16

SPOILERS inbound for Infinity War:

After Wanda destroys the Mind stone of Vision, Thanos confronts her saying:

Today I lost more than you could know, but now is no time to mourn. Now, is no time at all

So did the movie events happen all in one day or is it just a figure of expression? Or is that "today" even in earth time?

Points:

  1. Vision and Scarlet Witch were in Scotland and it was night-time there...
  2. The fight at New York took place in the morning...
  3. The Wakandan fight took place in the morning or we could go for afternoon or evening...
2
  • 1
    If he is talking about Gamora, then New York and Scotland wouldn't necessarily have to be part of "Today".
    – Oliver_C
    Commented May 5, 2018 at 16:25
  • 5
    For what it is worth, a day on Titan is 15 of our days long: en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikijunior:Solar_System/Saturn/Titan. (Assuming that Thanos is from Saturne's Titan).
    – Taladris
    Commented May 6, 2018 at 2:45

2 Answers 2

11

They probably could have occurred within a 24-hour period

New York is five hours behind Scotland. Wakanda is a fictional country, but the map on the MCU Wiki page places it east of Uganda, roughly within the borders of Kenya in our world; that would make Wakanda three hours ahead of Scotland (eight hours ahead of New York).

The attack in New York happened in the morning. If we estimate the time was around 9am - Tony and Pepper are taking a morning run, Peter is on his way to a school field trip - that means it would have been 2pm in Scotland. It's not normally dark in Scotland at 2pm, so the attacks on New York and Scotland don't appear to have occurred simultaneously.

I don't think we can pinpoint an exact time from the news report (24 hour news channels make this difficult), but we can estimate. It was dark outside so it was reasonably late, but not so late that everywhere was closed, so I'd say around 10pm for the attack in Scotland (8 hours after the attack on New York).

The next part gets complicated because it depends on how fast a Quinjet can fly. They travel from Scotland to the Avengers facility (New York state), then from there to Wakanda. The problem is that the Avengers facility and Wakanda are in pretty much opposite directions from Scotland, which drastically increases the distance they have to travel.

If eight hours passed between the attacks in New York and Scotland, then they have less than sixteen hours to do all of that in. Is that possible? Yes, if a Quinjet can fly faster than a commercial airliner. Is a high-tech government jet faster than a commercial airliner? Probably, so let's say yes.

The attack on Wakanda seemed to begin not that long after their arrival, and appeared to roughly coincide with Thanos' arrival on Titan, which would make it all roughly within a 24-hour period (even if the date had changed).

5

What does a 'day' even mean anymore when you frequently teleport to new solar systems?

Why should Thanos care about Earth's day/night cycle? If Thanos had a wristwatch I doubt it would be synced to Earth UTC.

I'm sure Thanos doesn't try to adapt to the local day/night cycle every time he zaps to a new world. There's just no reason for him to bother being jet-lagged. If he sleeps, he probably still does it on the day-night cycle of his home world. The day/night schedule he follows might be longer than Earths, and thus the events of the movie happen within one of his days.

If he doesn't sleep, then the concept of the length of a day goes really out the window for someone who travels in deep space and teleports between planets. He may have just cared more about speaking dramatically than precisely in that moment, and "Today I lost more than you could know" sounds better than "Recently, like within the past couple hours and within the scope of this same calamity that is coming to a conclusion now I lost more than you could know"

0

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .