Wednesday, September 05, 2018

whew

According to this website, I survived the "Snapture" of Thanos:


Of course, if the site is using a randomizer, I could go back to the site and suddenly discover that I'm actually one of the slain, one of the cornflaked.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's a primer:

1. Thanos = main villain in "Avengers: Infinity War"
2. Thanos thinks the solution to overpopulation in the universe is the destruction of half of all life. We need to talk to him about population mechanics and logarithmic progressions, I think, because he really doesn't get math. Let's say I have a cell that splits into two every minute. Let's say that, after several minutes, I now have 8192 cells, and I decide to eliminate half of them. I do so... but a minute later, my 4096 cells multiply and become 8192 cells again. See why Thanos's solution isn't much of a solution? By halving the number of cells, I'm merely lopping off one power of 2, which immediately restores itself the following minute. While populations don't increase according to the admittedly hypothetical rules of cellular multiplication, there's a similar dynamic happening. Halving the universe's population is a stopgap measure at best, not to mention insanely genocidal (as Dr. Strange points out).
3. To be able to destroy half of all life, Thanos needs the six Infinity Stones, which are "singularities" that either came to be at the birth of the cosmos or arose before our current universe (in a previous bang-and-crunch universe) and operate within it. Each Stone controls a fundamental aspect of the cosmos: mind, power, space, reality, soul, and time. With all six Stones, Thanos can wipe out half of all life with a mere snap of his fingers.
4. At the end of the movie, Thanos does this, and people disappear, flaking away like Corn Flakes, dissolving into nothing.
5. Nerds are jokingly calling this event by many different names, including "The Snapture," which is a reference to the Christian notion of The Rapture, in which a fraction of humanity—its believers—is spared divine wrath and cosmic destruction, meeting Christ in a glorious aerial gathering. Think of the Snapture as something like a morbid mirror image of the Christian concept.

Of course, Thanos's snap is supposed to eliminate half of all life randomly as an egalitarian solution, killing rich and poor alike, so it's not entirely accurate to say you were either spared or slain by Thanos, per se. Thanos performs the snap, yes, but the effects of the snap are supposedly random (although, as some have wryly observed, the snap seems to have spared all the original Avengers while cornflaking all the newbies).

Anyway, check out whether you survived.

PS: I did revisit the website several times. My status must be linked to my IP address because I keep coming up as a survivor of the Snapture. Go figure.

(Hat tip to this video, which gives the URL to the above site.)

ADDENDUM: very cool site re: population growth here.



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