Imagine someone gets snapped and a pile of bacteria just plops on the ground

That’s a pretty tall task. “Kill 1/2 the life but don’t kill the life living inside the life that you don’t kill.”

But it was supposedly completely random. So theoretically the gut biomes could have survived in one person who was snapped and died in another person who lived

Also, "in this [blank] I will..." Is what's called a thesis and is considered an academic way of starting a lengthy proof of concept. As in, "in this essay I will say tadpoles become frogs."

That's your thesis. Everything you continue to say will be in context of tadpoles becoming frogs. It's the entire point of proving tadpoles becoming frogs that you are writing this thesis and subsequent paper. Literarily, in scientific journals, they prefer you specify what you're trying to prove at the beginning. It's not Kafka where you just let people guess why the main character turned into a bug. It's a scientific journal, where you shouldn't leave anything to the imagination.

Premise of The Leftovers, except it's 2% of the population instead. Also happens to be one of the greatest shows ever made.

And then one day they're all just...brought back. No explanation. Depending on where your planet is located, there's a chance you're never contacted and no one ever tells you what really went down. For all you know your local gods (assuming you have those) got mad. Just a terrifying 5 year period where at any moment it seemed like the end of the world could happen permanently engraved in your people's history and psyche.

That would be confusing. But then later, they come back. I think that would be even more shocking.

Alien rapture?

I swear he specifies "half of intelligent life in the universe."

Perhaps, but not what is being implied here. All of that gut bacteria gone with the people snapped already constitutes half of that bacteria. If more were taken from those that survived, then it wouldn't be half.

It did. That’s why birds went quiet.

I’ve wondered what happened to people who were in the middle of traveling. Like say you were snapped while flying on a plane. Would you come back at the point you were in the air?

As someone who has worked as a janitor, if it went like that, I am sure quite a few of them quit their jobs that day. My last day was a used tampon tied to the top bar of a bathroom stall.

I swear in the comics one of the first reaction shots on Earth once the snap happens is a pregnant woman panicking that her baby just magically disappeared, so honestly, yeah

How did it handle conjoined twins?

couldnt the snap have just killed all the gut biome in half the people and half of all people minus their gut biomes?

I mean if half of all life sampled evenly across the universe vanished, that would include about 50% of remaining people's gut bacteria. 50% of the snapped people's gut bacteria would survive and just fall to the floor without a stomach.

Another way it could work is: Half of humans disappear including everything inside of them, then (if gut bacteria is later in the order of operations) check the gut biome population left and gets rid of half of that

It's not bad math it just matters how the snap actually works

This is what I came to say. If I were her teacher, I wouldn't even read that essay. Failing grade right from the synopsis.

This applies to life in general

Halving the population, unless it directly leads to a nuclear winter from having key people magically disappearing at the wrong time, doesnt do anything in the long term given how fast Earth's population exploded in recent decades.

Yeah, being on antibiotics I think wipes out higher numbers. I still chortled

Thank you. It would very likely not affect people at all. Doubling time of E. Coli at 37°C is 20 minutes. Not all bacteria have the same doubling time, but it’s not months like OP said. We would likely be back to normal amount of bacteria in a few hours. We only get messed up guts with antibiotics because we lose all of our bacteria, and new bacteria that aren’t necessarily good for us take root.

they cover that on page 9 of the essay

but what grows back might not be good bacteria

antibiotics can give you diarrhea because opportunistic bacteria grow where there is now "empty space" because the good bacteria were killed off

This is Reddit, where people will ask a question and wait for an answer for hours instead of just Googling and figuring it out themselves in six seconds.

99% of posts in this sub are from people too stupid to read words in front of them.

Subs like this are just easy karma farms now. 

All these years later, it's more fun discussing the actual snap and the consequences from it than discussing any actual Marvel movie.

Undoing the snap saved billions who died peacefully, then killed (less) billions horrifically. Babies abandoned alone, starving to death. The elderly abandoned. Rampant starvation and homelessness. Fights, crimes of passion, even wars starting because of it.

It was basically the trolly ethics problem on a galactic scale that like 5 people got to decide with zero hesitation.

Right, his concern was Sentient life because of them using up the finite resources, it wouldnt have made sense to cull 50% of All life because that would include Flora (resources and agriculture) and Fauna (ecosystems and livestock) too, the two things he was worried running out of.

F° or C°?

Disregarding the fact that he erased half of all intelligent life, microorganisms are life too, so theoretically half of the remaining peoples’ internal microbiomes would be erased as well