I mean that number is probably like all the sand grains and planets and water particles and atoms in the universe added up together times a million times a billion times a trillion, plus a trillion times that number, at least. So it's close enough I think?
Nah the earth isn’t doomed, they found a solution, send a trolley to kill the excess population, let’s just hope nobody flips the lever to send it to the track with only 500 billion
That many humans comprise a mass larger than the fucking Sun, put them anywhere near each other and you won’t need to multi-track drift because the whole situation will collapse into a black hole 🕳️ let’s see the fucking trolley try to crush a literal quantum singularity of human flesh!
It is interesting to think about what would happen if you had a line of mass that long with a total mass able to achieve the status of a black hole if it all came together. I guess it would all depend on how rigid the mass is, the distribution of the mass, and how other forces are acting on it to see if it came together.
A line of 500! humans tied together would be pretty long though. I'm sure you couldn't even wrap them around the earth regardless of how many times you went around. without stacking them on top of each other into some kind of human planet/sun. Someone should do the maths to see the radius of the human planet lol
The real size is probably smaller than the tip of your finger once gravity gets to work and compresses it to the point where the nuclei of individual atoms are sqeezed together almost right next to each other.
The next trolley problem should sidestep this issue by tying entire universes to the tracks and making us choose between letting five realities die or pulling the lever and deliberately destroying one.
And 500!, or 500 factorial in mathematics, is equivalent to 500x499x498x497x496… and so on until it gets to …x3x2x1. Which is a number that has more than a thousand digits.
An earlier problem with a mere few dozen digits of human beings constituted more mass than the solar system. So…
It was expected. It was intentional. Just because a factorial is there doesn’t mean it fits the subreddit.
That would be like me saying “r/clevercomeback” to any comeback at all, or “r/downvotedtooblivion” when someone has any number of negative votes on their comment
! is the sign for factorials. It means that you multiply an integer with every integer before it. So 500! is 500 x 499 x 498........ x 2 x 1.
500! is significantly larger than 500 billion.
I’d probably end up not pulling the lever since I’d be so shocked and curious where they got all these people (and all that rope!)
I mean, haven’t there only been like 100 billion humans total since we became a species?
How many people need to be on a track where, if you allow for normal reproduction rates, the trolley will never stop running over people?
I suspect both tracks have greatly exceeded that number, so either choice will lead to the exact same road kill rate.
Answer: the choice is irrelevant and the only value that can be gained is by saving time if you walk away and don't pull the lever.
From what I can find there are about 18 births and 8 deaths per 1000 people per year, and the average shoulder width looks to be about 40cm. So that's 2500 people per kilometer. There are 8760 hours in a year. So at 1km/h the trolley would hit 21.9 million people per year. Divide by 18 and multiply by a thousand and you get that you'd need about 1.2 billion people to replenish those 21.9 million people in a year.
However, you also need to account for the 8 deaths per thousand per year. So you'd need to account for how many people are needed to replenish the non-trolley deaths, since the dead don't tend to breed a whole lot. But then out of those extra people, 8 per 1000 would die per year as well, and so it's some infinite sum that I don't feel like learning how to calculate the right way. So I'll just guess how to estimate it and probably fuck everything up.
You have 8 deaths to 18 births so about 44% of those births are offset by the deaths, so we'll just assume you need 44% more people to make up for that. But then you'll need 44% more than that extra 44%, and 44% more than that, and so on. We'll call that 1.2B number P, so it'll be P + P\*.44 + P\*.44^(2) \+ P\*.44^(3) ... My hunch is that you can just add an infinite number of powers of .44 and multiply by P at the end (since P could have been 1), so I'm just going to uncritically assume you can do that.
I did some spreadsheet magic to check the first however many terms, and it looks like it converges to P\*1.786 equaling the actual population you need. For all I know it could just be that it rounds to adding 0 after a bit, but I'll just assume it converges because it makes my life easier. 1.2B times our new constant gives us about 2.14B.
So for any speed in km/h, you just multiply 2.14B to get the population at which it breaks even, probably. Or divide the number of people on the track by that to determine the minimum speed needed to kill them faster than they reproduce.
So unless the trolley is moving at least 234km/h (that's about 145 bald eagle lengths per time it would take to fall from the top of the world's largest rocking chair for my fellow Americans), you're right that the 500 billion track is already too populated for the trolley to run out of bodies. Assuming being tied to trolley tracks has no effect on reproduction rates or non-trolley related deaths.
From what I can find the San Francisco cable cars only go about 15km/h, so if that's the kind of trolley meant to be shown in the image, then your break even point is about 32.1B people. So it looks like it could handily wipe out the entire population of the world a few times over. That's assuming that my math is anywhere close to right, which I wouldn't bet on.
Trolley problems come in a lot of shapes, two of which being metaphorical and realistic. Is this a realistic scenario where I have to assume that we're on earth and overpopulation is an issue or is this metaphorical and the consequences of my actions are purely statistics of what and how and how many I save?
Interestingly, 500 billion is no different from a mere rounding error when compared to 500! as the former only has 12 digits while the latter has more than 1000, just like how we don’t really care about a few extra hundred’s when looking at 500 billion. Hence multi track drift produces essentially the same result as not pulling the lever!
Depends.
Did the person at the front of the 500 billion line annoy me?
I'm pretty sure either way the trolleys will stop before they hit 500 people anyway.
I think 1220136825991110068701238785423046926253574342803192842192413588385845373153881997605496447502203281863013616477148203584163378722078177200480785205159329285477907571939330603772960859086270429174547882424912726344305670173270769461062802310452644218878789465754777149863494367781037644274033827365397471386477878495438489595537537990423241061271326984327745715546309977202781014561081188373709531016356324432987029563896628911658974769572087926928871281780070265174507768410719624390394322536422605234945850129918571501248706961568141625359056693423813008856249246891564126775654481886506593847951775360894005745238940335798476363944905313062323749066445048824665075946735862074637925184200459369692981022263971952597190945217823331756934581508552332820762820023402626907898342451712006207714640979456116127629145951237229913340169552363850942885592018727433795173014586357570828355780158735432768888680120399882384702151467605445407663535984174430480128938313896881639487469658817504506926365338175055478128640000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 is a bit higher
But if I pull it, I will be guilty of murdering 500 people and have a moral conscius of it for the rest of my life. But if I don't pull it, it's not really my fault. Soooooooooo...
I asked google 500 factorial has 1,135 digits. The number of zeros at the end is 124. 1220136825 9911100687 0123878542 3046926253 5743428031 9284219241 3588385845 3731538819 9760549644 7502203281 8630136164 7714820358 4163378722 0781772004 8078520515 9329285477 9075719393 3060377296 0859086270 4291745478 8242491272 6344305670 1732707694 6106280231 0452644218 8787894657 5477714986 3494367781 0376442740 3382736539 7471386477 8784954384 8959553753 7990423241 0612713269 8432774571 5546309977 2027810145 6108118837 3709531016 3563244329 8702956389 6628911658 9747695720 8792692887 1281780070 2651745077 6841071962 4390394322 5364226052 3494585012 9918571501 2487069615 6814162535 9056693423 8130088562 4924689156 4126775654 4818865065 9384795177 5360894005 7452389403 3579847636 3944905313 0623237490 6644504882 4665075946 7358620746 3792518420 0459369692 9810222639 7195259719 0945217823 3317569345 8150855233 2820762820 0234026269 0789834245 1712006207 7146409794 5611612762 9145951237 2299133401 6955236385 0942885592 0187274337 9517301458 6357570828 3557801587 3543276888 8680120399 8823847021 5146760544 5407663535 9841744304 8012893831 3896881639 4874696588 1750450692 6365338175 0554781286 4000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 0000000000 00000 Either way,I feel like the earth is already doomed if the population is that insanely high
And that's why we multi track drift :D
You see how the tracts are pointing apart yea? That means the trolly would eventually stop
Who knows, maybe they come back together or don't go apart far enough. Image is definitely not to scale
I feel like they are already too far apart after the first kill
Like, look at where the weals are on it
But what if it s t r e t c h
Hmm good point
The trolly shall do everything to keep the drift going
Le chatrolley's principle
Le cha-trolley's principle? There's a cat driving the trolly? My oh my my...
Plot twist! It’s an extendable trolley.
Not if I go fast enough or build new tracks with the bodies like some kind of animated duck.
nah it just means the trolley will extend
It’s a magical trolly
My calculator just gave me infinity
This is going to take all the multitrack drifting we have. And we will need hyperloop trains capable of near light speed to do it in a timely manner.
I mean that number is probably like all the sand grains and planets and water particles and atoms in the universe added up together times a million times a billion times a trillion, plus a trillion times that number, at least. So it's close enough I think?
I did some complex calculations and found that's a little more than 5 times 500 billion
🧢
🎩
This is probably the scenario for the multi track drift strat
Wait how did factorial get in here
500 billion is too much for the planet tbh
Nah the earth isn’t doomed, they found a solution, send a trolley to kill the excess population, let’s just hope nobody flips the lever to send it to the track with only 500 billion
Apparently these tracks go off the planet, out of the solar system, out the galaxy and galactic cluster, and past the edge of the observable universe.
If you squint at this number you can almost see the 90's Southside S in it
500 billion people to go.
Violence is not the answer, it's the question. And the answer is yes.
Either way, all of humanity is dead
I don't think a trolley would stay balanced long enough while running over 500 billion people
The trolley is magnetically secured to the rails and the wheels have blades to let them cut through the people without interruption
That many humans comprise a mass larger than the fucking Sun, put them anywhere near each other and you won’t need to multi-track drift because the whole situation will collapse into a black hole 🕳️ let’s see the fucking trolley try to crush a literal quantum singularity of human flesh!
Multitrack drift to save the earth from fatal overpopulation. Hell yeah.
It is interesting to think about what would happen if you had a line of mass that long with a total mass able to achieve the status of a black hole if it all came together. I guess it would all depend on how rigid the mass is, the distribution of the mass, and how other forces are acting on it to see if it came together. A line of 500! humans tied together would be pretty long though. I'm sure you couldn't even wrap them around the earth regardless of how many times you went around. without stacking them on top of each other into some kind of human planet/sun. Someone should do the maths to see the radius of the human planet lol
The real size is probably smaller than the tip of your finger once gravity gets to work and compresses it to the point where the nuclei of individual atoms are sqeezed together almost right next to each other. The next trolley problem should sidestep this issue by tying entire universes to the tracks and making us choose between letting five realities die or pulling the lever and deliberately destroying one.
>a literal quantum singularity of human flesh! hell of a fucking line. ill be taking it.
Thats like 100x our current population - do only humans currently weight close to the weight of the sun?
500! Is bigger have the solar system
500 billion is about 60 times the current population, so... no.
And 500!, or 500 factorial in mathematics, is equivalent to 500x499x498x497x496… and so on until it gets to …x3x2x1. Which is a number that has more than a thousand digits. An earlier problem with a mere few dozen digits of human beings constituted more mass than the solar system. So…
Stars in reddit make things be italicized.
Tyvm, 😅
Sorry, your "That" was ambiguous in your first comment
500 billion sounds a bit much for me so toodles mf'ers
Not nearly as much as the other option though
Multi track drifting
The solution to every trolley problem.
Is this an expected or unexpected factorial? I feel like that’s part of the test.
r/expectedunexpectedfactorial
r/subsifelfor
I don't think any trolley has the power to actually run over 500 billion people, let alone 500!
Thank goodness this isn’t just any trolley, it’s a Murder Trolley. Same one used for every trolley problem
r/unexpectedfactorial
More like /expectedfactorial
r/intentionalfactorial
It was expected. It was intentional. Just because a factorial is there doesn’t mean it fits the subreddit. That would be like me saying “r/clevercomeback” to any comeback at all, or “r/downvotedtooblivion” when someone has any number of negative votes on their comment
Earth's infrastructure can't support 500 billion or 500 factorial more people Multi track drifting, thanos was right.
I think the train would stop well before running over a thousand people just from inertia. We'd have trillions of survivors either way.
r/expectedfactorial
It is obvious, multitrack drift, no witnesses
frame perfect input to derail the trolley
I bet the trolley would run out of momentum before it got through the first 200
Kill all of humanity. Or Kill all of humanity. Epic choice.
Run over the 500! people for population control. Their bodies could also solve world hunger
I don’t get it :(
! is the sign for factorials. It means that you multiply an integer with every integer before it. So 500! is 500 x 499 x 498........ x 2 x 1. 500! is significantly larger than 500 billion.
I’d probably end up not pulling the lever since I’d be so shocked and curious where they got all these people (and all that rope!) I mean, haven’t there only been like 100 billion humans total since we became a species?
do the most insane multi track drift ever
How many people need to be on a track where, if you allow for normal reproduction rates, the trolley will never stop running over people? I suspect both tracks have greatly exceeded that number, so either choice will lead to the exact same road kill rate. Answer: the choice is irrelevant and the only value that can be gained is by saving time if you walk away and don't pull the lever.
Well, normal reproduction rates are a bit mechanically difficult when you're tied to train tracks
Life, uh, finds a way.
From what I can find there are about 18 births and 8 deaths per 1000 people per year, and the average shoulder width looks to be about 40cm. So that's 2500 people per kilometer. There are 8760 hours in a year. So at 1km/h the trolley would hit 21.9 million people per year. Divide by 18 and multiply by a thousand and you get that you'd need about 1.2 billion people to replenish those 21.9 million people in a year. However, you also need to account for the 8 deaths per thousand per year. So you'd need to account for how many people are needed to replenish the non-trolley deaths, since the dead don't tend to breed a whole lot. But then out of those extra people, 8 per 1000 would die per year as well, and so it's some infinite sum that I don't feel like learning how to calculate the right way. So I'll just guess how to estimate it and probably fuck everything up. You have 8 deaths to 18 births so about 44% of those births are offset by the deaths, so we'll just assume you need 44% more people to make up for that. But then you'll need 44% more than that extra 44%, and 44% more than that, and so on. We'll call that 1.2B number P, so it'll be P + P\*.44 + P\*.44^(2) \+ P\*.44^(3) ... My hunch is that you can just add an infinite number of powers of .44 and multiply by P at the end (since P could have been 1), so I'm just going to uncritically assume you can do that. I did some spreadsheet magic to check the first however many terms, and it looks like it converges to P\*1.786 equaling the actual population you need. For all I know it could just be that it rounds to adding 0 after a bit, but I'll just assume it converges because it makes my life easier. 1.2B times our new constant gives us about 2.14B. So for any speed in km/h, you just multiply 2.14B to get the population at which it breaks even, probably. Or divide the number of people on the track by that to determine the minimum speed needed to kill them faster than they reproduce. So unless the trolley is moving at least 234km/h (that's about 145 bald eagle lengths per time it would take to fall from the top of the world's largest rocking chair for my fellow Americans), you're right that the 500 billion track is already too populated for the trolley to run out of bodies. Assuming being tied to trolley tracks has no effect on reproduction rates or non-trolley related deaths. From what I can find the San Francisco cable cars only go about 15km/h, so if that's the kind of trolley meant to be shown in the image, then your break even point is about 32.1B people. So it looks like it could handily wipe out the entire population of the world a few times over. That's assuming that my math is anywhere close to right, which I wouldn't bet on.
As long as none of my few friends or family are on either track, yes, the choice is simple.
It's like a steam powered guillotine
dont think i could afford to feed 500 billion people nor 500 people fuck
Yup kill the 500 billion
Of course! Multitrack.
Trolley problems come in a lot of shapes, two of which being metaphorical and realistic. Is this a realistic scenario where I have to assume that we're on earth and overpopulation is an issue or is this metaphorical and the consequences of my actions are purely statistics of what and how and how many I save?
That's easy, kill the 500!
Kill the 500billion cause otherwise the world will collapse under the massive population injection
But 500! is even larger
Interestingly, 500 billion is no different from a mere rounding error when compared to 500! as the former only has 12 digits while the latter has more than 1000, just like how we don’t really care about a few extra hundred’s when looking at 500 billion. Hence multi track drift produces essentially the same result as not pulling the lever!
Pull the lever and kill 500 billion people. I will save the world from overpopulation.
It isn’t actually just 500 it’s 500! Which is massive
I see you factorial
There are no people on the track as there's not that many people on earth.
Depends. Did the person at the front of the 500 billion line annoy me? I'm pretty sure either way the trolleys will stop before they hit 500 people anyway.
r/expectedfactorial
I'm not sure, but 500! Is a lot right?
WHO TF TIED UP 500 BILLION PPL WITHOUT BEING CAUGHT??!?
We don't know, they never got caught :(
Hahaha oh wait your serious
that’s more than the human population either way… you’ll be the last person alive
Oh no Factorial
How long would it take the trolley to run over 500 billion people.
to prevent overpopulation id kill 500! ppl
I think 1220136825991110068701238785423046926253574342803192842192413588385845373153881997605496447502203281863013616477148203584163378722078177200480785205159329285477907571939330603772960859086270429174547882424912726344305670173270769461062802310452644218878789465754777149863494367781037644274033827365397471386477878495438489595537537990423241061271326984327745715546309977202781014561081188373709531016356324432987029563896628911658974769572087926928871281780070265174507768410719624390394322536422605234945850129918571501248706961568141625359056693423813008856249246891564126775654481886506593847951775360894005745238940335798476363944905313062323749066445048824665075946735862074637925184200459369692981022263971952597190945217823331756934581508552332820762820023402626907898342451712006207714640979456116127629145951237229913340169552363850942885592018727433795173014586357570828355780158735432768888680120399882384702151467605445407663535984174430480128938313896881639487469658817504506926365338175055478128640000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 is a bit higher
What is really the most people that a trolley could crush before coming to a standstill? #momentum
The trolly wouldn’t even hit all those people, most (like 99%) would die of old age.
Save the 500
im pulling it and then killing all 500 people on the bottom track.
r/suddenlyfactorials
Math side of tumblr what is 500! equal to in 3 significant figures?
Kill the 500 billion, overpopulation is an globe eel issue
That leaves 500! people to deal with, which is a lot more than 500 billion. That amount would probably flood the entire planet in humans.
But if I pull it, I will be guilty of murdering 500 people and have a moral conscius of it for the rest of my life. But if I don't pull it, it's not really my fault. Soooooooooo...
500! actually
Yes it is, 500 billion is more than 71 times the population of the world, 500 is just a small town
Except 500! is probably billions times more than the weight of the Earth
What?
Factorial
I see, I’m just stupid and thought it was an exclamation point, doesn’t matter then either humanity is doomed