Reed Richards Psychohistory

My favorite part of Civil War was when we find out why Reed had actually backed Tony. Reed had invented Psychohistory (the stuff from Asimov's Foundation), and for decades had been able to roughly predict the future direction of society. He used it to calculate 31 possible futures for 616, Civil War was the least worst of all those futures, and in fact the only one out of 31 where humanity survives.

This is from Fantastic Four #542 where Reed asks The Mad Thinker to check his equations in case he made a mistake.

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>He used it to calculate 31 possible futures for 616, Civil War was the least worst of all those futures, and in fact the only one out of 31 where humanity survives.
So, if Civil War had not happened, the Marvel Universe would have no future?

Yes, in every other possible future things escalated to the point where humanity was destroyed.

I have the same thing in my head but not numbers but patterns and demographics.

I find big events easy to predict irl.

He had so many other super genius friends and cosmic allies to ask for help but he chose to ask a fucking supervillain who wants to kill him for help.

This room seems fucking pointless when you can invent alternative reality viewers at the drop of a hat.

Always good to see reed getting btfo
just a shame marvel never really follows through, and it's just back to status quo and reed gets away with all kinds of shit.
while tony got trown through the mud

He does just that at the beginning of Dark Reign.

Well Stark wasn't smart enough to check the equations, so that counts out Pym as well. Maybe The Leader could have done it but I think he's depowered by this point and a villain as well.

>So, if Civil War had not happened, the Marvel Universe would have no future?
Not exactly. Basically he was manipulating the future by making sure specific things happen at the right times at the right order. The actual events themselves don't matter. So It's not that he needed the Hero Registration itself, it's just that Hero Registration trigger certain things in time and space.

Now, the Mad Thinker was right that Reed is thinking and acting like a Villain. Reed is thinking about the "Big Picture", but the price is that he literally no longer care about individuals anymore. Because he can't control individuals, he dismiss them as unimportant.

And when you no longer care about individuals, you no longer care about people. Then suddenly you can murder millions "for the sake of Humanity".

Reed, basically, is already a villain.

Gimme an hot take then, chief.

Who? Any villains smarter than thinker are bat fucking crazy or can't be reasoned with.

The cosmic people who are this smart wouldn't give a shit or understand the basic human struggle.

The only other humans that come close at this time is Cho, Pym, and Black Panther. All who Reed would consider too close/emotional for this question.

>ten minutes of uninterrupted thought to connecting you to those crimes

Fuck me, that English. Mind of a genius right here.

and then the forces of evil won.

Civil War is EXACTLY where Marvel lost it's way.

North Korea gets dismantled. 8 years of Trump. Hollywood loses more money. More rightwing gov't over the world eventually.

Earth gets destroyed around 2050.

Stark is an engineer. It is outside his field. This is much closer to Pym's field and he was also an ally. Failing that, he could have shown this to other heroes before the Civil War started. Black Panther, Hank McCoy and Amadeus Cho comes to mind. Hell, Karnak's power is to literally see the flaws in things. Instead he trusted a villain who has tried to kill him and his family several times over. He may as well have asked Mephisto.

Any time you make a decision to force people into doing something, even if it is unequivocally for their own good, they will view you as a villain. Because you have taken agency away from them.

Murdering millions to save billions is the correct choice, it is even the 'good' choice, speaking as a utilitarian. We've trained people through narrative for decades now though that killing millions to save billions is wrong and the 'evil' choice, because "there is always another way" and in the story there usually is, but in the real world there is no narrative that will bend reality that way. In the real world sometimes sacrifices, terrible sacrifices, have to be made for the greater good. Or everyone dies.

With where we are now though, for example if you asked people in Europe if we should still take refugees in even if you could prove to them mathematically that it was absolutely certain that Europe could not support their numbers financially, logistically, or socially (We are no where even close to this point, this is just a future hypothetical) many people in Europe would say still take the refugees in. Because we have trained them to think that any choice other than that is 'evil', even if it dooms their own nations and themselves.

Essentially we have conditioned modern people to be unable to understand Lifeboat Ethics, just like Sue does at the end of these pages "We've beaten the odds before", etc. The problem is, looking at the future we potentialy have some big waves on the way.

>thermostat
>THINK

I love this equation.

I forgot about Cho, maybe Cho could have. I don't think the rest would have.

Cho constantly refers to himself as "The eighth smartest person on the planet" so he probably puts himself below Pym, Stark, McCoy, etc. And I don't think those three could have checked Reed's equations.

That's a lot better than JMS's bullshit explanation: "the law is the law and my uncle was wrong for being a commie"

Wait what?

I agree, this is way better. It actually makes him heroic because he saw it was the only way to save the earth but kept it to himself to bear that weight alone and never used it as justification. He never even told the Illuminati.

>that first panel

I got you.

>Pym, BP, Cho
Isn't Pym a robotcist/biologist? He really doesn't seem much better and may not stay objective. Cho acts pretty fucking irrational at times. BP waivers between giving responses from a king perspective and wise guy.

>Hank, Karnak
I question if Hank could catch on as quickly as the thinker and never read any feats with Karnak actually using his power on non tangible objects or really abstract ways. Otherwise I could buy into both of them.

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>youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

Pym may have taken a week or so since he is also a researcher. Stark probably wouldn't be able to follow it since it is completely outside his comfort zone. McCoy is a jack of all trades and would need a year or so by himself but has access to alien tech and whatever mutie interns he could get his hands on to cut that down to about a month. Cho's power is built to handle these type of equations so all he needs is a backpack full of candy to do what Thinker did.

>earth gets destroyed around 2050

how

I'm not him, but it doesn't get destroyed. Sorry for the spoiler.

It's a common technique, "predict" four things so obvious that a child could guess them, then throw in something startling at the end.

Best equation coming through: loneliness + alienation + fear + despair + self-worth ÷ mockery ÷ condemnation ÷ misunderstanding × guilt × shame × failure × judgment n=y where y=hope and n=folly, love=lies, life=death, self=dark side

>My uncle didn't comply when a literal witchhunt asked him to lie and throw other innocent people under the bus.
>Gee, that sucks for your uncle
>Don't you see Peter? They were right! They were right to destroy him!

What the fuck, Reed?

You make millions of models, choose the ones closest to reality after the event, and then declare yourself a genius

>Reed and Stark both hate Commies
Fucking Based. Unironically fuck Commies. Every single one I've met is nothing more than a self-centered, hypocritical asshole. FUCK COMMIES.

>you have to follow the law no matter what the law tells you to do


this is true though

>gives an example of the law making people act like savages
>"without the law we act like savages!"
You also didn't even really answer his question, Reed.

Pym was a jack of all trades. He's dabbled with physics, biology, AI, robotics, etc. Rational or not, Cho is still better than the Mad Thinker. Meanwhile, BP has access to an entire nation's resources to confirm the info and Reed has enough intellectual clout to convince Panther's stubborn ass to take it seriously.

Hank probably would have needed time but considering the help he has from the rest of the X-Men, his access to alien tech, and neutral position in the conflict, he would have been a decent choice to take a chance on. Karnak is more of a wild card since I am not sure what he was like in old appearances. If his power to see flaws is the same as how current Karnak has described himself then he would just need to take a glance.

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Sue made that hole, she caused $800,000 dollars worth of damage to the Baxter building because she was in a bad mood. Reed didn't even get mad, but that's because he has the patience of a saint.

No. It made him a self-important arrogant prick who would rather trust his enemies because he could threaten them than tell his friends the truth.

They couldn't handle the truth.

I hate her

If this is still legit and they care a shred about continuity at all - that means the Renew Your Vows universe leads to the destruction of humanity.

When is survival worth it though?
Is it not sometimes better to die than to survive?

>Is it not sometimes better to die than to survive?

As an individual? Certainly. There are many possible scenarios.

When you are talking about all of humanity? Almost certainly not, except for very bizarre outlier scenarios.

Yep. And it'll be all Peter's fault. Because he wouldn't allow his friends to imprison his other friends.

Well, the circumstances of the Act not being implemented was something like Xavier mind-melding with Iron Man and a fuck tonne of politicians or something and they came to some other conclusion about it. But yeah, it'll probably end up being Pete's fault.

would think he'd ask doom. he knows victor would love to point out any flaw and that he sees himself as the great saviour of mankind

Reed has humiliated Doom intellectually so many times that I doubt he even takes him seriously anymore.

Yeah it's pretty retarded. I get that we need law and order but the penalty didn't fit the "crime". Although the Uncle should have foreseen that the social stigma attached to being seen as un-american back then and the risk he was taking by insulting people who could easily inflict that stigma.

That's a good one, I didn't think of Victor.

I think he would be able to check the equations, Reed probably didn't call him for two reasons;

- too much water under the bridge
- he could never trust him to answer truthfully

If it's so complicated that Richards needs someone else to check it and it's so complicated that it actually predicts the entire planet's social trends "to an extremely high degree of accuracy," why the fuck would the mad thinker be able to check it for him in after being in the room for (based on the conversation apparently happening with no time gaps in between and him saying "I see no flaws" as a response right after Richards finishes explaining) probably less than a minute? This was after Richards explicitly estimated ten minutes of thought required for him to prove mad thinker was involved in a crime. So it takes well over ten times as much time for Richards to think through one very specific and well defined scenario involving one guy and his role in a crime compared to his being able to figure out an entire novel field of "highly accurate" total planetary socioeconomic prediction after seeing it for the first time less than a minute ago ON TOP OF then applying his understanding to check the whole thing and confidently tell Richards he was right.

Doom was still in hell at the time. He came back after CW.

Wasn’t psychohistory kinda bullshit because it only took one mutant to fuck it all up

So How much smarter is reed compared to tony?

I wouldn’t go that far Renew your vows is a different reality so there probably a lot more variables that would alter the equation reeds predictions were based entirely in the 616 universe

It's easier to double check something that's being laid out for you to see than to find something somebody as smart as the Thinker is trying to hide.

It can take a year to write a book and a day to read it.

The complete lack of surprise in the second panel irks me

HA

You are comparing many different things with completely different factors of difficulty.

For example; Einstein could show his theory of relativity to thousand of physicists for peer review, and most of them could understand and verify it and realize it was an incredible leap forward within less than an hour. It's the same for most revolutionary things like theory of evolution etc, once you explain Darwin's theory to a room full of students for the first time many of them will immediately see how beautiful it is and how much sense it makes and think how "obvious" it is once you think about it. But none of them could have actually thought of it if it didn't exist, just like none of the physicists checking Einsteins work could have come up with it. Verifying it is also always much much faster than actually coming up with it was. It only "seems obvious" afterward because the work has already been done.

Confirming the work of genius is always easy after they have cleared the path for us. Clearing the path, except for a very few humans, is as difficult as to be virtually impossible. All we can do is contribute a slight bit towards it if we are lucky.

It doesn't predict individuals. He was a freak mutation that no one could have predicted, all it does is predict the directions humanity will take as a group.

Different kinds of smart. Tony would solve a problem by making something out of other things or established principles. Reed would just discover a new principle.

It's funny how no one mentions that Reed kept his equations in a room full of crazy instead of a notebook or in his computers.

>double check something
Set the time back to a few hundred years and replace Reed with Isaac Newton.
Do you think anyone would be able to walk into a room, have Newton explain to them how calculus and physics work for the first time, and then on top of all that, they're able to go through everything he's written about it and confirm that it's accurate, within one minute's time?
Now take into account that a method what Richards came up with would be like a million times more convoluted and difficult to think through then what Newton came up with.

Visualisation, user.

>Do you think anyone
No. This is why Reed picked The Thinker. Only a genius likely to employ the Room Full Of Crazy himself is able to understand Reed's Room Full of Crazy.

It doesn't predict society either if one individual can screw the larger scale society prediction up.

It's Reed. It makes sense for him to use something like that given how he stretches

Tony is an engineer. Reed is a scientist, but more than that is kind of an ode to scientists when they could be generalists, before the different fields became so complex that specialization was required. Because of this he is ridiculously OP; better physicist than Pym, better biologist than McCoy, probably better engineer than Tony. Better ____ than ____ ins 616 when if comes to any science really.

He's really so broken that his brain is thousands of time more powerful than his super powers. If he was let loose he would have already solved all the major problems on earth in 616; aging, power, cancer, all disease, intelligence enhancement, even death itself to a limited extent. He would have already created a singularity.

He doesn't do this because the writers can't let him because very quickly the world of 616 becomes so different than ours that it becomes unrelatable to the readers, and many themes don't work anymore. So they just write him away from being able to do it, mainly by having Sue interrupt him to go carry her bags while she's shopping right as he's about to solve the problem of turning all humans into living immortal energy forms.

am I the only one here thinking The Thinker was buttering up Reed for his own reasons here?

It predicts societal behavior as a group, the mutant was an individual freak mutation that distorted that group behavior to the point it left all parameters.

No, he probably genuinely appreciates Reed's genius. And now that he knows his equation, he can use it for himself.

I think he was just literally struck by the achievement.

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holy shit, didn't know Reed ever quoted Tom Lehrer

Damn it reed you can’t just murder the fucking sorcerer supreme and both the mutant/inhuman leaders and the Illuminati didn’t do shit until it fucked up handeling secret wars

At least he killed a skrull, so he's got that going for him.

Nah dude. Optimism is a mental illness.

Oh well he got lucky there can’t imagine how alward it’ll be when he comes back
And confronts reed

>I find big obvious things easy to say

OK faggot, it's 2020:
What significant trend in food marketing emerged?
What will characterize the next big social media platform?
What precious metal that isn't used in jewelry will be an important economic player and why?
What happened with water rights in the southwest?
What shift in the electoral college happened?

Honestly that just sounds like a bullshit justification. "This event may seem retarded and badly written but this smart character says it's exactly what should happen".

> He used it to calculate 31 possible futures for 616, Civil War was the least worst of all those futures, and in fact the only one out of 31 where humanity survives.

This is from Fantastic Four #542 where Reed asks The Mad Thinker to check his equations in case he made a mistake.
The Civil War was ultimately a Skrull job.
Did he calculate human society getting fucked because the Illuminati operated unchecked and provoked a response from extraterrestrial threats?
Because that shit happened twice.
Might want to carry that in his equation.

Sure, yeah. Of course people who predict the world is going to end in "Current Year + About Thirty Years" which, by the way, they have been doing quite commonly throughout human history are also mentally ill. Also, they have universally been verifiably wrong.

What did the Illuminati do pre times runs out that’s the only thinks I really know then for

Which one was the skrull, I don't even remember.

Did Thinker just show himself out after this?
He's not still in there now, is he?

Walked up to Skrull Empire, swung their dicks around, Skrulls took it as a threat/insult/challenge/excuse, tortured the 'lumi for a bit and learned (somehow) to perfectly copy powers and memories from that, then apparently devised the schemes that help fuel CW, the new order after it and lead to the Skrull Invasion itself. Because the heroes always win though, and Fury's paranoia and preparation, they managed to side step all of this with little consequence.

You ever see two spergs try to figure out how to end a meeting/social enounter? It probably took a while.

>Did he calculate human society getting fucked because the Illuminati operated unchecked and provoked a response from extraterrestrial threats?
>Because that shit happened twice.
The claim is that the threats ended up not mattering because humanity survived. That's what happens when one stops looking at the small picture. It is basically early Gwenpool mentality, that humans don't matter and you should do everything possible to keep Humanity alive. No matter how many humans you have to kill to do it. It's not that End justifies the Means, it's that Means is irrelevant and no one cares how many millions had to die.

Cuck Bolt. He got himself kidnapped like a bitch.

Jeus. What an easy infiltration job. He never had to speak!

Thinker has always admired Reed's mind. I think when Reed was supposedly dead, Thinker tried busting in ans stealing all of Reed's notes so it wouldn't be lost.

>No, he probably genuinely appreciates Reed's genius. And now that he knows his equation, he can use it for himself.
It just sounds like something that is deliberately hard to use to benefit anybody. Sure, a villain could use it to cause a lot of harm, but the tools are so general that it is just as likely the villain ended up getting killed by the events he orchestrated. The equations doesn't care about individuals, so those trying to manipulate it is not immune to its effects.

This was JMS's explanation. McDuffie claimed during CW that he wrote it from an outline by JMS and the stuff referencing asimov and psychohistory/foundation is something he tended to do during his b5 days.

for all its worth Secret War: Civil War was a shithole so Reed may have been right.