I take the square root of the negative trolley, then use my imaginary streetcar to establish a complex track so I can start killing in an additional dimension.
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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).
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
I'm no expert, but I'd expect such a slow moving trolley to eventually derail itself anyway on account of all the corpses
I think you just passed the Trolley version of the Kobayashi Maru. Well done.
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 would question the ability to line people up on a railroad track such that they have a 1:1 correspondence with the real numbers.
It's totally doable because they are real people.
Yeah, for any length of track, you would need to stack infinite people...
If we are already dealing with infinities of peoples then we can deal just as easily with infinities of tracks. I just struggle to see what kind of power source the trolly uses to plow through that many people.
Has anyone tried just asking the trolley to stop?
Or stopped the person who keeps tying all these people to the trolley tracks?
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 straight ahead track actually kills an infinite number of people every interval of time.
The tram travels at light speed and so time no longer flows for you. You exist in a singular moment of splattergore.
Assuming that it takes some amount of energy to kill one person, and that the trolley doesn't have an engine with infinite power, choosing the bottom track would save lives. The trolley would have to expend an infinite amount of energy to move any distance from the starting point, so it would just get stuck there while trying to crush the unimaginable amount of people bunched up in front of it.
Pulling the lever will kill people slower, therefore less deaths in the lifetime of the universe.
Move to the end of the track and undo the constraints of people on the track. You will have infinite time until the trolly reaches the end, and can thusly save infinite lives by doing so.
Sadly, it takes an infinite amount of time to reach the end of the track. Thankfully, you have infinity time, though it's still inconvenient. An infinite number of people people will die (instead of an infinite number of people), but you'll save an infinite number of people in the end. After an infinite amount of time that will be infinitely better!
That trolleys going to derail eventually. So the one with more people since they are tightly packed and it can't build momentum.
Shit man if there's an infinite amount of people there must also be an infinite amount of track. So forget philosophy, I'm getting rich!
I come to an agreement with the person who has tied these people to the tracks to untie every 2nd person. I save an infinite number of people!
I tried to do a similar deal and ended up with negative one twelfth of a person dead.
Do nothing, since an infinite number of people implies an inconceivable population overgrowth, so the best possible good for humanity is to cull the population.
Heck, you could probably go out and genocide the rest of the population that isn't tied to the track and still not suffer any real loss. Then, you face the last true enemy: the bloodsoaked beast responsible for the deaths of untold billions- yourself.
Once you've slain that last creature, all of humanity that still remains will be those tied to the railroad track. The only living people will spend their entire lives knowing nothing but the track and the trolley, and the imposing fear that one day, they, too, shall be crushed under its wheels like those before them.
The only life remaining for the human race is now one of terror and eventual slaughter. There are no good outcomes to this conundrum. There are only the uncaring wheels of the trolley.
I kill the trolley driver. The Dead Man button makes that the trolley stops.
The top track can be assumed to be of infinite length, but for the bottom track this is not enough - to fit ℵ people on it, they'll have to be infinitely compressed. And since they are compressed - they are already dead. I'm not pulling the lever - preventing the (farther) desecration of corpses does not merit killing people who are still alive.
As a mathematician, this strikes me as an entirely reasonable interpretation, except for the fact that the compressed bodies would form a black hole, killing everyone regardless.
So you're correct to say that you wouldn't pull the lever, but your reasoning still missed an important detail.
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.
Everybody dies, no matter what choice you make. It's just a matter of time.
As an Engineer with a Physics background I say the most ethical choice is the real numbers side as the tram, having no room to accelerate between victims, will quickly stop, whilst it's more likely it can keep going for ever on the integer branch of the line.
A more effective vehicle for this would be a tank or maybe a steamroller.
(Note to self: keep this in mind if I ever become an Evil Overlord and need to execute large numbers of people in a gruesome manner)
People die faster if you do nothing, so doing nothing seems like the obvious choice
The trolley goes at infinite speed after the branch point. What's your outside the box answer now?
what do you do?
I replace the lever with a quantum switch so it can be a superppsition and kill everyone twice be ause they deserve it I mean look at that massive line of people there is no way they didn't know what was going on before egtting added to the tracks no species thos dumb deserves to escape the trolly my god how did they all get there -continues ranting as trolly aproaches-
PAUSE
And this makes about as much sense as the original question so no educating me!
resumes ranting
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.
This is a complex problem, hence I pull an imaginary lever and divert the trolley onto the imaginary number line to kill infinite imaginary people. No one cares because they're imaginary
We need to shut down these trolley experiments until we figure out what the hell is going on
That trolley is definitely stopping before it makes it through all those people on the bottom track.
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.
Multi-track drifting, baby. Double infinite.
Unless the trolley is traveling with infinite velocity or the people have infinitely small mass, it would never make it past its first countable infinity of people. Therefore there is no difference.