Avengers Endgame: 10 Unexpected Consequences To Reversing The Snap

10. The Immediate Collateral Damage

It’s important to realise the scale of the atrocity inflicted by Thanos’ snap. At the end of Avengers: Infinity War, we had a taste of the collateral damage - a helicopter, presumably having lost its pilot, careens into the side of a New York skyscraper.

Plenty of people have already extrapolated that tragedy outward, proving that far more people actually died as a consequence of the snap than the immediate 50% of the population. Imagine how many airliners were in mid-flight at the time? What about vital crew onboard ships and submarines, or engaged in air traffic control?

What about the hospitals suddenly on a skeleton staff in the middle of an incalculable emergency; or power station, treatment plant and dam employees responsible for maintaining safety measures? The humanitarian cost would spiral into the hundreds of billions.

But that’s just the big, dramatic disaster movie stuff. What about the governments that lost vast numbers of civil servants and politicians? Thanos’ snap radically damaged the decision-making apparatus of whole nations.

New elections would need to be held for the vastly smaller electorate. Wakanda certainly wouldn’t be the only royal family to lose a monarch. Drastic emergency powers would need to be enacted: some regimes would use it as an excuse to mount a coup, destabilising whole regions.

The infrastructure of the entire world took a massive hit, and those ramifications would be felt for decades. Worldwide genocide on this scale would have profound knock-on effects… as would the delayed reversal of that genocide.