Our approach to climate change.
Now that is a new take on it.
Obligatory https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/
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Like a good Boomer pass it down to the next one.
Kill one person and become an hero: If I double it and give it to the next person and this behaviour carries on it would need just a few people until the first guys get the power to kill every human being. In this scenario I kill one person, so no one gets the power to potentially kill 1+n persons which will eventually happen.
How many turns until it’s the entire population of the planet?
Doubling every turn would reach 8,589,934,592 on turn 34
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If the people tied to the previous segments are magically moved forward to the next one, 34 turns. If not, everyone would be tied to one of the tracks at 33 turns.
Edit: forgot to add 1 to include the first lever.
I pass it to the n+1th person. We can do this forever because integers is infinite.
Smart solution. Like this, no one ever gets killed but we need an infinite number of people on the switches.
Until you get to that one person that would like to end mankind way down the line.
It’s curious how they’re selected. During the nuclear age we’ve had nukes in the hands of fanatics who hated the enemy, who were able to comprehend the gravity of their responsibility enough that not once did a nuclear tipped weapon get launched in error or against orders… or at all.
We’re closing on eighty years without an atomic war. Not a small accomplishment. It’s one of the few things that gives me hope for humanity.
It just takes one.
If we can travel faster than the trolley, we could adjust all switches with one person who continues to travel to the next junction before the trolley arrives!
Hell of a job, but yes 😆
While integers are infinite, humans are not. Eventually the entire population of the earth would be on the tracks and nobody to flip the switch.
Do we consider intelligent aliens to be “person”? Because the universe is also infinite AFAIK
Most scientists agree it is finite.
Do they? There’s broad consensus on the size of the observable part, but what’s beyond that is surely more speculation than science.
Based on observations it seems that the universe curves in on itself. And is thus finite.
I’m pretty the curvature of the universe has actually been measured to be very close to 0, within margin of error, which would suggest an infinite universe. (It doesn’t prove it by any means, though. The curvature could just too small to measure.)
However, the observable universe is indeed finite, due to the speed of light being finite.
