MCU: World of the Snap

[Kareeah_Indaga]

All true, but transportation will be the real bottleneck here, especially when the armed gangs figure out they can use abandoned cars as roadblocks to force 18-wheelers to stop. Eating local will be a matter of necessity, at least until corporations can add armed personnel to their distribution networks.

The car barricades is a good point, but I think you’re overestimating the amount of militarization that will occur - bullets, guns and so on will also be hit by the infrastructure problems, so if they didn’t have guns to begin with they’ll have trouble getting them, and they either ration their bullets or they run out. So they’re going to be limited to things like wrenches, pipes, knives - things that don’t require ammunition. I guess they could pull a Hawkeye and start using bows and arrows, if they have access to the materials to make them, but they aren’t going to be taking out any tanks with those.

Most governments will be preoccupied with reestablishing basic control, although it’s possible some agencies of larger and wealthier nations will try to get ahead of food issues. But the farmland is likely to be a long way from the capital, or wherever the government is operating from, and making sure that the correct seeds reach the designated farms could end up being a logistical near-impossibility.

Does the internet still work in this scenario, do you think? It’d definitely make coordinating…well, everything easier. Ditto for phone service, I would assume satellites would be unaffected by the Snap at least in the short term.

Tobacco farms would present another issue, which is that long-term tobacco cultivation depletes the soil of nutrients, in particular nitrogen, phosporus and potassium. Former tobacco farms would be more difficult to farm for food plants, and while there will certainly be those who try, the yields will probably be much poorer than non-tobacco farmland.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but doesn’t most farming deplete the soil? The farms in question would be battling that Snap or no Snap, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect at least a portion of them to have fertilizer already on hand. Or have fertilized the previous fall.

I don’t think any country will be completely immune to these issues—and if there are major hurricanes that take out power and water in coastal communities, those regions would see internally displaced as well.

That’s why I was asking about the time of year - hurricane season doesn’t start until summer, at least in the US. There’s at least a little time to unblock the roads before people have to use them to evacuate, and the weather satellites should still be working so it’s not going to come out of no where.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
The car barricades is a good point, but I think you’re overestimating the amount of militarization that will occur - bullets, guns and so on will also be hit by the infrastructure problems, so if they didn’t have guns to begin with they’ll have trouble getting them, and they either ration their bullets or they run out.

Extremely good point about the bullets. That said, without going into specific details, I think there will be ample reserves on hand in certain countries that will contribute to a prevalence of highly armed bands. Probably shouldn’t say more than that, but my strong sense is that armed gangs will be a major issue in a number of countries. And it’s almost certain that many small groups of soldiers will desert and become bandits, as soldiers have done throughout history, and they will bring plenty of government-issue weapons and ammo when they do so.

Also, there are people who make their own bullets, and that may become a cottage industry after the Snap.

As for bows and arrows, there are hundreds of thousands of bowhunters in my country, if not more, using both compound bows and crossbows, so it’s entirely feasible that those will be in play as well.

Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
Does the internet still work in this scenario, do you think? It’d definitely make coordinating…well, everything easier. Ditto for phone service, I would assume satellites would be unaffected by the Snap at least in the short term.

I would assume that phones and internet will continue working until power is lost to a specific area, due to the accumulation of ordinary maintenance issues and a shortage of trained repair personnel. Probably there will be a gradual erosion of service, although I would expect the governments of more developed nations to make this a priority.

That said, there will probably be large areas of information blackout even in wealthier nations, so there will be a need for agencies—civil, military, intelligence, what have you—to send people into those areas for ground-truthing, to assess the situation and restore what they can. That could end up taking months or years in some cases.

Also, speaking in very broad terms, some governments or non-state entities might take the opportunity to launch cyberattacks against the full spectrum of infrastructure, specifically to further weaken governments they oppose or just to spread greater chaos. With half the number of intel analysts to detect these attacks, and half the number of skilled defenders and repair personnel, their effects would likely be more damaging and more widespread, and would take much longer to correct. Targeting hospitals could cause many secondary fatalities, and targeting power generation and distribution could cripple large areas.

Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
Not to put too fine a point on it, but doesn’t most farming deplete the soil?

To a degree, yes, depending on the crops, but tobacco has more extreme effects. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, only that it will be more difficult and likely with much less yield.

Internal refugees may be assigned to these farms for growing their own food, or may simply take them over for their own use, but they’ll have a difficult time growing much.

Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
There’s at least a little time to unblock the roads before people have to use them to evacuate, and the weather satellites should still be working so it’s not going to come out of no where.

Even with roads completely free and plenty of advance warning, many coastal areas have inadequate road capacity for the volume of traffic that a hurricane evacuation would require. Instant gridlock will be the result, with tens of thousands of people trapped in traffic as the hurricane is bearing down. There will be half as many people to evacuate, but it only takes one accident to jam up a highway for hours, and there will be half as many police and first responders to deal with it--and there will likely be many accidents during an attempted evacuation.

And if a hurricane hits an area a couple months after the Snap, there will probably still be a lot of abandoned vehicles on the roads. Half of all vehicles will be driverless immediately after the Snap, so roads in most urban areas will be choked with empty vehicles, including many wrecks.

As one example, Route 66 leading to DC is already a parking lot inside the Beltway every morning. When half those vehicles lose their drivers, it will be impossible for the survivors to drive anywhere, so that stretch of Route 66 will be undrivable until tens of thousands of cars can be manually moved, and that would be a huge undertaking. Same for the Beltway itself, and likely for many other urban areas.

Whether or not those vehicles will all be moved in the first few months depends on local governments, and I doubt most of them would be effective enough to mobilize that kind of major effort. The vehicles will most likely need to be physically pushed out of the way, since I expect there will be a lot of scavengers early on who will be going from car to car draining whatever fuel they can. Price gouging on fuel will be astronomical immediately after the Snap, and it will occur to a lot of people that it’s cheaper to siphon fuel from abandoned cars, either to resell it or attempt to hoard it for later use.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Curious; what would your top three priorities be if you were in charge of recovery?

Also, there are people who make their own bullets, and that may become a cottage industry after the Snap.

The issue with this is that unless we're thinking of completely different kinds of bullets, that changes the problem from 'no one has bullets in stock' to 'no one has the components for bullets in stock.'

I would assume that phones and internet will continue working until power is lost to a specific area, due to the accumulation of ordinary maintenance issues and a shortage of trained repair personnel. Probably there will be a gradual erosion of service, although I would expect the governments of more developed nations to make this a priority.

Inclined to agree, and I'd think this would drive people toward the major population centers (more people -> more likely to get repairs sooner with the limited crews) in the long term.

Also, speaking in very broad terms, some governments or non-state entities might take the opportunity to launch cyberattacks against the full spectrum of infrastructure, specifically to further weaken governments they oppose or just to spread greater chaos.

While I can see a couple of hackers going "ANARCHY, WHOO!" I would think most of those government or non-state entities are going to have difficulties keeping their people fed too, and will probably have more immediate uses for their funding then hiring people to hack their neighbors...with possible exceptions of using it to screw with inventory for things like food or medicine. They're going to be running into the same issues with disrupted chains of command, disrupted supply chains and disrupted almost everything else, are they really going to have the resources to declare cyber-war on their enemies while all the rest is going on?

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
The issue with this is that unless we're thinking of completely different kinds of bullets, that changes the problem from 'no one has bullets in stock' to 'no one has the components for bullets in stock.'

I’m by no means an expert on bullets, so I’ll defer to those with more experience here.

Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
Inclined to agree, and I'd think this would drive people toward the major population centers (more people -> more likely to get repairs sooner with the limited crews) in the long term.

I’ve been thinking about this, and I think that many people will actually be fleeing large cities if they can, because food will start to run out very quickly, and the distribution centers will either be looted or under the control of various armed groups.

This is based on the assumption that highway travel will break down early on, from a combination of fuel shortages, abandoned vehicles, bandits and gangs, unrepaired damage, and a severe shortage of drivers. All of these together will either constrict or completely halt shipments of new food coming into large urban areas.

I wouldn’t expect this to happen immediately, but the disappearance of half of all drivers, packers, stockers, department heads and logistics staff will cause an immediate backlog in food distribution, and looting and panic buying will deplete most stores fairly quickly. Once the highway issues start to snowball, there will be less and less prospect of store shelves being restocked, and a lot of people will flood out of the cities in desperation.

Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
They're going to be running into the same issues with disrupted chains of command, disrupted supply chains and disrupted almost everything else, are they really going to have the resources to declare cyber-war on their enemies while all the rest is going on?

It's likely that at least some of the governments will come to the conclusion that a life-or-death struggle for resources has just begun, and it makes sense that some of them would attempt preemptive strikes to sow further confusion in any potential competitors.

And depending on their outlook, some non-state entities may see the Snap as an opportunity to double down on their efforts and take advantage of the chaos for ideological reasons.

[Sapphire Guard]

1. Shut down anywhere that is dangerously understaffed, a la bioweapon labs, nuclear power plants, etc.
2. Since this is the MCU, fortify the critical infrastructure against supervillain attacks. It won't help, but it's polite to try.
3. There will inevitably be a gigantic famine, because virtually nobody in the modern world knows how to actually produce food, and randomly assigning people to farms doesn't actually work.Wait for that to blow over, then try to reassert control. It is likely to go poorly, as they will remember that you didn't help them, but it's the best you can do.

[M1982]

It was bad but not apocalyptically bad. 5 years later SHIELD has power, and there is even enough power to keep the security cameras going in the random warehouse where Lang's van was impounded. I don't think we can conclude it went full Walking Dead in the aftermath or anything.

Because they never though about the implications and thus ignored them

[Psyren]

Because they never though about the implications and thus ignored them

Or... some fans are more intent on doomsaying than imagining ways things could have worked out in a Tony Stark universe.

[warty goblin]

It's the MCU, I think it's less that they didn't think it through because of laziness or anything, and more because it doesn't matter in the slightest. The MCU's interest in pretty much any event begins and ends with how one or more superpowered people feel about it. We know how the surviving Avengers felt about the Snap, basically nothing else matters.

[Tyndmyr]

The car barricades is a good point, but I think you’re overestimating the amount of militarization that will occur - bullets, guns and so on will also be hit by the infrastructure problems, so if they didn’t have guns to begin with they’ll have trouble getting them, and they either ration their bullets or they run out. So they’re going to be limited to things like wrenches, pipes, knives - things that don’t require ammunition. I guess they could pull a Hawkeye and start using bows and arrows, if they have access to the materials to make them, but they aren’t going to be taking out any tanks with those.

Making bullets is not very hard. Even real world countries unable to feed much of their populations are, in practice, able to make bullets. And it's not as if they really go bad.

While I enjoy the aesthetics and improvised weapons of a lot of apocalyptic media, it's probably not super likely in any real world scenario.

The issue with this is that unless we're thinking of completely different kinds of bullets, that changes the problem from 'no one has bullets in stock' to 'no one has the components for bullets in stock.'

Casings are typically reused many times, and even when a casing has been too damaged to reused, the metal is still there, and can be melted down.

Lead is fairly available. In a pinch, other metals can also be used for the projectile, but recycling lead back into bullets was common on an individual level even in the old west. It's somewhat less common now, because mostly people would rather not work with lead for health reasons on hobby projects, but it's not at all hard.

That leaves you with powder and primers. Both of those can be homemade. There's relatively little reason to do so nowadays, for much the same reasons that we don't make our own paper. It's way cheaper and easier to just buy it. There are some people who do so, and instructions are quite easy to find, so it's certainly not a lost art, but it's a bit harder than the above. If there's some massive, long term need, though, it'll most definitely get handled.

All of the above is relatively unlikely to matter in a period as short as five years for the simple reason that infantry combat uses a great deal less ammunition that casual proficiency training.

If I go shooting twice a week, and burn 300 rounds each time, as a moderately involved hobbyist, that has me burning 31,200 bullets per year. Doing a hobby for perhaps an hour twice a week isn't a crazy involved level of hobbying, and is fairly normal, with people keeping the supplies on hand to do so.

A full combat load is 210 rounds. 30 per mag, one in the gun, six on the vest. In a fight, you will generally not use the entire load, because the entire point is to have more than you need. If you are getting in one fight a week for five years, burning half your ammo each time, you will burn 27,300 rounds. This is a ludicrously insane level of combat that probably nobody has ever actually done for so long a time and lived. Your odds of surviving over 250 consecutive gunfights intense enough to use that much ammo are, uh, not good.

Also, any sort of combat that is even a fraction of that intensity is going to rapidly deplete the potential combatants. Even if each person has only a modest supply of ammunition, if they die before expending much of it, combat makes the ammo/remaining combatants ratio rise.

In short, in any reasonable apocalypse scenario, bullets are not a meaningful limiting factor. Instead, they're a genre convention. Zombies taken wholly realistically are just a lot less scary, and in a horror movie, that won't do. So many apocalypses lean on scenarios which heighten the danger, and limited ways to fight back is one of those.

[JeenLeen]

To the general question, I think Stephen King's The Stand showed some insight well. In that book, way more than half the population died. While that changes the implications a lot -- I think large bands of bandits would be way more common in a realistic post-Snap world, as well as it being actually possible a government could persist/continue to maintain control, than in The Stand-- some small-scale things ring true.

Spoiler: guess I'll spoiler something from the book The Stand

Show

I think there's a chapter or small sets of chapters set after the plague wipes out most of life, showing scenes from individuals who die due to lack of care or support. I remember one really sad one about a young child who survived the sickness, but had nobody to care for them and died shortly due to that.

When I've thought about the Thanos-snap, I've wondered if it takes into consideration things like age and caregivers. E.g., if a city has all (or almost all) the adults die and just leaves the kids -- statistically unlikely for any given area, but probable to happen somewhere on the earth, if each person in an area has a 50/50 chance of dusting -- a lot more of those kids will probably die due to lack of care/support. At least, for the lack-of-damage we set to society, it seems plausible that (even if the movie never states it explicitly) the details of how the Snap works contain something of local distribution of deaths. (E.g., it seems almost certain the "half of life universe-wide" isn't completely random, in that every planet likely has half its life wiped. If he can set that level of granularity, it seems reasonable to set it not just planet-wide, but city-wide and to take into other factors than just location.)

[Kareeah_Indaga]

@Tyndmyr: Good to know! Thank you! I was thinking of plastic hunting shells.

I’ve been thinking about this, and I think that many people will actually be fleeing large cities if they can, because food will start to run out very quickly, and the distribution centers will either be looted or under the control of various armed groups.

This is based on the assumption that highway travel will break down early on, from a combination of fuel shortages, abandoned vehicles, bandits and gangs, unrepaired damage, and a severe shortage of drivers. All of these together will either constrict or completely halt shipments of new food coming into large urban areas.

Okay but (and I think this came up in the FATWS thread):

1.) How are they leaving, since the roads are blocked, and gas is hard to get? They aren't going to get far on foot, especially if there are roving armed gangs!
2.) What about all the infrastructure they're leaving behind? EX: docks to take in fish, housing to live in, etc. Cities are already going to have those, the countryside not so much, and for anything complicated they won't be able to have new ones built or shipped in, for the same reasons that travel is difficult.

[Lacuna Caster]

1. Shut down anywhere that is dangerously understaffed, a la bioweapon labs, nuclear power plants, etc.
2. Since this is the MCU, fortify the critical infrastructure against supervillain attacks. It won't help, but it's polite to try.
3. There will inevitably be a gigantic famine, because virtually nobody in the modern world knows how to actually produce food, and randomly assigning people to farms doesn't actually work.Wait for that to blow over, then try to reassert control. It is likely to go poorly, as they will remember that you didn't help them, but it's the best you can do.

The modern world also produces way more food than is required to meet the needs of our current population (by design, having excess production capacity is how you avoid dangers of scarcity,) and many of us are eating more than is healthy in the first place. I would consider it highly unlikely that the canned goods and supermarket reserves would run out before emergency workers could be assigned to critical food-producing regions and trained to be at least passably competent (farmers often use minimally-skilled seasonal labour for this purpose.)

[DavidSh]

/

When I've thought about the Thanos-snap, I've wondered if it takes into consideration things like age and caregivers. E.g., if a city has all (or almost all) the adults die and just leaves the kids -- statistically unlikely for any given area, but probable to happen somewhere on the earth, if each person in an area has a 50/50 chance of dusting -- a lot more of those kids will probably die due to lack of care/support.

Let's run the numbers, shall we?
Assuming each person is dusted independently, with probability 1/2.
A city has a lot of people, and so it's unlikely that all of the adults in the city are dusted. If cities were all only 10,000 adults, and there were 8,000,000,000 adults on Earth, that would be 800,000 cities at most. (In reality, cities are bigger than this, and there are fewer of them,) The probability that any given city loses all of its adults would then be (1/2)^10000, which is about 10^(-3000). Even with 1,000,000 cities, the expected number of cities that lose all of their adults is 10^(-2994). Too small to worry about. If we choose a definition for "almost all", I think we will still get these microscopic numbers

Villages and families are a different story. There are a lot more of them, and they are a lot smaller. Half of the one-parent families would lose the parent, and a quarter of the two-parent families would lose both parents.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Tyndmyr
In short, in any reasonable apocalypse scenario, bullets are not a meaningful limiting factor.

I was hoping you’d stop in and cover the ammo situation.

There’s a scene in Wind River where Jeremy Renner’s character is making his own bullets. I don’t remember the details of the process, but in terms of visual storytelling it emphasized his self-reliance.

Originally Posted by Kareeah_Indaga
1.) How are they leaving, since the roads are blocked, and gas is hard to get? They aren't going to get far on foot, especially if there are roving armed gangs!
2.) What about all the infrastructure they're leaving behind? EX: docks to take in fish, housing to live in, etc.

These are good points, but in some cases people may have no other options, and they’ll have to leave however they can. The best defense against armed gangs is to travel in a large armed gang of your own—so many of these internal refugees may end up forming additional gangs.

There’s also another reason that would draw people out of cities: if the shipments aren’t getting in to them, the next best thing is to go out to the shipments. Half of all eighteen-wheelers will be scattered along the highways, and every one of them is a potential jackpot for a starving group of people—or for would-be scalpers who want to sell or barter to a starving group of people.

There are different estimates for how many trucks are on the road any given day, but hundreds of thousands seems like a good order-of-magnitude. Half of those would represent a nontrivial amount of food and other useful products, so it makes sense that a fair number of people will be trying to get to those resources.

Originally Posted by JeenLeen
…a lot more of those kids will probably die due to lack of care/support.

This will likely happen even without areas where adults are disproportionally snapped. Many families involve a single parent taking care of one or more children, and if that parent is gone, many of their children may not survive either.

I can imagine that immediately after the Snap, there would be many, many kids alone in the back seats of cars that have just run off the road with no driver. How many survivors will notice them in the general panic and confusion?

Originally Posted by Lacuna Caster
The modern world also produces way more food than is required to meet the needs of our current population….

The key issue here is availability and distribution, and existing disparities will become much worse when half the producers and distributors no longer exist.

Originally Posted by Lacuna Caster
I would consider it highly unlikely that the canned goods and supermarket reserves would run out before emergency workers could be assigned to critical food-producing regions and trained to be at least passably competent (farmers often use minimally-skilled seasonal labour for this purpose.)

Even assuming that some agency would be able to mount an effort to match workers with regions, getting them there will be a severe challenge, and it will take weeks or months to train them.

Meanwhile, once people realize that half of the world’s population has disappeared, many of the survivors will begin buying or taking whatever they can. Looting and panic buying will be very real issues, and the disruptions to travel—including the disappearance of half of all trained drivers—will mean increasing delays in resupply.

And if the global markets collapse, which is a strong possibility, then the finances required for ordinary interstate commerce simply may not exist anymore. There will probably be some attempts at emergency relief efforts, but it’s not likely they’ll be able to sustain even a fraction of the necessary flow.

[Lacuna Caster]

Even assuming that some agency would be able to mount an effort to match workers with regions, getting them there will be a severe challenge, and it will take weeks or months to train them.

There is such an agency. It's called the market. Half the producers and distributors no longer exist, true, but neither do half the consumers (and being a low-level distributor just requires a driver's license.)

If the Snap were to trigger a more generalised collapse of civilisation due to panic or recession or what have you, then... yeah, sure, food shortages are likely to be a problem, but that's not really a specific problem with food production per se. (And even then, I'm skeptical there would be massive famines- the Wall Street Crash and Great Depression actually reduced mortality from every source except suicide.)

Incidentally, I just stumbled on an alt-history video essay explaining how demographic expansion tends to lead to societal collapse long before actual malthusian limits are reached, which I thought was interesting.

[Sapphire Guard]

Our big problem is that there's no one way it's likely to go. It'll depend very much on a case by case and how hard the snap hits.

The modern world also produces way more food than is required to meet the needs of our current population (by design, having excess production capacity is how you avoid dangers of scarcity,) and many of us are eating more than is healthy in the first place. I would consider it highly unlikely that the canned goods and supermarket reserves would run out before emergency workers could be assigned to critical food-producing regions and trained to be at least passably competent (farmers often use minimally-skilled seasonal labour for this purpose.)

Much of what supermarkets carry is perishable. The snap appeared to happen in the daytime in both the US and Wakanda, so I don't know where that puts rush hour. Half of the supply chain is gone, the other half can't get through, leaving aside the people who will just go 'half my family is dead, screw going to work' and so on.

Those seasonal workers are not actually minimally skilled. During the pandemic, some Western European farmers couldn't get their seasonal workers from Eastern Europe, which caused problems because there's a big difference between the people doing it on their first day and the people doing it for years.

[Lacuna Caster]

Those seasonal workers are not actually minimally skilled. During the pandemic, some Western European farmers couldn't get their seasonal workers from Eastern Europe, which caused problems because there's a big difference between the people doing it on their first day and the people doing it for years.

I'm sure there is, but how long does it take to train people for passable competence at manual labour? Did the problems amount to mass starvation? Half the producers and transport are gone, but so is half the population you need to feed. In principle, those factors should cancel out, more-or-less.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
The MCU's interest in pretty much any event begins and ends with how one or more superpowered people feel about it.

Well, we began to explore the perspective of ordinary people in Falcon & Winter Soldier, and indications are that we’ll get at least a little more in some of the other upcoming series.

As I recall, you’re not a big fan of the superhero genre in general, so I don’t know if you’ve been following any of the Disney+ series. The upcoming movies will be squarely focused on “how superpowered people feel about themselves and the world,” but some of the upcoming series may be a little more grounded.

I’m guessing that the Wakanda series will gloss over the Snap in favor of exploring Wakanda in more detail, which is fine. Wakanda is small and advanced enough that a lot of the large-scale production and infrastructure issues plaguing the major powers may well be less damaging.

Originally Posted by Sapphire Guard
Those seasonal workers are not actually minimally skilled. During the pandemic, some Western European farmers couldn't get their seasonal workers from Eastern Europe, which caused problems because there's a big difference between the people doing it on their first day and the people doing it for years.

Very much this. People who have been doing specialized labor for years will know how to do it far better than people who have never done it before.

Originally Posted by Lacuna Caster
…how long does it take to train people for passable competence at manual labour?

When half of the people who could do the training are gone, then it will take at least twice as long, and probably longer.

Originally Posted by Lacuna Caster
Half the producers and transport are gone, but so is half the population you need to feed. In principle, those factors should cancel out, more-or-less.

Except they don’t, because most of the population is concentrated in urban areas which can’t support themselves, and which are dependent on a constant supply of consumables. And again, that supply chain has almost certainly been critically disrupted at every point.

If this past year has taught us anything, it should be how fragile and fine-tuned our system of industrial food production really is. Losing half of everyone, in every single sector of the economy, can’t help but have devastating effects, because that is a labor shortage like none other in modern history.

And that’s to say nothing of the essential knowledge lost from every business—the fine-grained, hard-won, day-to-day experience of running a small business or a family farm. Some things simply won’t get done, or will be done badly, with detrimental effects that will snowball very quickly.

[Lacuna Caster]

Except they don’t, because most of the population is concentrated in urban areas which can’t support themselves, and which are dependent on a constant supply of consumables. And again, that supply chain has almost certainly been critically disrupted at every point.

On a timescale of days-to-weeks, maybe, but people don't starve to death on a timescale of days-to-weeks. Eventually the empty vehicles will be taken off the road and normal traffic can resume, more-or-less.

If this past year has taught us anything, it should be how fragile and fine-tuned our system of industrial food production really is.

How has the past year taught us any such thing? Was there mass starvation in the developed world that I didn't notice? There's been plenty of hunger in poorer nations, but due to economic recession, not transport disruptions.
.

[Tyndmyr]

The modern world also produces way more food than is required to meet the needs of our current population (by design, having excess production capacity is how you avoid dangers of scarcity,) and many of us are eating more than is healthy in the first place. I would consider it highly unlikely that the canned goods and supermarket reserves would run out before emergency workers could be assigned to critical food-producing regions and trained to be at least passably competent (farmers often use minimally-skilled seasonal labour for this purpose.)

So, while that would most likely not work for a variety of reasons for most apocalypses(not least because food has growing seasons, and pushing workers around is limited to that, and many people just don't want to be farmers, and even with training, a person who has never farmed before will do worse than someone with experience) growing food shouldn't be a huge problem in the MCU example.

Sure, you'll lose half the plants and half the farm workers, but you're only feeding half the people, and you still have 100% of stored food. Probably. I'm assuming that a can of veggies doesn't have half the veggies disappear out of it, because not alive. Anyways, net, you end up with a fair amount of food left, and production being fairly well scaled.

Transportation may be a problem, going by accidents. I can imagine the sudden vanishing of a lot of truckers creating some wild traffic logjams. Roads are going to instantly be a bit messy, and folks are going to be focused on lifesaving first, with resuming supply a lower priority. But actually growing the food is no big deal.

Fortunately, having effectively double the food supply in supermarkets relative to the population gives you some cushion to figure that supply mess out. Maybe more, because of people dying of secondary effects like car accidents.

As apocalypses go, it's really pretty bad, but it's easier to fix than something like One Second After-style EMP scenarios.

On a timescale of days-to-weeks, maybe, but people don't starve to death on a timescale of days-to-weeks. Eventually the empty vehicles will be taken off the road and normal traffic can resume, more-or-less.

How has the past year taught us any such thing? Was there mass starvation in the developed world that I didn't notice? There's been plenty of hunger in poorer nations, but due to economic recession, not transport disruptions.
.

Well, while Covid was certainly bad, it was a great deal less disruptive than the snap would be. Total deaths are just over 600k, total US population is about 330mil. That's a death rate of about a fifth of a percent. The snap is approximately 250 times worse, and it happens all at once, rather than being spread out.

I do think the disruption would be rather more severe. Would we eventually clear the main roads and get things flowing? Sure. In the US. After a *lot* of secondary disasters. I would expect food to be impacted pretty heavily, though, with selection dropping way off. Yeah, we might not be starving, but stuff like flying in bananas probably won't happen.

Just in Time supply chains don't cope well with severe disruptions like this.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Much of what supermarkets carry is perishable. The snap appeared to happen in the daytime in both the US and Wakanda, so I don't know where that puts rush hour. Half of the supply chain is gone, the other half can't get through, leaving aside the people who will just go 'half my family is dead, screw going to work' and so on.

I think the panic buying is likely to nullify any difficulties with moving the perishables before they spoil, at least in the short term. Especially if the power grid isn’t failing right away; refrigeration will still work.

Sure, you'll lose half the plants and half the farm workers, but you're only feeding half the people, and you still have 100% of stored food. Probably. I'm assuming that a can of veggies doesn't have half the veggies disappear out of it, because not alive. Anyways, net, you end up with a fair amount of food left, and production being fairly well scaled.

I do wonder about things like whole potatoes - what counts as a plant as far as the Snap goes? Did half the viable seeds go to dust too? Does it have to have sprouted to count as ‘alive’? But I concur it’s probably not going to affect anything you can’t plant in the ground and get a plant out of, so even if half the world’s whole potatoes went poof the mashed potatoes, fries, and whatever else would still be around.

[warty goblin]

Well, we began to explore the perspective of ordinary people in Falcon & Winter Soldier, and indications are that we’ll get at least a little more in some of the other upcoming series.

As I recall, you’re not a big fan of the superhero genre in general, so I don’t know if you’ve been following any of the Disney+ series. The upcoming movies will be squarely focused on “how superpowered people feel about themselves and the world,” but some of the upcoming series may be a little more grounded.

I’m guessing that the Wakanda series will gloss over the Snap in favor of exploring Wakanda in more detail, which is fine. Wakanda is small and advanced enough that a lot of the large-scale production and infrastructure issues plaguing the major powers may well be less damaging.

I'm not generally wild about superhero stuff, but I've watched watched some of the Disney+ shows with my girlfriend. Wandavision was good and legit way more creative than I was expecting, although the stuff outside of the dome was really, really boring and rote, and the entire evil witch plotline was tedious. But it did do a good job of owning up to Wanda doing some legit messed up stuff and actually having that matter and be recognized. For a show that was in terms of plot closest to going full superhero solipsism, it did probably the best job of avoiding that.

We're like halfway through Loki, and it's fine. There's not a lot of there there, but Tom Hiddleston is clearly having a ball and that carries a lot of weight. We've totally skipped Falcon and the Winter Soldier on the grounds we don't care about either character, and at least to me every preview I've seen looks like very standard superdudes superpunching dudes in Marvel's patented over-edited zero-color grading Boring-o-Vision action style.

[hungrycrow]

I think the panic buying is likely to nullify any difficulties with moving the perishables before they spoil, at least in the short term. Especially if the power grid isn’t failing right away; refrigeration will still work.

Real question: how long can the power grid stay up if workers can't get to power plants?

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Lacuna Caster
Was there mass starvation in the developed world that I didn't notice?

I didn’t say mass starvation. I think it’s very clear that I did not.

I don’t know the effects where you live, but for a while I was standing in some very long lines, and had difficulty getting essential foods and other consumables. Ripple effects have continued ever since, and are still causing issues, although not everyone may be attuned to them.

The fact is that we have built a delicate, highly sensitive support system for ourselves, which is energy-intensive and operates at a massive scale. It’s good at delivering a high volume of product on a predictable schedule, but not good at handling comparatively minor, Covid-style disruptions. And as Tyndmyr points out, the Snap would be hundreds of times worse.

Originally Posted by Lacuna Caster
…people don't starve to death on a timescale of days-to-weeks.

That is in fact the timeframe for starving to death.

But again, I didn’t say people were starving to death. But people will be extremely hungry before they reach that stage, and that hunger will drive them in search of food.

Originally Posted by Lacuna Caster
Eventually the empty vehicles will be taken off the road….

By whom?

Half the highway workers will be gone. Those that remain will be focused on ensuring the safety of their families. And as Sapphire Guard said, a lot of people simply won’t be coming in to work when the world is clearly ending.

Remember, most people won’t have any idea what’s happened. No one but the Avengers and a few Wakandans know why half the world is suddenly gone, so most survivors will be wondering if they’ll be disappearing in the next five minutes, or tomorrow, or the day after that. There is no certainly about anything. Absolutely no one is thinking, “Don’t worry, just chill, five years from now Professor Hulk will bring everyone back, so everyone’s going to be perfectly fine.”

By definition, nothing like the Snap has ever happened before, and the shock, confusion and terror will be overwhelming for the survivors. They will gradually adapt to the new reality—but losing half of your family for no known reason, in a way that can’t be explained, will be profoundly crushing.

And that means there won’t be many people who care about moving vehicles off the road—not for many days or weeks, and by then the fuel tanks have run out or been siphoned dry.

For the U.S., one recent estimate shows 115 million cars and trucks on the road every day, so that’s over 55 million vehicles abandoned on every street, toll road, highway and beltway in the country. Moving that many unattended vehicles, especially when many of them have crashed and sustained damage, will be a massive endeavor.

Originally Posted by Tyndmyr
Sure, you'll lose half the plants and half the farm workers, but you're only feeding half the people….

True, but again, the logistics of distribution will probably fall apart very quickly.

Half of all food animals will be gone, and half of all meat packers will be gone, as well as half of all the truckers who will drive the meat from packing plants to grocery stores. That’s even before we get to the situation on the roads.

Even if a shipment gets through, half the meat department workers are gone, half the store managers and assistant managers are gone, half the cashiers are gone. And most importantly, half of the people who do the ordering are gone, and half the people who coordinate the logistics of distribution are gone, which is a recipe for full-scale chaos.

Imagine one person trying to cover twice the normal regions in their state, with half the drivers and half the suppliers--and half the people they're used to dealing with are gone as well. That will very quickly create an overwhelming logjam.

Originally Posted by hungrycrow
Real question: how long can the power grid stay up if workers can't get to power plants?

It’s an extremely good question. I’m assuming a fair amount of staff redundancy, and probably a lot of automation wherever possible, so I would expect that power remains generally available for days or weeks afterward, if not longer.

After that, difficult to say. There will be less overall stress on the grids, because fewer people will be using power; but as noted in a previous post, there will be half the number of trained repair workers, so ordinary maintenance and repairs will take longer to be addressed, and cumulative issues will build up faster.

Originally Posted by warty goblin
We've totally skipped Falcon and the Winter Soldier on the grounds we don't care about either character, and at least to me every preview I've seen looks like very standard superdudes superpunching dudes….

You’re not wrong there. It’s very definitely Much More Marvel^TM, so if you don’t like superpunching then you can definitely skip it.

[Tyndmyr]

Real question: how long can the power grid stay up if workers can't get to power plants?

Depends. In a snap like situation, outages are likely just because of the sheer amount of accidents and missing personnel. A nuke *can* stay online for a long time with fairly minimal supervision, but generally safety procedures are going to err on the side of safety for such things. Falling aircraft could hit transformers, vehicles going off the road could take out wires. In the short term, it's going to be a mess, and if the local grid doesn't have enough spare capacity to cope, you could have very wide scale blackouts for a bit.

This seems generally a good deal worse than how bad Texas was hit. I'd assume there would be at least a temporary blackout in most places within the first day, and they'd need to turn areas on one at a time.

I don’t know the effects where you live, but for a while I was standing in some very long lines, and had difficulty getting essential foods and other consumables. Ripple effects have continued ever since, and are still causing issues, although not everyone may be attuned to them.

Automobiles are a big one. Because of materials shortages, chips haven't been made, and without chips, can't make cars. That's a long production chain, and with an awful lot of stops along the way, so disruption to the supply chain hits it really hard. It's so bad right now that across the US, the price of used cars has been rising rapidly because the supply of new cars is so reduced.

There was a point in the peak of covid where the local supermarket did have more area that was empty than stocked. They never ran out of all food, but they most definitely did run out of paper products(not just toilet paper, but napkins, paper towels, etc), cleaning products such as bleach, etc, pasta, meat, some canned goods, rice, bottled water, and so on. It did get a bit crazy there for a while. Nowadays it's more in the background, but even if another covid sized event happened right now, the shortages would be far, far worse, because we are coping with the fallout from the last one.

One can only imagine the awful challenges supply chain folks deal with in the MCU. Even beyond the snap, there's a fair supply of problems. The expanding goo in Guardians 2 definitely at least flattened local businesses. Sarkovia, whatever it produced must have gotten pretty well trashed by Ultron. New York I'm sure had all kinds of difficulties in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Sure, these are comic book movies, not economics texts, but being a civilian in this world would be at least occasionally pretty rough.

[warty goblin]

For sheer nightmare scenario, the post-Unsnap world seems even worse for Ye Average Civilian. Like sure, the infrastructure is going to fail in some bad ways when half the world vanishes, but at least the material necessities for everyone still exist, and the existing food stocks give some degree of cushion.

But when everybody's deSnapped, the world population nearly doubles in an instant. Unless they cover somewhere that everybody also reappears with housing, food and clean water for a year, you're looking at a humanitarian crisis that boggles the mind. Even if, in an act of egregiously superhuman coordination, they get every piece of arable land back under cultivation immediately, you're still looking at months before substantial additional calories are going to appear, and food stocks will be being burned through at twice their rate one day ago. Logistically nothing is prepared for a shock like that. Cities will be denuded of food in hours, and you'll see hunger set in within days. Within weeks you'd be facing billions of starving people. Inside of six months you could easily see hundreds of millions - if not billions - of people dying of starvation, disease and the attendant wave of violence as the famished world turns on itself for every calorie. There won't be a deer, rabbit or pet left uneaten anywhere.

And just imagine the horror for the a rando member of the world population. Half your family vanished in an unspeakable tragedy. Five years later they're back, and you have to sit and watch them starve to death. Or you got Snapped, then reappear into a weird, decayed world, where your house is probably a shambles, your spouse may well have remarried and have children, you own nothing, and the worst famine in history is bearing right down on you. Both killed billions, but you might well conclude that between Thanos and the Avengers, Thanos was the merciful one.

[Sapphire Guard]

Which is why the MCU writers know better than to delve into this.

Palanan, I think Lacuna was probably talking to me re giant famine. I mostly stand by that.

The big cities are in deep trouble, most of the main arteries will be impassibly clogged by abandoned hulks or car crashes. The railways might be salvageable, but can they supply a whole city alone? Supermarkets keep supplies on hand for a couple of days, most of it will go bad quickly if uneaten. Milk and bread, the two most basic staples, both have a short shelf life.

[Saintheart]

One topic I haven't seen addressed and which might be worth speculation: what impact 1,000 Asgardian refugees have on this situation, given they likely bring significantly advanced technology to the mix?

And even before someone goes to the "Modern day humans trying to hack it back in caveman days" analogy: this technology explicitly includes teleportation within at least the Milky Way galaxy over the Bifrost, which Thor certainly has at the end of Infinity War. Leaving aside deep depression, why wasn't Thor out bringing the riches or advanced technology of the universe to Earth over the rainbow bridge to help deal with their problems? Am I now going to have to conclude that Fat Thor was even more crapped on as a character by Endgame than he already was?

[GloatingSwine]

One topic I haven't seen addressed and which might be worth speculation: what impact 1,000 Asgardian refugees have on this situation, given they likely bring significantly advanced technology to the mix?

And even before someone goes to the "Modern day humans trying to hack it back in caveman days" analogy: this technology explicitly includes teleportation within at least the Milky Way galaxy over the Bifrost, which Thor certainly has at the end of Infinity War. Leaving aside deep depression, why wasn't Thor out bringing the riches or advanced technology of the universe to Earth over the rainbow bridge to help deal with their problems? Am I now going to have to conclude that Fat Thor was even more crapped on as a character by Endgame than he already was?

The Bifrost was always controlled from a fixed point, and relies on the operator at the other end being aware of the desire for it to be activated and turning it on.

Presumably Eitri has a transporter room, because that's where Thor came from, but he won't be sitting waiting for people to request transport.

So Thor's transport to Earth using it was a one way trip, and the remnants of Asgard don't have the knowledge or resources to build another one on Earth. (Remember, just because Asgard has advanced technology doesn't mean the average citizen knows how to build any of it, and the more advanced the technology the less of it can be reproduced without all or most of the right specialists)

[M1982]

Those seasonal workers are not actually minimally skilled. During the pandemic, some Western European farmers couldn't get their seasonal workers from Eastern Europe, which caused problems because there's a big difference between the people doing it on their first day and the people doing it for years.

While there certainly is that difference, the main issue was that in absence of their usual eastern workers, there were simply not enough western workers willing to put up with that kind of hard labour. At least in Germany most unemployed simply were not interested in filling the gap.

Even if ordered by the unemployment office they just did deliberately bad jobs or just called im sick after a day or two because of back pain, etc.

Also the comment about the forces of the marketing and that only half the competition was gone, that's not quite the case.

It's not that half of the producers are gone and the other half is fully functional.

All of them are half gone which leaves none of them functional.

And with half of everything else gone and thus all of everything not being functional gor quite some time, it won't be quick for two remaining halbes to organize into one new functional whole.