Thanos' plan was so fucking stupid. He wanted to eliminate half of the population to reduce the lack of resources. This completely ignores how populations grow exponentially and will be back to the original quantity in a generation or two... His plan kills half the population while not actually fixing the resource problem.
Should have just snapped his fingers for unlimited resources. What a dum dum.
i guess that explains how T'Challa was just straight up able to talk him out of it in What If. Thanos legitimately just needed someone to explain to him everything wrong with his plan.
The original idea was that the humans were used as a kind of biological processors. Like a botnet but with humans. That idea is so much better, but studio execs shot it down because "people wouldn't understand".
The original script of The Matrix didn't day that. The original purpose was to use human minds as computers to fight other humans.
Butt if you think about it, Morpheus though he was living in the real world.
I don't know why but for some reason the Thanos one bugs me more, it feels more fundamentally wrong. Like I understand the flaws with the matrix, I went electrical engineering to software development, but to me I'm still willing to accept some wand wavy bullshit about how they need to harvest humans for power, more than I am that a population won't double immediately. Like the biology of consciousness and brains and electricity have a lot more room for complex weirdness than the weeds in my walkway always immediately regrowing.
Even just halving a population of a speices isn't actually all that much in cases where they aren't already threatened. In humanity's case it would drive set our population levels all the way back to the distant and barbaric times of the 1970s.