• Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    2 months ago

    For any randomly chosen person on an infinitely long track, the trolley will take an infinite amount of time to reach them. 0% of the people on the track are harmed at all.

  • elrik@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    2 months ago

    It really depends on the specifics of the top track. Are people added to the top track just in time to be run over by the trolley, or is the track pre-populated with an endless arrangement of people waiting to be run over.

    If it’s the later case, how do people further down the track survive for an unbounded amount of time while waiting to be run over? Do they wait, bound and screaming for an eternity? How do they survive long enough to be alive before being run over?

    I need to know if the top track reduces to running over an infinite arrangement of corpses. Or, if trolley time for the top track has some different meaning, such that the trolley brings an end to the finite life lived by each next person on the track.

  • Maalus@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    2 months ago

    100 people hands down. Infinite people means infinite lives removed, infinite experiences etc. The 100 people will never truly die either, so if minimizing death is the goal, that’s best. It also is the choice that will happen without your input and those are usually better morally than actively changing and sentencing other people to death by yourself.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      And also, why are so many people traumatized by calc 2 and not by ordinary differential equations and complex analysis?

  • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    See, the thing about the 1+1+1 is that they can’t all die at ONCE. Even moving at a reasonable clip, let’s say that trolley kills say, one person a second. Two people per second already die anyway, so yes, we’re increasing the mortality rate, but humanity can survive that, and statistically a lot of people wouldn’t end up dying by trolley. It would SUCK that there’s a chance you might wind up on the trolley and dead at any time, but dying is already a natural part of life and it happens to everyone at some point anyway, so there’s nothing inherently STRANGE about adding a trolley death every second.

    The 100 reincarnating people will be suffering FOREVER, repeatedly, with no reprieve or redemption, and the real kicker is all the other people in the other lane are dying ANYWAY, just as people always have, so it’s not like you’ve really SAVED them - you’ve just not allowed the mortality rate to increase at the cost of eternal suffering for a few people. Doesn’t seem like a good trade.

    It’s a more interesting question if we change it slightly and all of the infinite people are Wolverine, bub.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      Spoilers for Deadpool and Wolverine.

      !Just throw down an infinite number of Deadpools, one between each Wolverine, have them all join hands and blast Madonna. Trolley is defeated.!<

  • saltesc@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    2 months ago

    Everyone overlooking the rigorous maintenance required on the trolley. There will need to be several seamless swap outs each day with cleaning and engineering crews to keep the trolley, tracks, and grounds around running in a fulfilling order. And probably some ovens.

  • Mango@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    Killing everyone once ends all suffering. It’s only the reanimation that’s evil.

  • 10_0@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    The illusion of choice, either way there will be infinite suffering