• @lunarul@lemmy.world
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    6911 days ago

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

  • @aesopjah@lemm.ee
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    5511 days ago

    or 100% of the 50% that are destroyed are the gut bacteria in the humans etc that got snapped

  • @nieminen@lemmy.world
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    4611 days ago

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

    • enkers
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      3911 days ago

      That would be incredibly unlikely. Due to the huge number of gut microbes, the chance to even lose 5% off of the median, even with billions of trials, is functionally zero.

      • @errer@lemmy.world
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        4011 days ago

        Maybe in your gut biome, but mine is just two or three really, really large bacteria

        • enkers
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          11 days ago

          Yeah, I was trying to compute the “ballpark” of the odds, but it’s actually hard to do because of how astronomically improbable it is. Even computation systems that are designed to compute rather big/small numbers (think 100,000,000^1,000,000 big) fail.

          Here’s another example: If a human only had 1,000 gut microbes, the chance that over 900 of them get snapped is 1 in ~10^162 [WA]. (This was roughly the biggest number I could get WA to yield a non-zero answer for a >90% snap.)

          Now if you do that for every human on earth, the probability is still essentially zero. [WA]

          When you consider that humans don’t have 1000 gut microbes, they have over 10 trillion, it’s just mind bogglingly improbable.

          • @yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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            11 days ago

            I’ve found a proper approximation after some time and some searching.

            Since the binomial distribution has a very large n, we can use the central limit theorem and treat it as a normal distribution. The mean would be obviously 500 billion, the standard deviation is √(n * p * (1-p)) which results in 500,000.

            You still cannot plug that into WA unfortunately so we have to use a workaround.

            You would calculate it manually through:

            Φ(b) - Φ(a), with
            b = (510 billion - mean) / (standard deviation) = 20,000
            and
            a = (490 billion - mean) / (standard deviation) = -20,000
            and
            Φ(x) = 0.5 * (1 + erf(x/√2))
            

            erf(x) is the error function which has the neat property: erf(-x) = -erf(x)

            You could replace erf(x) with an integral but this would be illegible without LaTeX.

            Therefore:

            Φ(20,000) - Φ(-20,000)
            = 0.5 * [ erf(20,000/√2) - erf(-20,000/√2) ]
            = erf(20,000/√2)
            ≈ erf(14,142)
            

            WolframAlpha will unfortunately not calculate this either.

            However, according to Wikipedia an approximation exists which shows that:

            1 - erf(x) ≈ [(1 - e^(-Ax))e^(-x²)] / (Bx√π)
            

            And apparently A = 1.98 and B = 1.135 give good approximations for all x≥0.

            After failing to get a proper approximation from WA again and having to calculate every part by itself, the result is very roughly around 1 - 10^(-86,857,234).

            So it is very safe to assume you will lose between 49% and 51% of your gut bacteria. For a more realistic 10 trillion you should replace a and b above with around ±63,200 but I don’t want to bother calculating the rest and having WolframAlpha tell me my intermediary steps are equal to zero.

            • enkers
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              210 days ago

              Whoa, good work! I think I’m going to have to go over this a few times to grock how it works, especially the Φ(b) - Φ(a) bit. My stats textbook has a bit too much dust on it. ;)

    • Kalkaline
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      1111 days ago

      Yeah, yeast doubling rate is around 90 mins in optimal conditions, I would assume the rest of the microbes in your gut would have a very similar rate and they would be well adapted to those conditions.

  • @s_s@lemm.ee
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    10 days ago

    Fewer than 50% of the cells in “your body” contain your own DNA.

    There are many more bacteria, since they are much much smaller than “your own” eukaryotic cells.

    Where you end and your “gut flora” begin and end is not as clear as you might first believe.

  • @blady_blah@lemmy.world
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    1510 days ago

    The snap was always the dumbest part of the entire avenger series. Let’s say for example, you have a bunch of deer that are eating the forest bare, so you let hunters kill half of them… Then what happens next? You have the exact same problem in a few years. The snap solves nothing.

    Also if you can snap your fingers and do this, why can’t you snap your fingers and make twice the food supply?

    The snap is just stupid, even in a world made-up physics-defying superheroes.

    • @djsoren19
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      1410 days ago

      It’s stupid only because they try to rationalize it.

      Comics Thanos just wants to commit genocide so his crush notices him. That’s also stupid, but he’s a big purple space alien so what can you expect? Using a magic space glove powered by stardust and wishfish to kill half of all life as an incredible gesture of his devotion to Death makes internal sense.

      • @BatmanAoD@lemmy.world
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        410 days ago

        His crush is literally Death, so it kinda makes sense that genocide would be the way to get her attention.

    • @zod000@lemmy.ml
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      810 days ago

      To be fair, it made slightly more sense in the comics, though still batshit. In the comics there was no noble purpose like they tried to shoehorn in for the MCU. IIRC, Thanos was literally doing it to impressed Death (the cosmic entity) to gain her affection.

    • @Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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      39 days ago

      Even worse than that. 50% of all life dies, right? That’s 50% of the plants too. If you know anything about food chains, taking 50% of everything leaves the top of the chain massively overloaded.

  • @Etterra@lemmy.world
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    1411 days ago

    Yeah but I thought about this I realized that whenever somebody vanished from the snap it would leave behind a slurry of gut microbes and a (different looking) dust from all of the skin mites, microbes, and stuff that just live all over the human body. Meaning the aftermath would have been even messier.

  • @Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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    1211 days ago

    So will bacteriophages and viruses be snapped as well? Does it mean that scientists can utilize the Thanos snap to determine for good whether viruses are alive?

    • @Zron@lemmy.world
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      910 days ago

      That’s an interesting question as to whether the infinity gauntlet rounds down.

      Like, if there were 3 survivors of a species and thanos snapped the universe, does the gauntlet round up to 2 survivors, or down to one?

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️
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    11 days ago

    The snap must take intention into account, like a genie, and not the literal wording of the wish, like a monkey’s paw, because otherwise everyone in the universe would have just been cut in half.

    But also: what if Thanos himself got snapped out, along with the power glove (because for some reason it turned their clothes into dust, too)? The heroes would have been fucked, right? It’s been a minute since I saw the movies but IIRC, they used the time stone to go back in time. But what if the stone was gone because it was part of Thanos’ attire? He himself used the stones to destroy the stones, so there is probably a timeline where he got snapped away with everyone else, destroying the stones in the process.

    • The_Decryptor
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      311 days ago

      I imagine the stones would survive it, just fall out of the vanishing gauntlet. It’s not like the stones were a part of it, they were just being held in place by it, but then there’s the question of whether or not the contents of people’s pockets got snapped as well, we know the pager Fury had didn’t count as “part of him”.

      And no, they used the ant man tech to go back in time, no stones there.

    • @T156@lemmy.world
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      211 days ago

      But also: what if Thanos himself got snapped out, along with the power glove (because for some reason it turned their clothes into dust, too)? The heroes would have been fucked, right? It’s been a minute since I saw the movies but IIRC, they used the time stone to go back in time. But what if the stone was gone because it was part of Thanos’ attire? He himself used the stones to destroy the stones, so there is probably a timeline where he got snapped away with everyone else, destroying the stones in the process.

      It might not be possible, since the stones were also performing the action, and Thanos didn’t want to destroy the stones while snapping everyone in half. Otherwise, they might just self-destruct by going for the nearest target first (Thanos), and stop there, not fulfilling the desired action. You’d have to destroy/scatter them separately.

      I don’t think that they used the time stone to go back in time, since it was destroyed when they got there. They had to get it from the past, since a decent part of the movie surrounded that.

    • @BatmanAoD@lemmy.world
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      110 days ago

      The stones were destroyed before the remaining Avengers found Thanos. That’s why they went back in time. And they needed Tony not to be killed by the snap (hence Strange’s bargain) so that he could invent time travel without relying on the time stone.

  • @fsxylo@sh.itjust.works
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    910 days ago

    It’s bullshit space magic, it probably considers what Thanos thinks of as life. Why it snapped the birds is a different plot hole altogether, because it means he snapped away half the food, too.

      • enkers
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        11 days ago

        Moreover, that’s not how probability works in independent events.

        It’d be like saying “I flipped coin A 1 billion times and got half a billion heads, so now that I’m flipping coin B 100 times, I probably won’t get any more heads.”

        It should be fairly obvious that you can say the exact same statement about tails, and get a completely contradictory statement.

      • @NorthWestWind@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        Say, there exists 2 humans and 98 bacteria. Consider all cells of a human one life.

        50% of ALL life doesn’t care which species the life is, and therefore there’s a chance that 50 bacteria die. The probability of that happening is 98C50 / 100C50 = 98! 50! 50! / (100! 50! 48!) = (50)(49) / ((100)(99)) = 0.247

        For my previous argument, I did not actually do the math. Now that I have done a little bit, the probability seems to converge at 25%

        Obviously, this is based on the interpretation of “all life”. For my interpretation, “all life” includes every life in a single set, and apply the 50% snap to that. For some others however, it may be interpreted as each species in their own set, and the 50% snap is applied on each set individually.

        • @ramenshaman@lemmy.world
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          19 days ago

          But if there are 7 billion humans and n bacteria, and 50% of them are snapped, wouldn’t approximately 3.5 billion humans and n/2 bacteria be snapped?

          • @NorthWestWind@lemmy.world
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            19 days ago

            The problem is the ambiguity of the statement. Is it 50% of each species? Or is it 50% of all life as one set?

            If it’s the former case, then sure 3.5b humans and n/2 bacteria gets snapped.

            But if it’s the latter case, we group all 7b and n bacteria into one set and snap half of them. This 50% can consist of 50% humans + 50% bacteria, but there’s also a chance for it to include 0% humans + 100% bacteria. Therefore, the amount of humans snap is a random variable instead of a constant.

  • @LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    If you want to be really technical the survivors would also lose 50% of all the other cells in their bodies and probably wouldn’t live another few months. I’m not a doctor so I won’t try to put a number of weeks, days or hours on it, let alone argue that number, but hey knock yourself out.

    /edit based on another comment - even if you could stay physically intact with half the cells in your body dying, half of your brain cells dying would probably kill you instantly.