Except for his solution is basically, "Let's put the population back a whole 40 years or so, while massively disrupting society and the economy and being guaranteed to traumatize virtually everyone remaining. That will fix everything!" The only person who could think that was at all reasonable would have to have a grade school understanding of how the world works and no interpersonal connections, or what they mean to most people.
And then he destroys the stones, so it's not he planned for the snap to be the first of an every-few-decades population culling. This dork actually thought he had a permanent fix and threw away his tools in confidence that it was.
So at best this turned the population clock back 40 or 50 years. How is that a solution to anything? This is like pining about the good old days. Also, I suggest you read a little about generational trauma, because I'm pretty sure having half of everyone you know disappearing, and that applying to everyone, is going to have a little of that.
Painless? Even accepting that emotional pain doesn't count (which I don't agree with) 50% of every person involved in operating a piece of dangerous machinery just suddenly disappearing absolutely caused widespread injury and death among those left behind.
I thought the reasoning portrayed in the movies made a lot less sense than the reasoning in the comics.
If his goal is to eliminate poverty and balance the resources vs consumption, why not double the resources rather than destabilize the entire universe in the process of halving the consumption of resources?
A shortsighted and foolish plan at least makes sense when it's in the pursuit of romance.
People are a resource. If you eliminated half the people, not only have you wasted all resources that went into those people, but you've wasted everything those people could produce. Minus half of agricultural workers would probably mean way less than half production. The post-snap world would be a place of austerity and starvation. You could recover sure, but it'd be time for another snap.
On the surface I understand, but as you dig deeper the logistics don’t make a lot of since with the “indiscriminate” part. Let’s say you had two warring factions of almost equal power. How would the snap know to take an equal amount so that there isn’t a massive power shift which could lead to a much more negative outcome. What if there was a single, very influencial person that got snapped. Things like that. His goal was to alieviate suffering but there are so many better ways he could have approached it. It’s possible I’d need to dive into the backstory more to determine what made him choose that specific action.
About the 2 faction problem, theoretically 50% of each faction will be gone. Chances are big that the power balance remains the same. But you can idd argue that making 1 faction completely dissappear is also 50% and statistically possible.
About the influential people (let add geniuses to be complete). Those persons are not unique, nobody is irreplaceable. Someone else will step up to be equally influential, Someone else will figure stuff out.
The reason he choose that action is not to be biased and give everyone an equally 50% chance of survival. In his eyes, a cleaning lady deserves an equal chance to a CEO.
I think that’s where we differ in analysis. If you had a charismatic leader who was snapped and another that was ruthless who wasn’t snapped, even if you lost 50% on both sides, it could greatly cause an imbalance.
As for a genius or such, it could set progress back by decades or more or they could have produced something that had a positive effect to change the course of their race.
First point: fair enough, I see the flaw. But then we're changing to a more ethical dilemma: does a charismatic person deserve more chance to live?
Second point: with half the population left, there is more time to solve things (caused by humanity). Global warming, for example, will likely be solved by just the snap alone.
Maybe he could have made it that every female can only bare 2 children, that would gradually reduce population. But that would put a huge strain on the younger generation to take care of the elder.
I'd argue in the marvel universe it would be inevitable with the faction problem. The marvel universe is much much larger than our own and much more heavily populated, so even if it was a small chance, there's many more times that chance could happen.