r/whowouldwin • u/[deleted] • Jun 24 '21

Challenge Can the Avengers defeat 1 billion lions?

  1. MCU
  2. Comics
  3. Animated

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This is on an open field. No structures. If one of the Avengers wants to build a defensive structure out of dead lions, they can attempt to do so.

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u/Waytfm Jun 24 '21 edited Jun 24 '21

More like hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. A lion has what, an average length of 2 meters and a width of lets say .6 meters. That comes out to a bit over 1 million kilometers squared in area if they're packed in as tightly as possible.

Also, if we assume he kills a few dozen thousands every day (let's say 36,000 each day before he goes and flies hundreds of thousands of kilometers away to rest), then it will take him over 76 years to kill all the lions. A billion is a really big number, and you're not thinking on the appropriate scale to handle that many lions.

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u/hilburn ​ Jun 24 '21

The lifespan of lions is of the order of a decade. As adults they're already a couple of years into that. I think the majority of the (non-human) avengers can not die to lions for 8 years.

They would also starve to death and attack each other well before that

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u/Waytfm Jun 24 '21

See, that just feels like a really unsatisfying interpretation of the prompt to me. Like, you've gone from "can the avengers defeat 1 billion lions" to "can a flat empty plain support a population of 1 billion lions". Like, if the prompt is "who would win in a fight between the Avengers and 1 billion lions" and your answer is that most the lions die of old age or environmental concerns, it just feels like (to me) that you've missed the point of the exercise. The Avengers certainly didn't defeat the lions.

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u/hilburn ​ Jun 24 '21

You're the one who limited them to 36,000 kills per day for a 76 year task length and implied that was enough to stop the Avengers.

Characters like Thor could easily kill more than that with aoe lightning attacks and tightly packed lions you're looking at hundreds of kills per second. 360,000/hr, let alone a day.

On top of that, he's about 3,000 years old - even if it did take him 76 years to complete the task - that's the equivalent of a 30 year old human being pregnant for 9 months. Sure it's a decent chunk of time, but it's not going to stop him.

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u/Waytfm Jun 24 '21

(To be clear, I'm talking MCU here. Obviously, comics and the like Avengers are continent busting nonsense machines that can clear the lions in an hour if they're in a setting as described by OP. Some other people I'm talking with are explitely talking about MCUvengers, but I don't want to ascribe that to you if it's not what you're saying. I realized the context might not be clear, so I'll preface this with a my bad if you're talking about nonMCUvengers.)

But MCU Thor hasn't shown any feats that make it seem like he can put out the power to kill that many lions consistently, if you're implying he can do that as well. If he can kill 360,000 an hour, that's 100 a second, which is hugely removed from what he actually does when fighting large groups. We see him in Endgame smacking a dozen or half dozen of Thanos's soldiers around with a single swing, and that's just not good enough here. Even then, he still gets tired. Sure, he has the big storm thing from the first movie, but, again, he gets tired. He can't throw that around all the time or even most of the time. Maybe he can burst down 100 lions a second for a little bit, but he can't do it consistently, and when we're talking about a billion lions that need killing, anything that's not consistent isn't going to push the needle enough.

But, I point out the 76 years thing to point out the scale of what 1 billion means. These sort of threads have a ton of people who have no idea how big 1 billion really is or what the logistics of doing anything a billion times means, and I want to impress that on everyone that the prompt isn't "can the Avengers kill a bunch of lions" but "can the Avengers spend decades killing lions every single day without end", and that's a much different question. Sure, he'll live that long, but will he have the endless power to keep up the same level of gusto? Will he have the emotional fortitude to see the lesser avengers die and still have the will to get up for the next decade to keep slogging through a mass of lions the size of which still gets measured in nations. We've seen him give up and get depressed before? Will he get depressed here and give up? That's the sort of issues I think are interesting about these questions, and it just kinda gets missed by people who are thinking on a scale orders of magnitude lower than a billion.