Why Everyone’s Favorite ‘Avengers’ Fix Is Even Worse Than What the Movies Did

5 What Happens When We Double All the Food?

What happens is your fridge pops open because it’s now too overstuffed to stay closed. So, that ruins your whole day.

That sounds like a joke, but it speaks to a real issue. Our world isn’t designed around storing infinite quantities of food, or even around storing any more food than we store currently. We store a little food, then we eat that food and get some more. With perishable food, if the amount of food doubles, it will go bad long before it prevents long-term starvation. 

Non-perishable food lasts longer, but the stuff will still soon be gone as well, not so much because it gets smelly but because it gets eaten. Outside of the occasional Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, we don’t stockpile that much food, not compared to how much food we produce and consume. The international agencies in charge of plotting our battle against hunger don’t even track how much food exists in the world, which shows how little that stat matters. They track the amount of food that’s produced each day and the amount each day that people need. 

Doubling the amount of stored food on Earth would be a bit like doubling the amount of stored electricity. Storage matters, but the amount we store already is so small compared to the amount we go through that doubling it isn’t going to be solving any crisis. 

4 Okay, Let’s Double the Farms Then

Let’s not be so quick to dismiss the idea of doubling food resources. No one ever specified that Thanos doubles the shekels of stored grain. Maybe when he says, “Double the food,” and snaps his finger, he doubles all food production facilities. Meaning, he doubles the world’s farms.

It’s debatable whether people would actually want that. Right now, when farmers tear down tens of thousands of acres of rain forest every day to expand their cattle ranches, this attracts objections, rather than people saying, “If only you had magic stones and could accomplish this much faster.” In fact, agriculture already takes up about half of all habitable land. If they double in size, that’s going to be a bit complicated for everyone, especially in countries like Hungary or Mongolia, where agriculture currently already takes up more than half of land. 

And if we want these farms to really produce food, we better hope Thanos also snapped a few more people into existence to work those fields. One of the most basic resources in industry is labor, so doubling the resources should mean increasing the human population. At that point, this glorious plan of doubling the resources-to-organisms ratio has hit a snag. 

Whether or not his resource doubling does raise the human population, we know it does double the number of livestock and crops. But those are living organisms, too. That was one reason that the original version of the plan made no sense, by the way. When Thanos snapped away half of all life, he snapped away half of all food. And by that same token, increasing the amount of living food also means increasing the amount of living creatures. 

And we’re not just talking about a tiny handful of the things. Livestock outweigh humans, by mass, and they have to eat as well, if you plan on maintaining this double-food-production that you started. Total domesticated cattle alone outweigh all humans combined, by mass. 

Clearly, doubling food production is more complicated than doubling our stockpiles of ramen and then reaping the benefits forevermore. But here’s the real complication…

3 We Don’t Even Need to Double Food

Alongside all of this strange speculation about an impossible situation is a fact about the real world that many of you already know. We already collectively produce more food than everyone collectively needs. However, that doesn’t result in full bellies for everyone because the food doesn’t go to all the hungry people, and doubling food production doesn’t change that. 

If Walmart’s warehouses instantly become twice as full, that does nothing to feed the starving people of Sokovia, not unless someone moves the food over there. And if Idaho’s farms instantly bear twice as many potatoes, that might do nothing to fill Walmart’s warehouses, not unless someone moves the food over there.

Maybe, when the farms suddenly have way more crops than they’re used to selling, it’ll cost them more to ship the stuff than they can sell them for, resulting in situations like the one below, where farmers have no choice but to bury millions of potatoes and let them rot. Or maybe the government will instruct them to do this, because with many crops, regulations put a ceiling on how much enters the market, for the sake of maintaining prices.

No, to feed everyone, we need to plan out routes to transport food to every corner of the world, and we need to pay people to bring food along these routes. Maybe transport would become a bit cheaper if doubling resources means doubling the world’s fuel reserves. Or, maybe it wouldn’t. Petroleum is yet another substance whose cost is determined by cartels deciding how much to release rather than by how much exists on Earth. 

And doubling petroleum brings up another issue...

2 What About Those Clear Skies?

Having spent more time talking about food than perhaps any of you wanted, let’s try and cover that second wish of Thanos’ more quickly. Along with full bellies, he said killing half the population would create clear skies. Well, do you think doubling everyone’s “resources” would accomplish this?

There is one point on the tech timeline where it might. If we’re been stinking up the skies with pollution, and we’ve recently discovered a cleaner technology, but we lack the resources to switch over, doubling our resources might help us do that. We might be at that point right now. But if you’re applying this solution across all the planets in the universe, you can be sure that most societies are somewhere else.  

If we double the petroleum in 1973 (and we assume this oil can get to the people who want it), that wouldn’t result in clear skies. If we double the number of whales in 1863, that wouldn’t result in clear skies either in the places that burn whale oil. Today, if we go to the Indian farmers who torch their crops once a year and cover their country with smog, giving them twice as many crops isn’t going to clear the skies. 

Now, you might notice that in each of those situations, doubling the stuff people like to burn would improve many people’s lives, even if it doesn’t reduce pollution. This is when, if you didn’t know it already, you realize Thanos didn’t really want to improve many people’s lives. He wanted to wipe out half of all life. Because...

1 Destruction Feels Cleaner

We didn’t write all this out to convince you it’s impossible to solve the world’s problems. Many problems are solvable, particularly if you have the power of omnipotence. But the solutions to most problems add up to more than snapping your fingers once and being done with it. 

Often, people call on some billionaire to write one check and end world hunger. These people are crestfallen to learn that one check won’t end the job, no matter how big the check is. Instead, we need to set up systems and then run them forever. People can take pride in each individual lengthened life, but at no point do you get to sit back and say, “I did it. The job is done.”

But you know what does let you say that and revel in that feeling? Cutting aid to the hungry, just slashing it all away. Granted, this doesn’t solve hunger, but it’s wonderfully cathartic. And if you can convince yourself that you’re doing good (you just saved the government a bunch of money!), then you get to feel good about having done good, and that feels great. 

Despite never explaining to us why Thanos’ plan is bad, Infinity War never needed us to think that it’s good. All it needed was for us to think the plan appeals to Thanos, and it does. Thanos liked the idea of solving the universe, but rather than starting with how best to help everyone using infinite power, he started with the idea of how clean it was to kill half the population, based on his many years of traveling from planet-to-planet doing just that.

A similar philosophy exists in the real world. It’s called degrowth, and much like Thanos, its proponents imagine themselves as saving humanity but hate all that humanity does. When Thanos completed his work, he didn’t teleport to some place where people lived happily as a result, as no such place existed. He teleported himself to some place where no one lived at all, and he looked out at how beautiful the world can be without so many intelligent beings running around and taking up space. 

Let’s not act confused at why Thanos never used the stones more constructively. If anything, we should ask why no one else did. 

At the end of Endgame, the heroes have all the Infinity Stones collected. They must return these to their own timelines, but we see this isn’t urgent, as they wait a few days before doing so. So, they don’t try using these stones for fixing any of the world’s problems? Note that these aren’t evil artifacts. A couple of the Avengers used to use these gems routinely. 

Doubling the universe’s resources wouldn’t solve everything, and it might kill whoever tried wielding that level of power. But how about using the stones to do something a few quadrillion times smaller than that? Why not use the stones to cater one single awesome party? Real missed opportunity, skipping out on that. 

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