Seeing an infinite number of people lying there I deduce that I must be in some kind of thought experiment and let the trolley roll on while I look for a way to escape back to reality.
build new tracks to make the trolley run on (possibly in circles).
If you let the train go, it would appear to stop immediately at the first person (assuming it has any reaction whatsoever to hitting a person) as there are infinitely real numbers between any two real numbers you could come up with.
If we have infinite people, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to lose a couple.
Since there’s an infinite number of people to kill in either case I can just do nothing, and thus by inaction most of those infinite people will have more than enough time for someone else to rescue them. Maybe the State, that’s what they’re there for.
I actually would like to choose the track where the number of people increases by one (so 1, 2, 3, 4…) and then the train will kill -1/12 people
PS Yes, I know this sum result is problematic, it’s only a joke
Invent a new number system that provides aneven smaller infinity
The set of all even integers is a smaller infinity
Reminds me of this: https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/
This is f’ing hilarious 🤣
This is awesome
I just tried to kill the most people every time and apparently a lot of people agree with me
Is it possible to get this thing to skid on both rails? You’ll only be killing an infinite number of people anyway.
That doesn’t kill any more people than if you just stay on the real number track.
Would suck being the last person on either track. It’d be a long and boring wait while tied up
I’m just waiting for the black hole to form just from the mass of the infinite people between 0-1 on the Reals track.
At any point in time, a finite amount of time has passed, and the trolley has killed a finite amount of people. The correct track is the one that, at any given time, will have killed fewer people. Unless the trolley speeds up to account for that and always kills n people per second, the top track will result in less deaths over any period of time.
The train tracks are linear time on Earth. It’s basically the choice between letting people be killed or dying of old age.
The tram travels at light speed and so time no longer flows for you. You exist in a singular moment of splattergore.
The straight ahead track actually kills an infinite number of people every interval of time.
All trolleys to date have been finite. A trolley which can kill an infinite number of people would truly be a marvel of engineering.
EDIT: I rolled a critical fail in reading comprehension and I thought the other track was N per integer instead of 1 per real number in the previous version of this comment.
The people in the real number track are already dead by the time the trolley arrives due to the forces involved in cramming them so tightly together. I.e. they are basically just a gore pile the moment after the people are somehow arranged like that.
I pick the real number track so that no one new has to die.
The same thing most people would do when presented with a Trolly Problem for real. Analysis paralysis, choose to do nothing, then cry softly every night for the rest of my life.
It’s always better to gain a full understanding of the system when trying to make important decisions.
The trolley has two sets of wheels, leading and trailing, both of which must remain on the same set of tracks.
The switch is designed to enable the trolley to change course, moving from one set of tracks to the other.
Throwing the switch after the leading set has passed, but before the trailing set has reached the switch points will cause the two sets to attempt travel on separate tracks. The trolley will derail, rapidly coming to a halt. If the trolley is moving slowly enough to permit this action, nobody dies.
Source: former brakeman (one of the people responsible for throwing switches), section hand (one of the people responsible for installing switches), and railroad welder (one of the people responsible for field repairs of switches).
Way to stop the trolly problem dead in its tracks.
dead
ha
I’m no expert, but I’d expect such a slow moving trolley to eventually derail itself anyway on account of all the corpses
Yes, or come to a halt. You’d be surprised at how little it takes to reduce the already low friction to nothing. A bit of blood and a bit of resistance will bring it to a halt pretty quickly.
I think you just passed the Trolley version of the Kobayashi Maru. Well done.
Thanks. This is the first time I’ve seen a jokey enough presentation to feel comfortable in treating it as a hypothetical reality rather than a moral/ethical exercise.
If the leading wheels are allowed to continue any interval down the original track, uncountably infinitely many people die.
Only if those people can also be infinitely packed into the distance the leading truck (the set of wheels) manages to travel.
Which, I guess is fair play in a thought experiment involving different sizes of infinities. :)
I think that wad the premise, yeah.
OR… if you can keep the wheels spinning really fast, you could “drift” the trolly, keeping a set of wheels on each track and kill everyone on both tracks into infinity.
I’m pretty sure that leads to multi-track drifting, and so all the people die.
Source: https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/000/727/DenshaDeD_ch01p16-17.jpg
🤣
Don’t worry, the first body or two will take care of it!
This is quintessential anime action. So ridiculous, yet so awesome.
