this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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If the trolley is moving at light speed by the time it hits the station, it is impossible for anyone to get on or off because—from the trolley’s perspective—no time passes between stops. Ergo, the number of passengers on it must be the same every stop.
If the initial number of passengers is odd or a non-zero integer, this inability to board/unboard would contradict the rules.
Thus, in order to satisfy all the conditions, the initial number of people on the trolley must be 0. As an even number it will be subject to halving, but 0/2=0, so the rules are satisfied.
Hence, pulling the lever is the optimal solution as 0 people will die. QED.
Also, the trolley going in a loop the speed of light would be immediately deformed and destroyed. If inner points of the trolley go c, then outer points would be going faster, so the tram would forcefully deform. Same with the people inside
Not to be the 🤓 but technically that only applies to Euclidean spacetime. It is possible to have spaces in which loops occur without there being a localized curvature gradient. The manifold might loop but at a small enough scale all manifolds are locally Euclidean. There are also just weird things that happen in hyperbolic geometry where you can have infinite nested concentric circles that are all technically the same size and are centered at infinity (Horocycles).
Anyway, point is that we don’t necessarily know the topology of the space in which the loop resides, so we can’t make the assumption that the trolley would be destroyed.