We need to talk about Thanos' insane population control scheme in 'Infinity War'

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) and Thanos of Titan (1973 -): Population problem people.

Image: wikimedia/marvel

By Chris Taylor2018-05-03 15:06:08 UTC

Spoiler Alert: This article discusses the shocking ending of Infinity War, which you really should have seen by now. 

It's been quite a week for galaxy brain solutions to our greatest problems — big, bold ideas, unfettered by anything as old-fashioned as science, history or logic. 

We're not just talking about Kanye West's bizarre fact-free "freethinking" rants, in which he suggested that centuries of American slavery were the fault of the enslaved for making a "choice" to not be free. There's an even bigger galaxy brain in pop culture right now: Thanos, Infinity Stone-wielding villain of the box office record-breakingAvengers: Infinity War.

Thanos' big freethinking idea? Saving the universe by killing 50% of its entire population, chosen at random. How does that save the universe? Because at a stroke, it instantly reduces the impact of large populations on the ecospheres of all of those teeming worlds. 

Can't have any famines if there's only half of you around to eat all the food. And forget climate change: nothing to worry about if you're only emitting half as much CO2! 

Image: GIPHY

While the Marvel comics version of Thanos concocts his 50%-off scheme because he's a sadistic alien trying to impress a being named Lady Death, the Thanos of Infinity War is absolutely in earnest about working for the greater good. Grotesque purple giant though he may be, movie Thanos really thinks he's doing this for the benefit of the half of us who remain. 

In the very last shot of the movie, Thanos appears to be in retirement, watching what he called "the sun rise on a grateful universe," the entire population of which has just been reduced by 50%. 

(We advise you don't start thinking about exactly what that means, less you start sobbing your eyes out at the notion that 50% of the animals in the universe just crumbled into dust as well as the humans and aliens. Never mind whether you survived — did your pets?) 

In an odd way, the movie endorses this population control concept — presenting it as a drastic solution, to be sure, but one that actually works. Plenty of people are thinking it, Thanos says at one point in the movie; he's just the only one with the "guts to carry it out." Gosh, if only political correctness would stop getting in the way of universal demi-genocide!

Later, Thanos tells his adopted daughter, Gamora, that her purged homeworld is now "paradise" because no one is going hungry the way she did as a kid. She doesn't deny it. He suggests to the Avengers that his own homeworld of Titan got knocked off its axis because there were, um, too many people on it? No one refutes him on this. 

Now, Infinity War doesn't get very deep into Thanos' bizarre and brutal math. (Why 50%? Why not 25%, or 10%? Surely some planets with small populations will be fine without a haircut, thank you very much?) But the general idea that extreme population control could save us from famine — this doesn't make sense, and it never has. We've seen this movie before. 

In An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, a famously pessimistic English thinker named Thomas Malthus declared that the world was doomed to disaster — unless it underwent a radical course of war, disease or famine. Why? Because at the time, the human population was increasing at a faster rate than food production. 

His solutions, absent war? Forced sterilization and reducing food handouts to the poor — because feeding them encourages them to bring forth more mouths. Both of Malthus' horrific ideas influenced 19th century legislation more than we care to remember. When the British withheld food during the Irish potato famine, they were thinking along Malthusian lines.

"The power of population is so superior to the power of the Earth to produce subsistence .... premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race," Malthus wrote. Thanos couldn't have put it better.

Thanos wanted to kill half the universe bc there's not enough resources to go around but genocide ain't the answer, man. Why not just make it rain potatoes or some shit. All of this could've been prevented if only he'd watched Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs

— Beyonce has an uncle named Larry Beyince. Bruh.... (@DragonflyJonez) April 29, 2018

The passion for such draconian, borderline genocidal solutions faded in the 20th century. But Malthus was just the first of many writers to warn of a "population bomb," to use the title of a similarly pessimistic 1968 book, that was coming any day now. Just you wait! 

As it turned out, though, Malthus and his successors hadn't reckoned with human ingenuity. Every time we think we've hit a wall in terms of food production, we come up with new technology and new efficiencies — just as we did in the so-called Green Revolution of intensive agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s that put paid to the "population bomb" problem.

The fact that there are people going hungry on planet Earth today has nothing to do with whether we can produce enough food to feed all mouths. We can do that many times over. The problem is lack of political will. It's corruption in the famine aid process. It's uncaring market forces. 

Thanos' murderous scheme, which would only wipe out on average half of all politicians, corrupt bureaucrats and corporations, would not somehow automatically feed the world. Not unless we decided to change our entire political and economic system as a response to the emergency. 

Meanwhile, something else has happened to the human world that would shock the pants of Malthus if he were alive to see it — and that makes Thanos' plan somewhat irrelevant. We've blundered across a number of  mystical spells that consistently reduce population growth. One is called "educating women." Another is "access to family planning." A third: "urbanization." As countries get wealthier and better educated, more people move from their farms to cities, where they find they no longer need to have large families. 

Granted, we still face a tight squeeze. The world is projected to hit a population of nine or ten billion later this century before numbers start falling again. With economic migrants and climate refugees on the rise, the developed world is increasingly paranoid about being overwhelmed by the developing world — hence Trump, hence Brexit, and hence Thanos. 

You can see why his dark Malthusian world view makes Thanos a villain for our times. For many a worried environmentalist, the idea of being powerful enough to snap your fingers and reduce the population burden at a stroke is a singularly seductive idea. 

Exactly five decades after his famous book predicted imminent doom, Population Bomb author Paul Erlich is still out there predicting a "near certain collapse of civilization" in the next few years, because we're at 7.4 billion people and Erlich says the planet can only support 2 billion. 

Heck, even Thanos was more forgiving than that. After all, he wanted to let us get away with 3.7 billion people remaining, not counting pets. Sometimes the true galaxy brains of our planet are stranger than fiction. 

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