this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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How long does it take to get an infinite number of loops in? Well, it's going at a finite speed, so it must be an infinite amount of time. Maybe you can argue that at the speed of light causes the inside of the trolley to not experience time past that point, but there's still all the time spent at sub-light speed accelerating. So at least an astronomical amount of time.
And the rules as stated result in an arbitrarily large number of people on the trolley. So these people after a point aren't being pulled from Earth, they must be being created wholesale. And then living a life out on the trolley, unless they exit.
So the choices are really 1. Kill 5 people or 2. Create an unknown but large number of people that will live out some sort of lives on the trolley, or get shunted out into the real world, and some smaller but still large number of people that will die prematurely.
I think life is worth living, so I prefer 2
It will always reduce to a cycle of 4→2→1→4→2→1, so you won't end up with a huge number.
But yeah, it would take infinite time to reach infinite loops, and meanwhile people can get on and off, so in reality nobody dies prematurely...
People can die on the trolley,
Also you're assuming the collatz conjecture.
If someone dies due to extraneous circumstances, they would die either way so it doesn't have to factor into your considerations on whether or not to pull the lever.
And while I haven't done a geometric proof to show that for all odd numbers, it will eventually reduce to one, I've worked out the sets for every odd number up to twenty and the pattern holds. While that's not rigorous enough for a theorem, it's good enough for me.