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Bacteria multiply crazy fast.... as long as the food source was uninterrupted I'd almost guarantee you most people's microbiome would be fully recovered in just a few hours and they'd not even notice.
Yeah 50% loss isn't servere at all for gut biome loss. If you've ever been on antibiotics you've likely experienced that or worse.
And the big thing that fucks people up is not only the high loss but also the antibiotics slowing or stopping additional reproduction. That keeps the population depressed for an extended period and then you get the shits.
Basically they'd feel mildly bad for a few days?
Bingo, or you would, I'm a bit more sensitive so I get slightly worse symptoms. But nothing dramatic.
This assumes it hits everybody's gut biome equally tho. What if it was random distribution? Some people would get totally fucked lol.
Wonder if it would go down the list of people by name or by birth day if ot wasn't equally distributed
They would probably feel bad for at least a week or two since half of everyone they know also died. On average, of course - maybe some folks were just lucky and no one they knew died so they might feel grateful to the dice rolling entities.
Try a few hours maybe. Antibiotics are bad for that long because they keep your micro biome low for a long time.
I'd honestly expect the result to be about as bad as food poisoning which can lasts 48 hours tops. Hence why I said days.
Or had a wicked hangover
I think is depends on which micro-organisms get destroyed.
The snap didn't always kill 50% of the people in an area. Sometimes it was just one or two people out of dozens and other times it was all except one person in an area.
How do the forces behind the infinity stones classify and quantify different micro-organisms? would it treat the good kinds and bad kinds equally? Would it distinguish between different kinds of micro-life at all?
I said this farther up in the thread, but in some places the infinity stones killed all except one person in an area full of people, and in other places it was just one or two people that got dusted out of dozens. What if it's a situation like that inside of people's gut biomes? Like some people getting all their good bacteria killed and some people only getting their bad bacteria killed?
Our doubling time isn't that bad either. We reached 4 billion in 1970s. If we round up the current population to 8 billion that's about 50 years. That's all that thanos would add by the snap. Even less probably because we have better medicine now so it would be easier to reach that number.
I kind of expect developed countries would maintain the current trend of being slightly below replacement value. Probably depends on the psychological impact of the snap. People tend to have fewer children when they know the ones they have are safe.
But your point is a good one either way.
How long can gut microbiomes survive after the host is dead? Wouldn't a dead host essentially mean near 100% fatality for the gut microbiome meaning that anybody killed by a Thanos snap would also mean a 100% kill rate of their gut bacteria, leaving any survivors to basically keep all 100% of their gut bacteria?
Well the implication in-universe is that the actual snap was killing 50% of all life, not any death afterwards. If we're counting bacterial life as individual living beings in this 50%, then it shouldn't matter whether the host itself got snapped or not, since the bacteria are "separate" and would be left behind after a snap....
Does this mean that for every human that disappeared there should have been massive piles of bacteria and shit left where they were last standing
That’s the dust you see floating away when someone gets snapped.
Even better, your microbiome covers your entire body (anything exposed to air) and into any organs that are part of the waste processing system.
So briefly after the snap you would see a vague outline of the creature, with a well defined digestive tract (mouth to anus), eyes, nose, ears, sinus system, and bladder. Because bacteria, viruses, and fungi are all quite small, the cluster of gut organisms would probably fall, and the rest would drift away. Imagine being in a crowded space and just breathing in all those bacteria, viruses, and fungi.. 🤮 I bet a lot of people would die from infections.
If the creature had any parasitic infections, like a tapeworm, that could also be left behind.
Don't forget lice!
Eyelash mites that we all have
Right so then couldn't it follow that human survivors may have no impact on their gut bacteria? If there are only two people and their microbiomes, and the snap kills 1 person and their entire microbiome, then the surviving person would have no or microscopically small impact on their bacteria assuming an even distribution of bacteria across the two people. Basically the OOP is assuming that of the people that died, half of their bacteria would survive, impacting survivors' microbiomes, rather than assuming 100% of bacteria would die with their hosts, leaving the surviving population's bacteria intact.
Well yeah, but what about planes? If the pilots died I’m pretty sure that’s a whole plane of dead people.
Depends on the micro-biome actually. An expert chef that's always taste-testing new things would have a very healthy micro-biome, but a lot of autistic people that only like eating a very short list of things would have their micro-biomes wrecked really bad
It wasn't an even 50% from everyone though. Some people had no loss of gut bacteria, other people had 75 - 100% snapped away
That's not how statistics works. Every person will lose almost exactly 50%.
Estimates for the number of bacterial cells within the average 70kg Human male is around 38 trillion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome
Do you know what the chance of 100% of them being snapped is?
0.50 ^ (38 trillion) = 0.0000000000000...
The calculator ran out of zeros.
It depends on how the snap worked. It was 50% of all life in the universe. Was that 50% of every species? Or just 50% of all living things? If it's the latter it's possible some species were missed entirely while others were completely wiped out.
If it's alive it had a 50/50 shot.
But no one lost 50% of their own cells, so clearly if it's alive and can be classified as a single organism. Is the gut micro biome an independent body of organisms, or is it just like any other organ of the human body, and thus would have been unaffected by the snap?
Either everyone lost almost exactly 50% of their gut biome, or, about half of all living organisms lost 100% of it, or, no one lost any part of it. Those are the only three possibilities.
The more interesting question is were viruses affected? Or did the magic stones not consider them life?
It's random and it effected the entire universe. Can your calculator tell you how big the universe is?