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.
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.
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 would question the ability to line people up on a railroad track such that they have a 1:1 correspondence with the real numbers.
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.
The real question for me is what unit of distance would be used for the integer representation… It could take 1 meter, 1 Km, 1 Au, or even 1 Infinity to represent the distance between every person and the next. Also, are we using a linear or logarithmic scale?
This is not to mention the lack of info on how fast the train is going, and whether or not it’s accelerating.
Has anyone tried just asking the trolley to stop?
In these scenarios the trolly is too close to stop before running the victums over.
Although in this particular time, having the trolly stop would save an infinite number of lives compared to the casulaites, which would actually help it stop fatser as bodies do not make good railroad tracks [citation needed].
It is my understanding that the trolley just wants to go forward. It doesn’t care whether it kills people or not.
Therefore, make the trolley go in circles.
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 tram travels at light speed and so time no longer flows for you. You exist in a singular moment of splattergore.
All trolleys to date have been finite. A trolley which can kill an infinite number of people would truly be a marvel of engineering.
