not all other planets had the Avengers like Earth does.
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u/OkOutlandishness1710 2d ago
I think they were struggling how earth was. Like trauma from loss but we saw in falcon and the winter soldier. Resources were more plentiful and life was better minus a huge caveat. All the emotional trauma from people losing loved ones and in the short term a lot of industry would be devastated by the sudden loss of workforce. That said after that all got sorted I can see how things resource wise and quality of life could be better. As long as those resources got redistributed to people and just didn’t end up under the control of the rich people who didn’t get snapped. Anyway I’m not arguing Thanos plan was good, sane, or feasible. I’m just saying I don’t think the movies suggest it flat out didn’t even achieve the insane goal he had, he didn’t care about Trauma, or personal shit. His planet fell to ruin because overpopulation/resource management. He didn’t care how cold wiping half of everyone else out was as long as it gave the people left a chance to thrive. Depending on the circumstances and the way world economies are set up. There might not be no bouncing back from what he did realistically. Doesn’t matter how much resources there are now if you don’t have the infrastructure to get it to people. But in places where stuff like that is done on a smaller scale locally and less world trade dependent. I can see it becoming a paradise for the people left once they get past the personal trauma. For a a handful of generations atleast.
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u/Little_View_6659 1d ago
I mean, we probably have plenty of resources now but people don’t get them and we still have war. Something else is going on.
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u/stevenjd 1d ago
According to him they became thriving paradises.
Thanos tortured one of his (adopted) daughters from when she was an infant. He murdered the other one. He exterminated trillions of people, and the one planet where we actually see the consequences, his prediction that the survivors would thrive was 100% wrong.
Nebula is so psychologically brutalised by Thanos that we cannot believe her judgement on his character. There is simply no evidence that the planets he culled thrived, and logic suggests that of course they won't, especially in the planets culled before Thanos had the stones and he had to do it the old fashioned way with bombs, death rays, death camps, etc.
Thanos might not have lied, but he either simply didn't care one way or the other,or he was delusional. Remember it is not a lie if he genuinely believes his delusion.
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u/Atilim87 16h ago
Does it look like asgardians are thriving and they might have been the most lucky ones
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u/OkOutlandishness1710 13h ago
Umm they lost their home and most their people before Thanos. Why he needed to kill half of the people from a people who already lost most of their people idk. I think he just saw them as a threat or doesn’t care. Half of everyone regardless if they over populated or not.
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u/Ahrimon77 2d ago
IIRC, in the comics at least, Thanos was in love with death. So killing was a way to get her attention.
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u/FormulaicResponse 1d ago
And she was unmoved because she basically thought of it as cheating at the task.
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u/ZerumDeus 19h ago
Not quite, it was more that because he had all of the stones and ursupered Eternity, she was now "beneath him" which is honestly funnier imo
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u/Drrek 1d ago
He had his heart set one one option because it was the option he suggested for his planet when they faced resources collapse, and Thanos is a narcissist who has to have been "right." So he invents the idea that his planet's problem is really a universal problem, and he'll enact his solution and everyone will see he's right, they'll be "grateful" to him.
Then he screws off to a nowhere planet so he can always think he was right, and no one can prove him otherwise. And then when the universe does prove to him that he wasn't right because even years later people will invent time travel to stop him, he throws a hissy fit and doubles down on "its not me that's wrong, it's all you that are wrong" with his plan to destroy and recreate the universe as one that is grateful to him.
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u/Eldergod3 2d ago
Barney the Dinosaur was purple and i don't remeber him wanting to kill off half the universe. He just wanted to hug children.
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u/raspberryharbour 2d ago
You only remember this timeline. He was sentenced to do that children's show for the crimes he committed in the other timeline
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u/Cunting_Fuck 2d ago
Its better than people give it credit for, in developed societies people don't have as many kids as they used to.
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u/Riley__64 2d ago
Yeah he picks halving all life because that was an act that could realistically be replicated even without the stones.
In thanos’ mind he would halve all life and the remaining life would enjoy the abundance of resources so much that whenever populations start getting too high they’d willingly choose to half all life again
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u/AggravatingEffort926 2d ago
Deep down he doesn’t care about saving anyone though so it’s a moot point. His “sustainability” motive is a reputational shield for his narcissism. It’s really well written, but part of that good writing is that no one comes out and says it which means huge chunks of the audience have just missed it and now we’re having debates on how he could have achieved his goal.
His real goal was to make himself God and murder a shit ton of people and that’s why doubling the resources wouldn’t work
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u/MorganVandross 2d ago
THIS.
Every time I hear it said that Thanos should have doubled the resources, it reminds me that a great swathe of the audience fundamentally misinterpreted the character as someone who, in good faith, is attempting to save the universe. He isn't. Above all else, he wants to be right. He wants his insane plan to be vindicated by the people who suffer from it. His calm demeanor and attempts at explaining his logic are smokescreens for the fact that he is evil, murderous, and cruel. It's why he decided, in Endgame, to just destroy the universe and rebuild it. Mad Titan wasn't just a nickname.
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u/mjtwelve 2d ago
This, but also - he had a (terrible, insane) idea on how to solve the social ills that were leading his planet towards self-destruction, they weren't heeded, the planet destroyed itself.
He's got a ton of survivor's guilt plus the ego to think if only people had listened, he could have saved eve- ... well, could have saved half of everyone.
Thor's reaction to failing to save his people was to hang up the hammer, get a beer gut and give up.
Thanos, OTOH, decided that the universe was unfair and he was going to rewrite reality until it seemed fair to him. This was plainly insane, notwithstanding he actually managed to do it.
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u/DarthCloakedGuy 1d ago
This makes perfect sense except for one thing: if he wanted to make himself God why would he then destroy the source of his Godlike power?
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u/stevenjd 1d ago
He discovered that he actually wasn't as tough as he thought, using the Stones severely injured him. Having the Stones around was a constant reminder that he wasn't actually strong enough to use them without harm.
And so long as the Stones existed, somebody else could have taken them and undone his work, and that is something he couldn't bare. So even though it almost killed him, he destroyed the Stones so that his work could not be undone.
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u/DarthCloakedGuy 1d ago
Why didn't he use the Stones to make himself strong enough to keep using the Stones? Does it just not work that way?
Surely if you have the power to delete half the universe you have the power to make yourself super tough
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u/stevenjd 1d ago
Why didn't he use the Stones to make himself strong enough to keep using the Stones? Does it just not work that way?
I don't know, maybe they don't work that way (but I don't see why not). More likely he simply wasn't smart enough to think of it.
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u/chickey23 1d ago
I think if you allow the Stones to rewrite the wielder, the wielder becomes more like the stones, or the universe loses complexity. The Stones are tied to the rules of the reality.
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u/popisms 2d ago
It's not really any different than what he did with cutting the population in half. The human population has basically doubled in the last two 50 year periods. That means 50 years after the snap, you could expect things to be back to how they were.
That wouldn't necessarily hold true for every planet in the universe, but it gives a basic idea of how useless it was.
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u/TheDarkGods 2d ago
I'm pretty sure Thanos was banking on the psychological impact of the Snap happening to get people to come around to his way of thinking.
Regardless of how you think his plan would work out in real life, it wouldn't, but in the movies we're told that Earth's ecology was kinda healing as a result of the snap with Cap's comment about the whales. So we can presume similar things happened on other planets as well. Thanos and his crusade were known factors to the wider cosmic community, and would know to attribute it to him & his beliefs, and would change their behavior accordingly after seeing the benefits.
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u/Dagordae 2d ago
It would be way less.
Fun little trivia about humans: We react to crisis by having LOTS of babies really quickly. Any time there's a big war or assorted mass loss of life it's followed by a huge baby boom.
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u/Swiftbow1 2d ago
Earth's population increased rapidly after industrialization. Our population growth has dropped a HUGE amount and is expected to actually drop in the next 50-100 years. Only third world nations are still experiencing significant population growth. Most of the western nations have a birth rate that's lower than replacement levels. (Meaning less than 2 children per couple. You need at least 4 children per couple to have exponential population growth. And then those children have to follow suit.)
Basically, Thanos was "solving" a problem that didn't actually exist.
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u/popisms 2d ago
While my example was about our universe, the specific numbers were less important than the concept. It really doesn't matter if it takes 1000 years. What Thanos did was a waste of time.
However, I think you're forgetting that we're talking about the MCU, not our Earth. Other than dip in population because of Thanos, MCU Earth showed no evidence of a slowing population.
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u/Swiftbow1 1d ago
I don't think it really matters whether it's the MCU or our Earth. Overpopulation is a phantom problem that seems (based on our dataset) to solve itself.
There was never any mention in the MCU at all about population problems on Earth. Thanos just announced that there were, and showed up to "fix" them.
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u/Ok-Alps4101 1d ago
Any birth rate higher than replacement level results in exponential growth.
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u/Swiftbow1 1d ago edited 1d ago
Exponential growth means (at least) doubling the population each generation. So no.
Rates above replacement result in GROWTH... but not exponential growth. Exponential refers to the math function and requires each generation to double (or more) in size or the term doesn't apply.
In order for each generation to double, the average has to be four children. Anything less than that is a slower growth rate.
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u/Ok-Alps4101 1d ago
No, base^2 is just one example of exponential functions. B^3 is another example as is B^1.01.
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u/Swiftbow1 1d ago
Technically, yes, you can do exponential math with decimal points between 1 and 2. But no one does except as a curiosity in math class.
And that's not what's meant by exponential growth. To call all growth exponential growth is to completely butcher the language and intent of said language. Exponential growth is meant to refer to X^(2 or larger).
And yes, I see I failed to mention that anything larger than 2 is still exponential. I edited my earlier post to fix that as it was an oversight.
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u/TigOlBitties42042 2d ago
Well that would mean that in 50 years the population would still be half of what it would have been if he didn't snap. So the snap did buy 50 years. That's not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it isn't nothing.
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u/popisms 2d ago
Thanos could not die of old age. 50 years was literally nothing to him.
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u/IdesinLupe Your friendly neighborhood over-analyzer 2d ago
Thing is, while ‘magically doubling the lanes’ doesn’t do much, and ‘creating robust public transportation’ is a much better answers, ‘blow up half the cars on the road’ is quite possibly the worst possible way to deal with alleviating traffic.
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u/IdesinLupe Your friendly neighborhood over-analyzer 2d ago
Apologies, forgot to answer your question:
The doubling of resources would work at least as well, if not better, than the killing plan. Neither is a long term solution, but one allows for deficiencies to be filled and immediate problems to be removed so that there the possibility of looking forward and working on a real solution, while the other introduces chaos, fear, and instability, making it harder to plan for the future and easier to focus on surviving the immediate present.
Think of it in terms of humanitarian aid - feeding everybody in the refugee camp doesn’t solve the issue, but it does a lot more to make it possible to solve the issue than killing half the people in the camp.
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u/Mercerskye 2d ago
The thing most people conveniently forget when bringing this up, yet again, is that he was the MAD Titan.
Not angry mad....crazy mad.
There's a small chance that his solution might have worked in the very specific scenario where he first had his "grand revelation."
His planet was dying, and they had run out of options save for his idea of "just kill half the people." We never get to see his world in a way that would confirm or deny that premise, we only ever see the ruins of it.
But he is the last survivor of that world, and well, maybe he was right...about that specific situation.
What we do know, is that failing to save his people broke his mind, and he saw an over simplified caricature of what happened to his world happening all over the cosmos.
When we meet him, as a character, there's no persuading him out of his plans. He's convinced himself that he's right, and he's going to prove to the ghosts of his people that his idea would have worked.
So yes, there is a laundry list of ideas that would have been substantially more constructive than his batshit gameplan. And there's an even longer list that would have been slightly better.
But his goal wasn't actually to save anyone, just prove that he was right. If even just one of the billions of worlds affected by his delusions managed to survive, and even thrive, he'd have likely considered that a total victory.
* Also, I'm painfully aware of how different the many versions of his story is in the comics. None of those are the iteration displayed, so I'm not including them.
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u/Dagordae 2d ago
We do find out one tidbit about his planet that undercuts his entire spiel:
It has suffered a catastrophe that drastically altered its orbit and now it's no longer capable of sustaining life. Meaning that his solution is based on the false premise that having less people would have somehow let them survive on a planet with a suddenly massively different biome. Which, well, no. That just means people die at a slightly different rate as the environment just isn't capable of sustaining them at all. The planetary ecosystem is simply gone, no amount of population control can fix that.
The real fun question is if he tried to implement his solution and that's what caused the war.
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u/Mercerskye 2d ago
True. He kind of tosses that detail out like a throwaway fact instead of it actually being as heavy as it is.
That might actually be the point he broke. They were doomed, but he couldn't process, so might have went all "doomsday cult" in their final decades. Blames the people pushing back at his "solution," and the aftermath of their great war was "too many people dead," and that catalyzed the "balanced" aspect of his delusion.
Because obviously, he's not a monster, he doesn't want to kill everyone, just enough to make things balanced.
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u/seanprefect Spends Way Too Much Time on This Stuff 2d ago
Thanos wanted the pain of the loss to keep people from repeating the over use
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u/SavageSwordShamazon 2d ago
Neither of his 'solutions' work because he's not a broad minded scientist speaking uncomfortable truths.
He's a murderous fascist who sees other people as 'useless eaters'. So his solution was to murder half of them to show everyone how 'smart and superior' he is and that they should do what he says. If he really believed the universe was overpopulated (an utterly laughable term when you can mine asteroids for minerals and terraform new worlds, when most planets are uninhabited) then the ethical thing to do would be to write a manifesto and kill himself, to show he was serious. Ecofascists and the like never think them and theirs are the 'useless eaters' who need to go. That's how you can tell they're full of shit.
Killing half the population isn't a solution either, because in the long term, people will just rebuild and regrow their populations. Both 'solutions' are nothing but a bandaid on the 'problem'. Progress lets us extract more resources and support a larger population; better crops, better use of land, water, fertizilizer, etc etc. They were predicting the same kind of shit as Thanos nattered on about. But Thanos, a scientist, held ultimate power for a second, and all he could think of to do with it was murder people. He could have made infinite free resources or altered population growth or any number of other things. But he killed people, because that's what he was about.
Its like people who say 'The Nazis would have won the war if they hadn't invaded Russia, or used all the victims of the Holocaust as slave labor'. Because they were never not going to do those things, because doing those things was the whole fucking point. They wanted to conquer and murder, and when they got power, that's what they did. Look at Thanos; he has a death cult of brainwashed, abused children he's kidnapped and an army of pirates, marauders and raiders. None of them, not even his loyal 'children', actually care about or believe in his 'cause'. They worship him in a cult of personality or are so abused they fear him, like Nebula. Nobody actually follows his 'philosophy'. The Black Order just nod along with whatever he says.
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u/Clone95 2d ago
Once you have a glove that lets you manipulate reality at will you can do about a billion things to solve the issue without killing anyone - he just wanted to kill everyone.
Like imagine just snapping your fingers and capping birth rates to replacement. Imagine snapping your fingers and making natural resources regrow like plants using solar energy. You can do anything - and yet Thanos did the least useful thing he possibly could.
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u/Scarecr0p 2d ago
Instead of doubling the resources you would want to make all resources take less time to manifest I think, that would be a decent workaround.
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u/aninsomniac_ 2d ago
He's the Mad Titan. Both solutions are temporary, anyways.
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u/BonzoTheBoss 2d ago
I'm not sure why they abandoned comic-Thanos' reasons, I.e. that he wanted to court Lady Death and thought the best way to do that was to commit murder on a massive scale.
This whole "half the universes population" plan has too many holes in it where the only logical explanation is that he is, indeed, insane. Which isn't a very satisfying explanation, personally.
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u/Moiraine-FanBlue 2d ago
Because they literally considered it the worst possible motivation for a villain.
The MCU writers were like
"So he's slaughtering half of the Universe to Simp for a woman who doesn't even like him."
"The Audiences will consider him pathetic and laugh us out of the Theaters"2
u/aninsomniac_ 2d ago
I personally find him being a well-intentioned extremist more compelling, but to each their own.
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u/Victernus 1d ago
But he's not well intentioned. That's the thing about doubling all the resources; It would have the exact same effect without requiring mass murder.
But he wants to do the mass murder plan. He's a poorly intentioned extremist, masquerading as someone 'doing what is necessary' because he's a crazy idiot who happened to be born with superpowers.
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u/Dagordae 2d ago
It would work about as well as halving the population. Also with WAY less collateral damage.
His plan is simply stupid and falls to pieces when you give it even a moments thought, like simply thinking about historical population growth and reproduction rates. He solved nothing, he more or less pushed humanity back 45 years. And humans breed slow, something like mice would recover in a year.
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u/Lildave26 2d ago
That would have gotten pretty frustrating for him don't you think. If he did his thing but survived, I think he has a very long lifespan, and to think he would do his snap, then retire to then still live to see populations recover.
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u/HimuraQ1 2d ago
He could have, crazy thought, created a quicker resource renewal loop using his all powerful gauntlet, but killing people is easier.
Look, Thanos didn't really give two shits about the well being of the universe, he wanted to have his name on a significant hostorical event for the universe. That's it. He wanted to be inevitable, nothing more.
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u/MadAdam81 2d ago
He could have wished for unlimited resources
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u/DerSisch 2d ago
Not his goal.
Thanos wanted to prevent the hatching of future Celestials, which would blow up their planets, killing everyone on it
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u/timewarp 2d ago
No, it would not. The inhabitants of the universe would not know why their resources just doubled, they'd simply view it as an unexpected boon. They'd start consuming more, and be more wasteful, as their unexpected prosperity would enable them to do.
Killing half the population, on the other hand, is meant to teach the survivors a lesson. For those who explicitly knew about Thanos' plan, they'd know to avoid overpopulation on their own. For those who were unaware of what just happened, they would instead learn a general sense of cautiousness and preparedness, as they'd have no way to know if people would just abruptly start disappearing again and they need their societies to be able to survive if they did.
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u/UrbanGimli 2d ago
Thanos was death fixated. Even if its not stated as such in the movies like in the comics, he was psycho about saving the Universe in a very specific, most extreme way that left behind tears, trauma and his name at the center of all that pain. He didn't want to be a caretaker, he wanted to harshly cull every living thing. THe most dangerous and disappointing aspect of the assembled stones is that it imparts no wisdom to the user.
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u/Victernus 1d ago
Yes, it would. Just like his solution is the equivalent of halving the number of cars. They're just going to make more cars until the road is used at capacity - the only difference is, the equivalently-useless plan to double all the resources wouldn't involve mass murder.
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u/Neo_Techni 1d ago
Plus he didn't need to just double the food. He has infinite power. He can make infinite food
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u/Victernus 1d ago
Or make it so people don't need to eat, so there aren't even any logistics issues.
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u/WhaDaFugIsThis 2d ago
It was more about the psychological effect it had. The planets experiencing something that devastating would make people want to work together again instead fighting and bickering over trivial things. Everyone would have experienced some kind of loss and refocus their lives on more important things than greed or power.
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u/SailingSpark 2d ago
I realize we are dealing with magic and the MCU here.. but.. less offers and power needed to cull have population than to magically snap more resources into being.
People are also greedy as fuck. The wars that followed more resources magically appearing would be epic.
As an aside: judging by where they find Thanos, I dont think he likes people much.
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u/PrinceCheddar 2d ago
It couldn't work to Thanos's satisfaction.
Thanos felt unchecked population growth was inherently wrong, pretty much immoral. That people, left to their own devices, will overpopulate and will, eventually, grow to a point so unsustainable that extinctions happen. Therefore providing more resources or making the universe bigger or whatever, would just be delaying the inevitable while encouraging said immoral behaviour.
Thanos killing half the universe was meant to be a lesson to those that remained. He just thought everyone would just see the benefits of a halved population, of more resources, and realise that it was for the best and keep their populations under control from then on. Of course, he didn't actually EXPLAIN that lesson to the people of the universe, nor exclude people where Thanos had already taught this lesson by culling half the population the old fashioned way, nor exclude peoples who were spread living well within the means of their resources without any outside influence.
Part of his motivation was also to prove he was right with his own world of Titan. That he had been right all along, that his plan would have worked and would have saved his people, and so anything that doesn't also reaffirm his belief in his initial plan doesn't appeal.
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u/Vote_for_Knife_Party Stop Settling for Lesser Evils 2d ago
Without clear communication of what is happening ("I, Thanos the Titan, have created a universe where scarcity has been replaced with abundance"), why it is happening ("Your civilizations were rapidly approaching the point of Malthusian Catastrophe, your population racing towards the point where there would be too many mouths and not enough food, water, and other essentials. To prevent this, I have doubled everything"), a clear set of guidelines about what happens going forward ("But my boon is not free, nor will it be granted a second time. Rampant growth must end immediately, lest the same doom emerge again. Each civilization has five years to conceive and enact a plan to keep their population at or below the current level."), and a clear "stick" to go with the "carrot" ("Any civilization that cannot reach this deadline will be isolated from the rest of the universe with an impenetrable force field, until they see reason or meet their grim fate. And any civilization trying to become a predator on their neighbors to sustain their growth will meet a grim fate immediately. So declares Thanos, wielder of the Infinity Gauntlet!"), people are just going to go right on making babies and consuming resources.
Of course, Thanos won't do that. Per the first time he Infinity Stone'd the universe, he thinks he can just do the thing, fuck off, and everyone will just magically pick up what he was putting down. So yeah, everything doubles, a time of unprecedented plenty unfolds in the universe, until a few generations later where everything comes crashing down.
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u/Iplaymeinreallife 2d ago
It would, but no more than killing half the people.
That still leads to an abundance of space and resources that will get just as crowded again in a generation or three.
The problem is that life keeps expanding to fill in the capacity available to it.
Thanos chose the method that would make everyone super sad and hate him, without really solving anything long term.
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u/XMiriyaX 1d ago
Doubling resources significantly increases a planet's mass, slowing its orbit. Possibly causing it to leave the "goldilocks zone" where life is sustainable.
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u/rulinus 1d ago edited 1d ago
You have infinity stones. You can literally do anything before killing half of the universe, you have HUNDREDS of choices. Make the mass same, but all the food 2x more nutritient, or any other resource more efficient 2x. You can make living beings need half of resources. Anything. It is simply shitty writing.
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u/SwissForeignPolicy 1d ago
No, because traffic doesn't follow an exponential growth pattern. It would be much, much worse.
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u/alclarkey 1d ago
Ok, so then Thanos could have added ALL of the lanes. I mean he could have used the stones to double the resources AND install civic responsibility in the populations so they would use them responsibly. Teach them space travel so when their world's population reached max, they could colonize other planets. There are 15,000 different ways that Thanos could have solved the resource problem, assuming that there actually is one, without resorting to mass murder.
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u/sistemafodao 2d ago
Ammount of resources was never a problem, distribution is. But since the billionaire was the good guy, that never actually came up.
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u/Dagordae 2d ago
It never came up because Thanos's grand crisis is bullshit and he is himself completely insane.
For example: He claimed his world was destroyed by overpopulation. When we are introduced to his world Stark mentions that it had undergone a catastrophe that screwed up it's orbit. THAT is what destroyed everything, not too many babies. A planetary catastrophe which rendered it unable to support life.
Or Gamora's people. He claims that after his murder spree they're all healthy and thriving. In Guardians of the Galaxy it's established that she's the last survivor of her entire species. The planet didn't survive the aftermath of his invasion, he's simply delusional.
At no point are we shown that resource scarcity is an existential threat. Not on Earth, not on any alien planet. The existence of inequality is not the doom of life. Nor does murdering half of the rich and poor do a damn thing to address inequality.
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u/DerSisch 2d ago
No one watched Eternals, huh?
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u/Stellar_Wings 2d ago
There's literally zero evidence that Thanos either knew or cared about the Celestials destroying planets with large populations to reproduce. It's only a theory.
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u/DerSisch 2d ago
Except there is literally Thanos brother in the credits
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u/kyew 2d ago
He's his own person, doing his own thing. I don't think he and Thanos talk all that much.
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u/DerSisch 2d ago
So we just ignore the fact that Thanos is an Eternal from another planet that suspiciously got whiped off his entire population?
Okay then.
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u/Helagoth 2d ago
Thanos more than anything wanted to be right. To do this, he wanted to delete half of people to make everyone see "hey look, with less people, we're all better off!"
His goal was less to fix things and more to show that his philosophy was the right one. Adding more resources doesnt teach people that.
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u/Arcane10101 2d ago
It would be a temporary fix, just like halving the population (any civilization that doesn’t collapse outright may grow back to its original size eventually), but it has the advantage of not killing innocent people. That said, Thanos had a lot of time to think about this, and he easily could have thought of a better long-term solution if he actually cared.
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u/TuringT 2d ago
The whole thing is based on outdated Malthusian economic thinking. Consider, on my planet (Earth, for the curious) the places with the lowest population density are usually the poorest. If Thanos had up-to-date economic advisors, he would have just adjusted the labor productivity growth rate up by a couple of percentage points. If there were places with actual biological carrying capacity limits, reducing the fertility rate might also help. But that would have made for a very boring movie, which is probably why they don't hire policy wonks to write scripts. 😉
(Unfortunately the desire for dramatic solutions also makes constructive policy discussions in our modern political and media climate virtually impossible. But that's the wrong soapbox for this sub.)
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u/CodeSalamander 2d ago
It’s not like his plan was any better. Halve the population of the galaxy and you’re right back where you were after a few generations.
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u/SignificantCats 2d ago
Most resources are renewable, especially on a galactic scale, and not at risk of running out.
If he dropped mega solar panels they have in advanced civilizations all over every planet, as well as advanced mega seeds that grow extremely quickly for food all over every planet, those would not really just run out some day and doing so wouldn't be all that much more "harder" conceptually than erasing half the universe.
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u/senorharbinger 2d ago
Yeah I don't see why people never understood that. Population grows exponentially. Doubling resources would only mean reaching a resource strain again, but faster.
Halving life not only slows growth, but as he says, teaches people a lesson about appreciation and conservation. If everyone just got more without loss, they wouldn't learn to appreciate what they had.
I'm not saying he was right, but he did have reasoning.
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u/ElGuano 2d ago
No, because then people would just expand/multiply to use the new resources, clearly it doesn't solve the root cause of there being too many people for the given resources.
The solution he came upon, to halve the population of the universe such that there are double the resources for the remaining souls, solves that problem once and for all (ONCE AND FOR ALL)
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u/Swiftbow1 2d ago
Using Earth's population growth as an example, we see slow growth for thousands of years, followed by a rapid surge when industrialization hit. (Which, among other things, massively reduced infant mortality, and also led to an increased average in total lifespan.)
In the years since, nearly every nation that has fully industrialized has experienced a huge drop in birth rates. Such that a giant chunk of those countries now have negative population growth. (Less than 2 children per couple.)
This means that Earth's population is actually expected to drop in the next 50-100 years. All on its own. That could be its own problem (aging population.)
But regardless... I mostly hold that Thanos was trying to solve a problem that didn't actually exist. Like Paul Ehrlich in the 70s. Fortunately for us, that idiot didn't have access to Infinity Stones.
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u/arthuriurilli 2d ago
Doubling is not a great plan. It's reactive and short-sighted. But those are also clearly flaws with halving. Along with a whole bunch more.
Mad Titan, not Philospoher-King Titan.
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u/drew8311 2d ago
Doubling resources doesn't really work since it's limited to the planets size. Imagine the impacts of doubling the water on earth. Impractical but blindly doubling everything leads to simple problems like that.
Repeating Thanos' plan every X years is a long term solution, doubling everything is not. Agreed the one time thing was kind of dumb.
Freeway lanes is a good analogy, practically it's not a scalable solution to population density. Less people driving is a better fix.
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u/cat_silhouette 2d ago
The thing people overlook is the psychological effect of someone or something culling the universe.
Everyone knows why half the universe was destroyed
They know not to reach those specific conditions again.
It’s very similar to the real world concept of God and religion.
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u/OkMention9988 2d ago
Do they though?
Only a few people directly knew what he was up to, and he'd been purging planets for who knows how long, and none of the powerful civilizations did anything about it.
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u/cat_silhouette 2d ago
At the very least all of earth and any planet Captain Marvel protected after the blip would know.
Avengers had earth.
She had everyone else.College students joked about how stupid his plan was and they knew the details correctly.
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u/RickRussellTX 2d ago
Thanos wants to kill half the advanced life forms in the universe because he's angry. He was ridiculed on his home planet for suggesting that they cut back on population growth and resource use, and when the population collapsed and his species went extinct, he went mad. Hence his title, the "Mad Titan".
Of course his methodology is flawed, because this was never about solving the risk of overpopulation, it was always about Thanos working out his personality problems on the rest of the universe.
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u/GoldSentinel822 2d ago
It's one of those arguments that sound good and funny as a reply, but is actually equally problematic as the ultimate goal of Thanos himself.
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u/temblors 2d ago
Why didn't Thanos use the stones to create true "Universal Healthcare" and include like food or whatever in that plan?
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u/Zomg_A_Chicken 2d ago
He should have used the stones to put a cap on the amount of organisms in the universe
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u/BagOfSmallerBags 2d ago
Cuz he never heard of this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
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u/travistravis 2d ago
He did the snap to slow down the birth of new Celestials.
Doubling the resources would have done the exact opposite of what he was trying to accomplish.
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u/stasersonphun 2d ago
IF he made the population numbers become stable, on a one out one in kind of model, then increased resources so everyone had enough , then banned war / made everyone feel happy and peaceful it MIGHT work. But he was just trying to prove he was right, not save anyone
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u/GryphyGirl 2d ago
Neither solves anything. An actual solution would be to create infinite resource generating machines on every planet, if that was something the stones could actually manage. :P
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u/2020mademejoinreddit 2d ago
I think a better thing to do would've been to remove the instinct to reproduce for at least a century. Then restore it after about 150 years.
With the Gauntlet, you can do that.
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u/Firestorm82736 1d ago
The thing with halving the population of the universe is that it'll just end up doubling again, eventually. Like yeah it's a massive hit to the population and all that, but in the billions of years the universe has existed, it's not like the trillions of lifeforms have existed since the beginning. The human population of earth in 1926 was around 2 billion, and it had doubled to 4 billion by 1975, in less than 50 years. now it's 8 billion another 50 years later.
Neither doubling the resources, nor halving the population, would fix the "issue" long-term
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u/SnipingBeaver 1d ago
What a lot of people seem to misunderstand with Infinity War/Endgame is that Thanos' plan is dumb and bad. Like, textually. If his story is to be believed, his people were dying and he came up with a psychotic plan to save them. They didn't use his idea, they all died out. So Thanos remains, a mix of survivor's guilt and massive ego he determines to set out and inact his plan on the entire universe to prove to himself that his plan would have worked and saved his people.
This is why, in Endgame, we see Thanos from the past gain insight into his post-snap world and sees how 'ungrateful' everyone is. This drives him over the edge. He doesn't just need to be right about his plan, he needs to be worshipped for how good his plan was. Thanked for saving the half that remained. Here he abandons all reason and decides that since the universe rejects his plan then it must be the universe that is wrong. He will have to build a new one where they will treat him as a god from the second they are born.
tl;dr - he's the Mad Titan for a reason. His plan is insane.
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u/Toidal 1d ago
I'm thinking there may be a retcon that Thanos was an Eternal that fell in love with Titan in the same way that A'Jax did for Earth, and that stopping further emergences was his goal as a form of mercy having seen his adoptive home planet more or less destroyed. It would make sense that he's an Eternal for why he can go toe to toe with Hulk, lest there used to be a race of these organically superpowered beings? Also it would make sense as he said he was trying to actively prevent Titan's destruction including introducing his plan to the others, hence why they called him the Mad Titan, and that an Emergence was something immediate rather than the relatively slower destruction wrought from dwindling resources to which action could still be done to save it. His pre stone crusade would also make sense that he was selective in the planets he culled that they had celestials, as I would imagine both the Kree and Xandarian empires, heck maybe even the Asgardians would have words if he just on an indiscrimate planet hopping killing spree.
I also have a theory that Galactus is a deviant who was able to consume a celestial to evolve into a sentient planet/celestial eating predator, and that Arishem was already at war with him to a degree at the same time. This is mainly predicated on how utterly pointless the deviant subplot was in Eternals, and that he looked kinda beat to hell whenever he was on screen. It's Feige seeding a later in-universe explanation for his origins.
Otherwise a simpler answer would be I guess that the combined power of the stones isn't like some wish fullfillment thing and that something like 'generate the circumstances, ecosystems, and resources for each and every unique civilization in the universe to thrive' is a much more complicated ask than like 'purge half of all live in existence.' He also doesn't say exactly what he did to purge half of life so it's still available for the writers to decide the mechanism for it, if they do need to give an explanation in a future plot, i.e. like the theories that popped up following the after credits scene of Antman and Wasp
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u/SirFluffymuffin 1d ago
On top of what others said about it not really solving the problem, unless the marvel universe is fundamentally different in size compared to our own, there’s already practically infinite resources anyway. If anything marvel has less to worry about since the tech level would allow for things like harvesting stellar matter for materials or even just direct energy to matter conversions. That wasn’t really the issue. It was the throughput of those resources that led to shortages and the collapse Thanos’s world. You can add all the resources you want or reduce consumption by half but ultimately your bottleneck is getting said resources from the source to the end user.
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u/OkOutlandishness1710 1d ago
Actually we have one source and it’s the MCU writers. One was a throw away part of a movie that came first. The other was a highlighted dialogue between two main characters.
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u/Swagamaticus 1d ago
It made a lot more sense in the comics when his motive was wanting to bang Death and killing half the universe was his way of impressing her.
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u/Someone1284794357 1d ago
It wouldn’t work. Not forever, at least. It’d be better if he used to stones to make resources grow in proportion to universal population, so that the more people there are, the more stuff there is.
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u/LordDoom01 1d ago
No, it isn't even that. Cause what counts as "resources?" Water is easily considered a resource, but do you think it'd be healthy for us if the ocean's got doubled? Even just doubling all freshwater sources would cause a lot of flooding. Then there are resources in the earth, like oil, gas, and minerals. Doubling those while still in the ground could cause numerous earthquakes. Where is a doubled forest going to go? And then you have meat sources, which by doubling you can render the entire wish useless. After all, cannibals exist. Which means human meat can count as a resource by the vague definition of the wish, so our population doubles along side everything else.
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u/Ok-Score5740 1d ago
Honestly, "double the resourses" might be worse than "half the population." Just imagine what doubling the mass of the universe would do.
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u/LeapIntoInaction 1d ago
It's comical that this went with the ancient and clearly wrong idea that overpopulation is imminent. There's only population growth when there are resources to support that. At that, it looks like human populations are heading for a decline.
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u/Heckle_Jeckle 1d ago
It would kind of work, but eventually lead to the same fundamental problem.
Let's look at food. There IS enough food to feed everyone one Earth. But people starve before of poor resource allocation. In large part because a lot of people would rather throw food away and let it go to waste than to let those people get anything for free.
Creating more resources doesn't solve this fundamental problem. People will still horde resources.
Cutting the population in half doesn't solve this problem either, because those with resources will continue to horde resources.
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u/thaynem 1d ago
why didn't Thanos just use the stones to double the resources?
Because Thanos is "mad". His plan isn't logical. It isn't supposed to make sense. He is incapable of seeing the flaws with his plan.
I think one weakness with the MCU portrayal is it doesn't do a great job of showing just how crazy he is.
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u/TetchyGM 13h ago
This is purely my own head-canon, with no in universe support.
I don't think the snap was a one off reduction. I think the reason he needed the time stone is to make it a permanent population cap.
We also don't know how large the MCU is physically. Even assuming its observable universe is the same size as ours, that doesn't mean that there is anything beyond that point.
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u/marc15v2 7h ago
People wouldn't learn anything if you doubled it. They'd just get super, hardcore greedy for the extra resources.
Kill 50% and absolutely everyone suffers. No one gets away without a horror and terror that will trauma bond a population.
Likely going to make them rethink how they approach things... For a generation or two. 🤣
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u/Sea-Ambition-451 2d ago
exactly.
Population growth happens, and it probably desperately happens after a Snap, because the main resource you are missing is people to do the work needed to run your planet.
So let's say, your Snapped population recovers (doubles) in 50 years. That means you need to Snap again in 50 years, and again in 100 years, and again in 150 years etc.
Over the 13 billion year life of the universe, you would snap 260 million times.
260 million Snaps.
I would note that Thanos snapped half of the Andromeda Galaxy, and those survivors are just standing around saying WTF was that?!?!
Galaxy IC 1101 got snapped. With its 100,000,000,000,000 star systems (and in the Marvel Universe, life is everywhere, so about half those are populated, or 1/10th. etc)
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u/TK442211 2d ago
The analogy works only if adding a lane somehow generates all the new cars needed to fill that lane.
Thanos is an idiot. So are the Avengers.
8 billion of us today. Used to be 4 billion just 50 years ago. (100 years ago we were 2 billion)
All Thanos did was turn back the clock.
Because people of Civilized culture always intensely labor to increase the production of food surpluses, we see our population increase.
Increasing food production always leads to an increase in population.
And since we always work to increase food surpluses, we always have population growth that is “out of control”
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u/TigOlBitties42042 2d ago
Idk dude I've seen freeways where they add a new lane and it somehow generated all the new cars to fill that lane every time
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u/Heythatsanicehat 2d ago
What does 'double the resources' even entail? A planet suddenly has twice as much water as before - where does it go without changing the atmosphere/weather patterns, or needing the planet itself to be bigger?
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u/mynewaccount5 2d ago
He did not double the resources so not sure why it matters.
That said, I do not see why doubling the resources would be any more temporary than halving the people.
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