#thoughtposts

I. Thanos’s universe motivations don’t make sense

So a thing about Infinity War is that Thanos’s motivation makes completely no sense. The motivation they decide to give him is that he wants to destroy half of life in the universe basically to deal with overpopulation problems. This makes no sense.

The universe, aside from not actually appearing to be running out of resources as a whole, is not a general interdependent system here. Individual worlds or groups of worlds can be having resource shortages, but they’re not a unit together, they don’t actually connect to each other. There might be a world with a huge resource shortage and a world with a huge resource surplus and they’ve never been in contact or known about each other and have nothing to do with each other. Neither do they affect each other’s reproduction rates or whatever. Etc. ‘The universe’ isn’t a coherent/unified/single entity with respect to this, and it doesn’t make sense to treat it like one.

‘Population outstrips resources’ is a problem of growth rates. If it is a problem, you can’t do things to it by destroying a bunch of people – if you don’t do anything about the growth rate thing, you’ll just get the problem again.

Killing half of everyone, whether by massacre or disappearance, is not actually going to cause happy thriving and great food yields in the other half. It will in fact cause a huge mess, lots more death, and exactly the opposite.

If you have enough power to just destroy half of life, why don’t you just make more resources or something.

II. The Titan story can make sense

Conversely, the story told for Titan specifically can make total sense. Titan is a unified entity. If they were having an issue of war etc caused by resource shortages, addressing growth rates wouldn’t fix their immediate problem, which they’d still have. The ‘kill half of people, at random, rich and poor alike’ feels like something that could show up as a (probably fringe) local position (which to be clear doesn’t make it like, ok. But it makes it coherent).

Resource conflicts and shortages tend to come down hardest on already vulnerable people. Saying ‘we’re heading toward a lot of uncontrolled death where the vulnerable suffer most. Instead, let’s make it controlled and organized and fairly distributed, and then with the acute problem dealt with we can make plans for the longer term’, is, again, coherent in context.

The infinity gauntlet and resources on that scale aren’t in play at all – this is a local issue. And if they arrange this as a plan, then whoever held this position could state that they would prepare ahead of time to avoid chaos and make the aftermath work how they actually wanted. (Again, that’s not likely to work, but it makes sense that someone could think that.)

III. From one to the other, with weird Star Trek computers

Star Trek (and probably other things) give us the trope of a robot or other such system programmed and set to a goal by its creators, that ends up outside the context of what the creators were thinking of, but keeps trying to carry out the goal.

So: Titan. Upheaval and the brink of disaster; a faction with a fringe position. They build a system. (Or, come to think, make themselves into one, somehow). The system has a motivating aim: arrange to destroy half of the population, at random, to, in their philosophy, secure a better life and future for the world.

On Titan, their faction never succeeds. Titan falls, with no or barely any survivors.

But the system survives. The system survives, and the system leaves Titan, and the system encounters the larger universe (which come to think Titan probably didn’t know about, since it didn’t seem like they were considering that as a place to look for resources). And the system is still running its program. It can’t reevaluate for a new context – it doesn’t have that capability. It can’t consider glaring issue with its approach – it doesn’t have that capability.

It has a motivating aim, and an increased scope. So – it goes to do its work. It gathers resources. It puts plans into action. And when it finds out about better resources that would make it so much more able to pursue its aim – it pursues those.