Thanos Was Wrong

In Avengers: Infinity War, the supervillain Thanos achieves an accomplishment where most villains fail: he succeeds with his intended outcome from the film’s onset. The purple titan manages to erase half of all life in the universe. The Mad Titan was able to reign over the most mighty bling in the universe, the infinity stones, and use them to “snap” life away indiscriminately and randomly. Within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the event that became known as the “snap” or the “blip” led to severe repercussions for the remainder of the human race.

Like many good villains, from Magneto’s Malcolm X-like defense of the hurt and downtrodden mutants to George Bush’s war of retribution on Afghanistan and Iraq, Thanos thought he was the hero of the story. Yes, he effectively engineered the most numerous loss of life in the history of the universe, but not on the whims of a Joker-like “just to watch the world burn” mentality. His plan necessitated the collection of power only as a means to an end. Thanos wasn’t power hungry just for the sake of power, as we see later on when he discards the infinity stones after his mission is completed.

No, this Thanos had grand aspirations of fixing the universe from the failings that beset his home planet – namely, overpopulation. At least, that is the reasoning Dr. Strange receives from Thanos in the film regarding his homeworld, Titan.

“Titan was like most planets; too many mouths, not enough to go around. And when we faced extinction, I offered a solution.”

“Genocide.”

“But random. Dispassionate, fair to rich and poor alike. They called me a madman. And what I predicted came to pass.”

―Thanos and Doctor Strange

From this angle, it appears Thanos has historical insight into a problem that he would like to rid the rest of the universe of. Just being a helpful guy! Sure, it’s anecdotal evidence, but who would go through the necessary trials to save the universe’s inhabitants from themselves if not someone with a personal background? It was not merely anecdotal evidence either. The only reasoning behind Thanos’ motivations was one personal example! Not a great sign when someone is willing to enact such a drastic plan involving the death of half of all living creatures without any prior analysis.

Did Titan Really Fall From Overpopulation?

We cannot take Thanos as an unbiased adjudicator regarding the reason for the fall of Titan. It may be possible that Titan reached some level of overpopulation that led to societal collapse, as Thanos surmised. Still, Thanos’ younger years provide enough evidence that he had always been the ideologue that we see in Avengers: Infinity War. He had the same idea before the fall of his planet! He wanted to kill half of his own species to “free” the rest from starvation; his people thought that went a bit far, probably noting in the process that they had the spacefaring ability and the means to leave the planet.

We get a glimpse of Titan in its former glory through the use of the Reality Stone, which shows a rich world of technological prowess. When we return to the present, Titan is a barren desert devoid of plant life. Where are the trees? Why did the climate become inhospitable towards life beyond Thanos’ species?

Adding to the mystery of Titan is Star-Lord mentioned the planet as being “8 degrees off its axis, [with] gravity all over the place,” which presumably was not caused by too many people weighing down one side of the planet. More likely, Thanos either wrongly blamed his planet’s fall on the same reason he always believed and then extended his fake miracle cure to the universe or, considering he’s a villain, he destroyed Titan itself after leaders disregarded his dumb idea.

The theory that Thanos may have destroyed Titan isn’t new. He would have the ability to knock a planet off-axis. The approach also explains the lack of any of Thanos’ species throughout the universe even though they had spacecraft.

Human Thanos

Having an ideologue that believes in his proposed solution so much that he refuses to accept other potential ideas feels like a story closer to home to the level of human ideology we have on Earth. In fact, we had our Thanos-lite intellectual, obviously minus the power to achieve his evil wishes—Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus observed that populations tend to grow geometrically (2,4,8,16) while food reserves grow arithmetically (2,3,4,5), leading to competition over food resources. This observation helped inspire Charles Darwin to later detail his theory of natural selection.

Malthus’ idea that population growth was exponential while food supply was linear led to his fear of what became known as a Malthusian catastrophe. Malthus hypothesized that a calamity would be inevitable to “correct” population size to a more sustainable level: “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

By now, Malthusianism is mostly discredited. Not to say the theory was completely wrong, but the man severely discounted the impact of the industrial revolution on agricultural practices and failed to account for changing birth rates over time. A Malthusian catastrophe cannot be proven impossible, but worries over overpopulation on limited resources have been around forever. As of now, technological progress has led to a decrease in the world population growth rate. That trend does not appear to be decreasing in the short term.

The proposed solutions from Malthus are where we get closer to a supervillain mindset. Malthus offered preventative checks that would limit birth rates and positive checks that would increase mortality rates. Birth control, marriage postponement, celibacy, hunger, disease, and war were all proposed “solutions.” These ideas became part of the growing eugenics movement that advocated for decreasing the fertility of the poor.

Ultimately, Malthus’ lack of ability to account for additional technological gains that occur with increased population led to a theory about human population change that more closely tracks with the issues that plague deer rather than humans. His belief the world had an environmental carrying capacity may end up being correct, but not from lack of food and natural resources, or at least not yet. If there is a carrying capacity of the planet, at the current moment, CO2 emissions and contributable factors to global warming seem like better bets (but even the degrowth movement is highly contentious).

The world already experienced a near 50% decline in population once before

Around 1350 the human population experienced the sharpest decline in its history. The Black Death killed a massive amount of people including an estimated 30-60% of the population of Europe and 15-30% of the population of China. The Black Death or bubonic plague affected most continents worldwide and created a death toll that even Thanos could be proud of.

The Black Death resulted in an immediate concentration of surplus labor collected over the many centuries before the pandemic, which caused the rich to become even richer. The price of goods spiraled upwards as the supply chain could not mask the heavy loss of life, leading to kinks that caused shortages. Those shortages caused even more loss of life in the form of starvation. However, that concentration of capital and heavy inflation would not last long.

And here we get to the “good” about the Black Death. Like Thanos prophesized, humanity rose from the ashes of the Black Death and built a more equitable society. The old order of feudalism died off when labor became so rare due to the heavy death toll of serfs. Serfs were no longer required to stay with a master indefinitely, as the manors had a severe shortage of labor and would instantly hire a serf, even if he broke the law in the process. The plague gave way to the form of labor we know today. The lords had to increase wages and standard of living to compete for the lack of labor available.

The Black Death led to the sharpest decline in capital held by the top 10% in history until World War 1. This decline was primarily due to the incredibly high inflation (as high as 27%), which caused the stockpiles of cash hoarded by the wealthy to decrease in value. The short-term aftermath of the Black Death resulted in positive changes that were only possible at the time by reducing the abundant supply of labor and thus increasing the value of labor.

So… Thanos Was Right?

No! Obviously no. Thanos was at best partially correct that many species could emerge from the ashes of the snap as a better society. We have seen the same effect in developed countries over the past several hundred years. It took two significant loss of life shocks in world history to serve as the only examples of brief periods where capital became more equally distributed: the Black Death in the mid-1300s and World War 1 in the early 1900s.

Unfortunately for Thanos, that was not his primary goal. His main goal was to prevent societal collapse from a lack of resources. Even ignoring the idea that he based the death of half the universe on a sample size of one planet (or worse, destroyed Titan himself) led to faulty over-generalized logic. Why did he not prepare for the population boom that would likely follow on these planets throughout the universe? What factors introduced will lead the human race to avoid growing back to its prior size? Like Thanos’ says, the leftover humans have an absolute abundance of natural resources, but now they need to invest in building human labor again to access all of it. Countries, and other planets in the MCU, for that matter, would likely invest in campaigns to increase the birth rate of its citizens, either for economic or military power.

We don’t know exactly what would become of Earth’s population size, but the answers do not seem to point to the planet never hosting the same amount of humans one day in the future as it did before the snap. The world population in 2018, the year of the snap, was 7.6 billion. Thanos cut that in half to 3.8 billion, roughly the size of the world population in 1972; it took humanity about 42 years to get from 3.8 to 7.6 billion the first time.  It may take longer than 42 years after factoring in the current low birth rate, but eventually, whether 50 or 100 years away human population will increase to what it had been in 2018 before the snap.

Honestly, while Malthus wasn’t as accomplished as Thanos, at least he understood that population growth could increase exponentially. Malthus’s Law, or exponential law, is that all life forms have a propensity for exponential population growth when resources are abundant. Thanos’ entire plan rested on creating a more resource-abundant universe. The problem with his plan is that a resource-abundant humanity, theoretically, will return to its former size within several decades.

Next article: The hellscape of Earth after Thanos snaps, and subsequently even worse potentially hell after Iron Man snaps.