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How does the Infinity Gauntlet kill you?

Does it simply disintegrate your body? Or does it mess with your soul and/or life-force?

If someone had either reconstitution or a healing factor powerful enough to counter disintegration, would they automatically undo "the snap"? Or did the Gauntlet mess around with the forces of life & death, so having "mere mortal" super-recovery couldn't help you?

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  • Aside from Groot, and the Extremis formula in Iron Man 3 (and anything in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which I haven’t seen), I don’t think we’ve seen healing/regenerative powers in the MCU yet. We’ve definitely only seen the Infinity Gauntlet and its powers once, so it’s difficult to speculate. As fas as souls and/or life-forces go, the metaphysical aspects of the MCU are currently vague too. May 22, 2018 at 9:46
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    @PaulD.Waite AoS has a bunch of healing/regenerative powers BTW.
    – OrangeDog
    May 22, 2018 at 10:31
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    @PaulD.Waite - They're implicit, and extremely common. How does T'Challa get back on his feet within hours after being stabbed and nearly killed? How does Hulk recover so fast from being beaten up by Tony, or by Thanos? Why is Thor combat-fit and unburnt hours after being fried by a star? Or after being pummeled by Hulk?
    – Adamant
    May 23, 2018 at 8:39
  • @Adamant: sure, although maybe those guys just didn’t get damaged that much in the first place — reduced vulnerability, rather than regeneration. May 23, 2018 at 11:10
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    @PaulD.Waite: It is explained in Jessica Jones season 2 that Jessica has healing powers.
    – Taladris
    May 26, 2018 at 10:02

2 Answers 2

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TL; DR: The Infinity Gauntlet has the power to undo creation.

In the movies, the Infinity Stones are explained to have the power of the universe. The power to create, and destroy, at will. It doesn't matter what abilities you have, how strong, or smart you are, if the weilder of such power wants you to stop existing; you stop existing.

The way it does so is it basically un-makes you. Scientifically speaking, it undoes the chemical reactions in your blood that cause clotting open wounds, it undoes the electrical signals in your nerves that fire when you feel pain, it undoes you.

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  • To expand on this, remember that this is the very reason Thanos is trying to get all of the Infinity Stones in the first place. He doesn't necessarily want to kill half of life, he just wants half of life to stop existing so that the remainder can live in prosperity. He sees the infinity stones as a merciful way of achieving his goal. Instead of landing on planets and slaughtering the occupants, which is traumatic and violent, he simply makes them disappear in the 6 fundamental areas of the universe, Time, Soul, Power, Reality, Mind, and Space. May 24, 2018 at 14:36
  • And where exactly this is explained in the movies?
    – motoDrizzt
    May 27, 2018 at 7:42
  • @motoDrizzt added a link to the reference in Guardians of the Galaxy
    – Ben
    May 28, 2018 at 1:53
  • It also undoes Bucky’s vibranium arm and T’Challa’s vibranium suit. Aug 21, 2018 at 23:12
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The Infinity Gauntlet is unable to kill anything, being just a piece of metal. Maybe if you hit someone on the head with it, ok, but it's not an efficient way to do it.

The six Infinity Gems instead, as explained in many occasions, give their owner control over fundamental aspects of the universe making him the equivalent of a god. And it's nowhere implied that the Gems themselves are some kind of AIs or grant wishing magic, so there is no

How do the Infinity Gems kill you?

The gems do nothing. Its owner uses its new powers of control over every aspect of the universe to do whatever he pleases, however he pleases. Thanos may have decided

  • that all those peoples will never exist anymore
  • to physically disintegrate them
  • that they never existed at all and then rewrite all the universe memories so that we all remember they existed, just for fun
  • he may have killed all the people he intended to save, created a brand new reality and moved their consciousness there, leaving the other ones in a doomed universe lacking resources.
  • he could have taken a different decision for each and every one of them, "killing" each one with a different method.
  • he may have started snapping his fingers, then go to a dancing course, teleport to every restaurant in the universe, tried every possible food ever cooked, then he may have spent billions of years travelling across time and space to solve every unsolved mystery, then decided it was useless because being a god he already knows everything, so he undo everything, than he teleported near every person he decided to kill, punched them in the face instakilling them, and finally finished snapping his fingers.

He is god, he could do everything and then undo it and redo it over and over again, and we still wouldn't know anything about it.

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  • It is stated in Age of Ultron that the mind gem is an AI
    – Gaius
    May 26, 2018 at 10:00

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