The Thanos Snap is Real: Global Pandemic May Very Well Remove Half Population
We’re already living through a slow-motion Thanos snap — The coronavirus outbreak.
Thanos of Titan, the quintessential big bad super-villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, assembled the all-powerful Infinity Stones in his Infinity Gauntlet so he could eradicate fifty percent of all life in the cosmos by snapping his fingers.
He reasoned that this demi-genocide would leave the remaining population with such abundant resources that there would be no more war, no more famine, and no more societal collapse.
Now, was Thanos right about the overpopulation on Earth?
The concept of overpopulation is based on the assumption that our planet has a natural ‘carrying capacity’ — a maximum amount of people it can support.
The rate of growth of world population has increased dramatically in the recent years and is projected to reach almost 10 billion by the year 2050.
Carrying capacity, in turn, assumes that the world has finite resources. Within a given habitat at any point in time, things like food and habitat are limited, creating competition among individuals and groups, a major driving force behind evolution by natural selection.
In 1798, the great scholar and economist Thomas Robert Malthus had warned that if the global population continued to grow faster than the available food supply, it would lead to worldwide famine.
In 1968 the biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote ‘The Population Bomb’, a book that highlighted overcrowding in cities and sparked a fear of overpopulation after claiming that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death.
In 2016, the multi-award-winning scientist and author E.O. Wilson published Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight For Life, and established the Half-Earth Project the following year. He was spurred on by the estimate that half of all species on Earth will be extinct by the end of the century.
Nature loss, deforestation, industrialization, pollution, and reckless urbanization are all eating away our biodiversity, global food chain, ecosystems as well as human lives.
We have transformed the entire surface of the planet — clear-cutting forests, fencing off swathes of acreage, killing off habitats for untold numbers of animals — because we are addicted to eating burgers alongside our fries.
The accelerating negative impact of our activities on biodiversity and nature cannot be tackled without a radical reset of our relationship with nature.
It leads to an unstable supply chain of world’s resources. Industrial revolution is reducing life expectancy — urban overcrowding, poor diets and essentially medieval medical remedies all contribute to very poor public health across the majority of world population. The densely packed neighborhoods contribute to the fast spread of diseases.
Outbreaks of invasive pests and diseases are another brutal result of our mindless activities causing grave loss to our natural environment.
A deadly and mysterious coronavirus outbreak that started in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 has killed at least 3,408 people and infected more than 100,333 across 95 countries.
We don’t know if these outbreaks are a consequence of our reckless behavior towards nature and environment — but the outcome is awfully devastating.
Scientists fear the new coronavirus could soon become unstoppable, they have even termed it as pandemic.
According to Adalja, an infectious disease expert at John Hopkins’ Center for Health Security, the new coronavirus could be of the kind that is constantly circulating, endemic.
He said, “We have to be prepared for this to become the fifth community-acquired coronavirus” — which could mean that outbreak never really ends.
If the spread of the new coronavirus isn’t halted, it could infect 60 per cent of the world’s population and kill 1 in 100 of those infected —which is around 50 million people.
The worry is that the virus is already spreading widely in countries that lack the resources to detect it. The head of the World Health Organization has warned that we may only be seeing “the tip of the iceberg”. If so, the chances of preventing a global pandemic are potentially low.
Bottom line
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thanos was a mass murderer who believed his actions are a necessary evil that are required to achieve a greater good: an end to suffering. In his own mind, he was not a villain, but a kind of hero. That sounds terrible if you see him as a person, but Thanos probably considered himself to be an instrument of destruction, a natural disaster or mass extinction event — one that will help save the universe.
In reality, human beings have exploited Earth to a point where the natural ecosystem is on the verge of collapsing. As Earth scientist James Syvitski writes:
“At some point, we graduated from adapting to our environment to making it adapt to us … But now we regularly decelerate and accelerate natural processes, focus energy in extraordinary ways and alter, destroy or create ecosystems.”
