Thanos isn’t right and I am surprised given the Infinity Gauntlet should have given him omniscience (all-knowing) to realize his plan is not only doomed to failure but would required periodic erasures of every species resilient enough to survive half of its infrastructure providers disappearing without a trace. He essentially would create a Universe dependent upon his purges to survive since species would never learn how to deal with their societal issues on their own.

Too many people, not to worry, The Great Purge will happen any decade now and fix this problem. Praise Thanos.

But more importantly, societies like ours would likely mostly collapse in fear and terror, governments assuming there was some other force at work would probably kill the rest of the survivors in a nuclear attack (assuming there were enough people to launch said nuclear weapons.)

Humanity as a sample species is psychologically ill-suited to have half of its population approximately (3.8 billion) people to disappear, even if it was clean and tidy, all at once, without warning.

Imagine if you will, all the airplanes that would crash, all the hospitals that would go offline, all the nuclear power plants whose crews would not return to work, all the military facilities now left barely guarded, all the fishermen who won’t go back to fishing, all the scientists, scholars, and other people we simply don’t realize we depend upon were to vanish without a trace right in the middle of what they were doing.

Most major metropolises would have to be emptied because the remaining resident would starve to death since supply and logistic food lines would collapse almost immediately.

Earth, as a pre-AI, pre-robotic society, would grind to a halt as the survivors had to cope with the question of what happened, why it happened and most importantly, when will it happen again?

Thanos is a monster, his Final Solution is not a blessing, but more a monstrous curse he would lay upon the Universe and would have to do it again, depending on the nature of life and how many societies would survive their collapse back into barbarism.

Thanos is a lunatic, unable to, even with the ability to see into the future, predict the results of thousands of permutations of the future with the Time Gem, read the minds of the entire Universe and realize the shock and horror he would be leaving across the cosmos, to hear the cries and souls of people left to wonder what will become of them, he was only convinced of his belief that he was RIGHT and your individual capacities as species simply didn’t matter.

He was the worst kind of God. Capricious, willful and without concern for those he was in a position to actually protect and guide into making better choices.

Sorry, there will be no “Thanos Was Right” tee-shirts at my house. Thanos was wrong and even without cosmic awareness, super-intellect or omniscience given to me by the Infinity Gauntlet I can see this.

In a snap.

-30-

Thaddeus Howze

Thaddeus Howze

Thaddeus Howze is an award-winning writer, editor, podcaster and activist creating speculative fiction, scientific, political and cultural commentary from his office in Hayward, California.
Thaddeus’ speculative fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals. He has published two books, ‘Hayward’s Reach’ (2011), a collection of short stories and ‘Broken Glass’ (2013) an urban fantasy novella starring his favorite paranormal investigator, Clifford Engram.