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Comment by Kevin McKee (kevin-mckee) on Torture vs. Dust Specks · 2021-01-07T20:31:34.421Z · LW · GW

The answer is obvious once you do the math.  

I think most people read the statement above like it reads either torture one person alot or torture alot of people very little.  That is not what it says at all, because 3^^^3 or 3^7625597484987 is more like the idea of infinity than the idea of alot.  

If you were divide up those 3^^^3 dust particles and send them through the eyes of anything with eyes since the dawn of time, it would be no minor irritant.  You wouldn't be just blinding everything ever.  Nor is it just like sandblasting everything in the eyes until they have holes through there skulls.  These aren't even close to the right scale.  

Even after taking all that dust and dividing it by all the eyes every creature has ever had and spreading it over their entire lifetime the amount of dust particles that hit the eye per nanosecond is unimaginable.  I don't mean the ordinary type of unimaginable, I mean physicists couldn't imagine what the physics of the situation means.  If you are thinking compressing that amount of dust into that small a space would might cause a nuclear reaction you are still thinking on the wrong scale.   The creation of black holes isn't the right scale either.  That amount of material hasn't been in one spot since the Big Bang,  which is also isn't on the right scale.  Billions of billions of Big Bangs per nanosecond in every eye that has ever existed for it's entire life isn't the right scale either.  It would be so much worse than that, however it's around here that my ability to describe how bad this would be tops out.

So yeah torturing a single person for a mere 50 years is the obvious answer.

p.s.

I know the question can be read as 3^^^3 people each getting one spec of dust in the eye, but that number of people in a single universe would also cause a disaster even worse than the one I described above.