Debunking Thanos’s Religion of Balance

And what would be a better focus

I just watched Infinity War…

It was quite interesting, and a sort of refreshing change of pace from tired old tropes… but heavy stuff nonetheless.

I don’t intend to go into specifics, but still, steer clear if you have a hardline against spoilers.

Though I appreciated their actually giving the villain some touching backstory, characterization, and motivation… his stated desire for universal balance is horribly flawed in its focus on population control.

The best villains are not those with some absurd motivation… its those who desire a goal that many deem laudable.

I want to actually compare Thanos and Killmonger and explain what makes the latter a better villain despite his not being worth a candle in power… but that will have to wait for a later, much more researched article.

Today I just want to address the idea that population control is never a good way to balance a society or provide stability in the face of scarcity.

The idea that overpopulation is a big problem and causes all sorts of negative effects on society is woefully inaccurate, and even childish/naive in thought.

Smarter people have detailed why:

https://www.pop.org/debunking-the-myth-of-overpopulation/

https://youtu.be/ioKidcpkZN0

In short, not only is our society equipped to feed almost double as many people on this planet with the resources we have now, but our population can only grow to such heights due to greater access to resources in the first place.

There is no reason to think this should be different in the Marvel universe where it seems every advanced civilization is just another humanoid.

Sentient creatures don’t breed ourselves into overpopulation, because we’re smart enough to actually see the impact it makes on the environment. We’re smart enough to invent more resources or ways to extract resources more effectively, with less waste.

So the whole concept of having to do population control (ie genocide) is utterly ridiculous.

Killing off half the population means killing off at least half the talent and ideas and ability to solve any problems arising from scarcity.

Whatever disaster Thanos’s people experienced was not an affect of overpopulation, but of stagnation. Had they used all that tech they used for incongruously floating buildings for space travel, they would have found plenty of resources to feed their population ten times over at least. They clearly weren’t suffering from lack of land. Much of which could have been used for food. Or they could find ways to artificially produce food like we do now.

The same could be said for Gamoras planet, despite them seeming to be stuck in Romanesque times for no good reason.

Maybe the comics explain Thanos’s reasons better… they likely flesh out what seems to be a religion of Balance.

But a far more interesting and accurate take on that principle could and should have been based on Entropy, or even on the Kardashev scale.

Any planet stuck in Tier 0 (ie using plants and native resources as energy) would die by a number of issues before overpopulation does them in, such as an asteroid or supernovas or war or whatever…

Tier 1 Civilizations that use their local sun as their primary form of energy would only barely risk overpopulation after they number into the quadrillions and swamp their solar system with space habitats via a dyson swarm.

Tier 2 and above would have the ability to harm/affect the very space of their entire galaxy, supercluster, and maybe even whole parsecs of the universe.

Thus, had Thanos sought to enforce Balance by ensuring no civilization reaches Tier 2, or maybe even Tier 1…then you’d have a much more effective solution.

I wager itd be much more interesting to see him batting down burgeoning space opera age civilizations then just wholesale slaughter of half a planet just because they reached some arbitrary, hitherto unsaid population number.

His quest for the Infinity stones would thus be to combat Entropy… the natural affect of living creatures and universal expansion.

Yes there would be a bit of a challenge explaining entropy to the masses. But better educate people on real problems rather than support a widely believed false assumption.