WAS THANOS RIGHT ABOUT HIS TAKE ON POPULATION AND TITAN’S DOWNFALL? — A SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS…
For those of us who watched the movie we all found out how Thanos established himself in the story. “Universe is expanding, the amount of resources matter is seemingly finite”. This is very true. But is genocide the real cure for over population? How did planet Titan, the wrecked homeworld of Thanos exactly see its fall?
Well, we have an answer for the questions in this article where we tend to bridge technology with human nature.
(WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD if you are that one person left on planet Earth who hasn’t watched Infinity War yet)
Infinity War had released amidst great expectations and destroyed the box office recently (pretty much how it destroyed half of the Avengers : p). At the time of writing this article, it just became the fastest movie to gross $1 Billion ( in just 11 days). It may very well become the first movie to reach $2 Billion in box office collection(Source:Variety), and rightfully so. It had received massive approval from fans, who were taken for an emotional and visual ride by the scintillating storyline, and critics, who praised the movie for its precise screenplay which astoundingly handled over 20+ Hollywood stalwarts in a very justified way.
But the movie was not more of an Avengers film than it was a Thanos film.
As I was watching the movie in good ol’ LA Cinemas, I couldn’t help, but feel awestruck by Thanos. That was quite a revelation of self, on how emotionally impactful was Thanos as a villain. Josh Brolin pulled off one of the best CGI performances ever, and the fact that I was rooting for him even after he killed my favourite MCU characters is something worth pondering over. But once the movie ended, (and my emotional turmoil settled about 48 hours later) I thought about Thanos’ ideological belief to drive his actions, and the more I thought about it I realized I might have found a loophole in his justification.
To put us in the same page, let us go to the scene where a faction of Avengers stuck in the dilapidated planet Titan confront Thanos, and that’s when we get to hear why Thanos does what he does and hunts for the Infinity stones. He shares the glorious past of his people in Titan, his home planet, and how they let their population grow out of hand and that depleted all their resources. This results in starvation of his species leading to extinction.
All that was fine, except that Thanos was actually wrong.
Let’s list out possible reasons for extinction of Titan’s occupants and try debunking them one-by-one. But before that, What if I I told you that there was someone like Thanos on Earth during the 1950s?
“The Population Bomb” was one of the best-selling books of 1950s written by a professor of the Stanford University, Paul R. Elrich. The crux of the book was that if America and the rest of the world did not take severe measures to cut down population, the majority of humans would suffer mass starvation and imminent extinction by 1980s due to lack of resources. The book urged for major societal upheavals and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. This book opened up a lot of conversations for population control and helped to propagate a conversation, but its predictions came nowhere close to true as you can very well see our species going stronger than ever in 2018, at least 30 years past Elrich’s deadline.
Now, let’s assume Thanos’ people died of lower healthcare. Possible, right? Wrong!
As this population chart shows, population shifted from linear to exponential growth as the modern era began. Technology had a huge part to play in this. Any civilization that hits the peak of population is naturally presumed to have hit the peak of technology, including medical advancements, because no population can boom in the presence of life-threatening diseases and conditions unless a cure had been invented to the most potential threats. Sophisticated healthcare made more people alive. So, for sure, if Thanos’ planet had a huge population, they might have very well had great technological advancement that made it possible in the first place. So, definitely they didn’t get extinct because of diseases.
Of course, one might argue that in Earth there are lot of underprivileged people who still can’t afford good healthcare. people in India below the Poverty line and also in third-world countries like in Africa. But, as a whole, the number of people with better lifestyle than before is more than people who still struggle for basic amenities. (Despite global economic gloominess, 53 percent of the world is “happy” while 13 percent of global population reports to be unhappy according to a poll conducted by The Research Intelligence Group (TRiG) and its global network of WIN International pollster partners in 58 countries).
This results in concluding that the plight of such people is the result of inefficient government rather than an uncontrollable population.
Okay, so maybe Thanos’ people ran out of resources and space to live? Not exactly!
Look no further than our own species and our history. In the case of transportation, People shifted from animals to vehicles once they realized it meant low maintenance costs and requirements than a live horse, and it meant they spent less in the long run. Decades later, we seemed to have realized that our vehicles run on a fuel source which is not only prone to depletion but also causes pollution that deteriorates the very environment we exist in. Although not economically ready for widespread consumption, we surely are making slow but huge leaps in alternative energy sources like solar, wind, and geothermal.
This has always been a characteristic feature in the collective conscience of the human species. We have incorporated the art of survival better than any other species, because collectively, our species behaves like a strain of bacteria or virus. We encroach a place, utilize its resources to the maximum and then move to the other area when we need more. That’s how civilization occurred when we cleared forest land for our sophistication. And, for better or worse, we still encroach as much land as possible and have begun occupying sea space as well by building artificial islands (like Burj-Al Arab, Dubai).
We still haven’t peaked in technology but we sure are getting close.
Given the rate of growth, one can be positively sure that in a couple of decades we would find a better alternative energy source to replace fossil fuels, and start occupying different celestial objects like moon or Mars (in a SpaceX shuttle, If Elon’s plan goes well). It’s because, the magnificent brain of humans thrives on creating a new resource every time an existing resource has grown old and “boring”. And as we already established the people of Titan as technologically advanced (the fact that Thanos travels all lengths of space at ease in a spaceship defines that they were an advanced civilization to begin with), they might have very well tried all that and most probably found success in it.
But the reality was that his population ceased to exist? What might have been the cause?
After agreeing that Thanos was wrong about his reason, one can only speculate what might have been the actual case. But considering Titan to have occupied a civilization that was very much Humanoid, and observing the real world around us, I finally came up with two possible theories.
One being that, just like our culture, they might have been becoming more and more dependent on AI. Of course, I am no old-timer. I still welcome any sorts of technological advancements with open minds and hands. But apart from the eerie sci-fi movies like Terminator warning us about how too much AI is bad, we can also look back a few months when Facebook was forced to shut down its AI when its modules started communicating among itself in an encrypted language. Elon Musk has been quite vociferous about AI, and how it should be handled and advanced very carefully to avoid creating our own Bane.
Possibly, Titan had a (more) Evil Zuckerberg who didn’t know when to stop and ended up materializing a demon that turned over them. But I must admit, after striving so much through this article for rationality and reason, it seems rather ironic to conclude on something as abstract and fictional as an AI invasion. Massive Unemployment due to Machine replacing human labour has also proven to be temporary from time-to-time, since people start concentrating on more complex jobs when simpler jobs are taken by machines, hence almost enforcing the advancement of civilisation.
The more convincing hypothesis to me couldn’t be more pragmatic.
Flipping through the newspapers and hearing tense middle-aged men shrieking everyday about tensions among people across the world, this theory seemed more agreeable than ever. Revisiting modern history gives us the reason for WW1 and WW2, one of the biggest wars that wiped out millions and millions of people. WW1 did not start over a resource or land, but because of the animosity of Bosnia and Austria that set up an assassination of an Archduke, resulting in more and more countries choosing sides. WW2, and significantly Hitler’s rise, was because of the agony in the losing countries of WW1 like Germany, and how their pride was hurt, and also because of Democracy vs Communism broadly.
Coming back to the present news, more often we see war between people not over a resource mostly, but over ideological differences (which lead to the rise of ISIS and violent factions like Antifa). Even in the more localized news, people murder or maim each other over disputes or feelings such as hatred, or because of a broken love, more than people fighting over a piece of land or a resource as a dispute over a material possession can easily be solved by rational solutions and convincing both parties over civilized discussions.
But no rationality works when animosity is fueled by emotions and ideologies, because it is way harder to convince someone against what they believe, even if they are horrendously wrong. Emotions cloud the rational thinking mind of humans. Emotions lead us to do things that we know we are not supposed to do. Emotions suspend the belief of righteousness.
And probably in that regard, Titan was too similar to Earth for its own good.
To come to a conclusion,
I feel that it was most probably just a bunch of incapable leaders with irresponsibility over their massive powers that led Titan to its dismal fall into abyss. Maybe Thanos failed to take a grip on reality that his planet died because of a few arrogant men in power who took insane decisions. Maybe it is the absurd reality of the extinction that forces him into denial and make him embrace his rational imagination to keep his sanity still alive. Just like humans potentially are, Titan’s people might have been too smart to die logically. It was almost inevitable that their fall would be of something vaguely “absurd and illogical”, driven by emotions.
Accepting the latter hypothesis to be real only increases the layers of complexity and depth in Thanos’ character, a ‘Mad Titan’ who was probably too rational to be understood by living creatures. A man who mourns over his loss so much that he ends up feeling guilty and his remorse makes him believe that he was responsible for the hell that was unleashed. If the latter conclusion I derived was true, It just makes me love Thanos more for what he is.
BUT WE HAVE ONE FINAL THING TO TELL THANOS:
— Written and researched by Lal Vasanth Rupan
(Sources of statistical data taken from various sources of the Internet, including Ben Shapiro’s Podcast and video titled “Overpopulation-The Human Explosion explained” by Kurzgesagt-In a Nutshell)
