The marines have flamethrowers and fuel to last 900 octillion years, after that its handguns and boots.
The fight takes place on an infinite flat field, obviously not in this universe so no black holes and shit. The marines start in 1 group and the ants come from all directions (by foot) untill 1 team is 100% dead.
No death by hunger, dehydration, old age or disease but the marines still need sleep. No reproduction either.
Which team would win and why?
Depends on whether the ants are fire ants
does it? does it really?
The gravitational field collapses reality
Graham's number is so far above a Googolplex it's ridiculous. There will be Googolplexes of Googolplexes of Googolplexes of Googolplexes ......... of Googolplexes of Googolplexes of Googolplexes ...... of Googolplexes of Googolplexes of ants per Marine
The fight would be over in miliseconds with eleventy gajillion gajillion gajillion universes full of ants.
I thought people on this board could read.
the ants dont start inside the marines, but walk torwards them from all directions.
That doesn't make any difference.
not for the end result but how do the marines die in a few miliseconds?
Ant's organizational skills would collapse due to too many members clogging the hive mind
OP doesn't understand how big graham's number is.
i do, but i bet many here dont, so its an interesting question and im looking for creative answers.
This isnt the first time i make this thread so i have seen some good answers before.
Funny answers are alright aswell.
Marines would drop a napalm ring around there forces as an area denial and use bunker busters to destroy any tunnels the ants have built. After that they would use artillery, bombers, and more bunker busters to take out and forces. Ants would still win because Grahams Number is too big.
it does actually.
there is a limited surface area of impact that the ants can attack.
as long as the marines can hold off the constant flow of ants and keep them from advancing, this is an easy win for the marines.
that being said, they would have to do it with handguns and boots or whatever equipment lasts indefinitely.
This is a dumb question.
Even if the ants attack the soldiers in a formation where the soldiers can burn them with maximum efficiency, they would run out of fuel before all the ants die. I highly doubt there is a flow path of the ants that will result in a rate of death such that the death toll will reach graham's number. How long does an ant need to be exposed to the flame before it dies? At what temperature? What is the heat transfer coefficient of the ant? The fuel last 900 octillion years but at what rate is it being burned?
Look up the orders of magnitude between graham's number, googolplex, and an octillion.
If you're gonna post one of these shitty ass topics, at least make it solvable or interesting. I would rather see a sun of made of ice post than this stupid ass shit.
I would agree its a dumb question, but many people here are dumb and for people not familiar with the numbers it very thought provoking, the main reason i make this thread is to get people to research these numbers.
deleted
Someone posted before reading again, but atleast you realised it afterwards.
marines would win.
marines can just constantly hold back the ants and move backwards into the swarm. they can use the charred remains of ants to create a fortress among other buildings.
eventually you can construct an obstacle course for the ants so that all you have to do is stomp them as they come into a single file line.
The stomped ants would eventually be as big as a mountain.
Also, since you didn't specify your question enough, there is a scenario where both teams will lose.
You didn't mention at what rate fuel is being burnt. Let's say it is burnt at an infinite rate. Everyone dies. The end.
if all the ants converged on the marines instantly, than it's over in a few seconds
>[Graham's Number] is so large that theobservable universeis far too small to contain an ordinarydigital representationof Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies onePlanck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space. But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Graham's number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the universe. Nor even can the number of digits ofthatnumber.
Holy fuck lol
>Also, since you didn't specify your question enough, there is a scenario where both teams will lose.
no, the first team to have every member dead loses, it is not really reasonable to think that the last member of both teams would die with less than a second apart.
>You didn't mention at what rate fuel is being burnt.
it lasts for 900 octillion years and then it dissipates, no matter how much was used.
>if all the ants converged on the marines instantly, than it's over in a few seconds
How big would the area covered by the marines be? it would be bigger then our current universe.
How long does it take for an ant to walk the distance of our universe? quite a while.
Therefor we can conclude that the battle will take quite a while to end, no matter which team wins.
Also, the marines in the middle will have a shit ton of time to prepare.
How long would it take an ant to crawl across the universe? I guess heat death would occur before the battle is over, or any other end to whatever universe they're in.
Most important is the behavior of the ants. Do the ants run from the flames or do they continue to march forward? No number of ants is making it through the path of the flamethrowers. If they just mindlessly move forward then it merely becomes a matter of their pace + how compact they are.
so are you saying that in this hypothetical plane of battle that is big enough to sustain both forces, they are at least a universe's length apart at their starting position? how is that fair?
and anyways, eventually there would be a huge thick wall of ants pouring over the marines, because there are just that many ants. this is like saying a quadrillion ants vs one baby. that is comparable to grahams number vs googleplex marines.
It doesn't even matter. A Graham's number is so large that dividing it by a Googolplex is still basically a Graham's number. Marines are not going to win, not ever, not even if every single one of them has a Googolplex of tactical nukes each.
Graham's number is stupid big, it is beyond ludicrous big, there is no amount of trying that will save the marines. Stop posting these types of questions a Graham's number is too fucking stupid.
this. there is no scenario in which the marines win. none. come up with a better who would win. maybe 1000 marines vs 1 trillion ants?
>there is a limited surface area of impact that the ants can attack.
Think three-dimensionally.
The marines aren't up against a line of ants on the ground, they're up against a wave of ants piled up so high that all but the very layer are already dead from the pressure. The ants don't even need to bite - the marines are simply going to to crushed into paste as uncountable tonnes of dead insects pile over them.
Ants marching forward could never live through the flamethrower's flames. The number doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how long it takes the farthest ants to reach the path of the flamethrower and their compactness. If the ants are too spread out, they lose because they can never reach a high enough density to affect the marines and can be stomped out after a graham's number of years. If they are a monolithic wall like in the movie version of WWZ, stacked on top of each other, then they can beat the marines easily. If they are spread out enough, but compact enough to require to force constant flamethrower usage, the ants will win after the 900 Octillion years (or triple/quintuple/etc. that if the marines take shifts).
W-what are they standing on
(You)
What a meme though, somebody should do a study about what the upper limit number is that a human can actually comprehend the magnitude of, recon that it is only in the 1000s
This is pretty much the same as saying: An infinite amount of ants versus a finite amount of US marines. the marines could last 900 octillion years + whatever time it takes for the ants to kill a googolplex marines, but once they are down too stomping on them, they cant keep up with the incoming ants.
>Think three-dimensionally.
OP defined it as a 2 dimensional approach.
you can collect that material and just move it elsewhere.
you have infinite time, as long as your method works indefinitely then a googleplex is NOTHING.
i am pretty sure a study like that has already been made.
But its not the same and thats the beaty of it, people dont understand the numbers so they either make themselves look very stupid or they research it, im fine with both.
edit: grahams number not googleplex
ants cant stack that high, they would just kill themselves at that point
link?
First of all the ants come from all directions, so moving to any direction doesnt really do anything and secondly, what do you do after your fuel is out, how long do you think a human being can stomp ants before collapsing or going insane.
Answer is, not long enough.
If you ask me, the battle will be over within a couple of years at most when the marines either killthemselves by choice or when they kill themselves by accident in a huge explosion of flamethrower fuel.
They would collapse into a black hole. You can't just neglect gravity.
>what do you do after your fuel is out, how long do you think a human being can stomp ants before collapsing or going insane.
They don't need to eat and live forever as long as they sleep enough. These are clearly not normal humans. They can stomp ants for much longer than they can flamethrower them. You are adding arbitrary parameters to the problem instead of trying to actually solve it.
Christ your autistic, do videogames have gravity? does a simulation?
The soldiers will be able to hold them off for at least 900 octillion years (assuming they are all constantly using their flamethrowers, so in reality they would last much longer, since they can form an outer defensive flamethrower ring while a command center is formed inside). By that point, they will probably manage to find a way to turn ant corpses (and any human corpse) into fuel.
apparently the biggest number we comprehend without abstraction is five lol
NāāāN is already waaaaa...aaaaaay past a googleplex and that number is still completely and totally insignificant compared with the actual gramsnumber. There is no understanding how stupidly big it is.
>ants cant stack that high, they would just kill themselves at that point
Which doesn't matter. There's so many ants that a hundred billion could die to the pressure for each and every ant marine kills, and it wouldn't make any difference. This isn't a fight, this is a bunch of dudes drowning in a ocean made of insects.
The ants. You don't understand Graham's number.
It's used to describe a real number larger than we can comprehend; the brainlet explanation is it's a way to express infinity as a real number.
So as soon as you come up a finite combination of resources to handle "Graham's Number" of x, Graham's number is in fact larger than that, because it larger than what is comprehensible to mankind.
>not on this universe xD
>somehow I expect that this new magical universe supports the same atoms, chemicals and that terrestrial animals can go "by foot" even if there is no gravity!
>geez guys, why is that so hard to understand?
Do you realize how dumb you sound?
The only way I can see the the marines not dying is if they learn to create a society made out of ant parts. Instead of ants being a threat they would need to figure out how to turn them into a full source in which case they would have a near infinite fuel source and build material to do whatever they want with.
arbitrary?
Yeah, human sanity, ability to handle stress and exhaustion are arbitrary if its robots vs ants, but its not.
Im trying to be as realistic as possible and im saying that if it was me with no need to eat i would not last long, i would get very bored and would quickly realise that death is better than 900 octillion years in fiery hell full of ants.
How long would you last?
Please, lets not forget that marines are also just people.
its a hypothetical, its not real.
do YOU realize how dumb you sound?
Well if it's just a video game then we can make any assumption we want.
Also even without gravitational forces between the marines and the ants, once the flamethrowers turn on, a massive firestorm would be created which would suck up marines and ants alike and likely be self fueling as more marines and ants are sucked up
Where does the wind come from?
even hypothetically speaking some rules need to apply so the ants and the marines can even exist. These rules include gravity necessarily.
Moreover you pointed another user for not "being able to read" when in fact his answer was legit. Nowhere in the OP implied that gravity didn't exist, and in fact is more logical to assume there's gravity in this new universe (since people and ants can go "by foot").
OP only implied that black holes or other BS that would negate the whole battle dont exist.
Its amusing how many try to work around the rules instead of trying to give an actual answer with thought put behind it.
because the actual answer is too fucking simple: graham's number is so unfathomably bigger than a googolplex that ants would win even if only 1 in 10 millions of ants was able to take out 1 tenthmillionth of marine per bite.
This is so dumb everyone fails to realise that the marines can use their boots and clothes (googolplex of them) to fashion a mini city of high walls and towers while some dedicated flamethrower men secure the perimeter for a few hundred years as the marines inside build the boot city. By the time the inner keep of boots and jackets is fortified, they can draw up the drawbridge and live in naked pride knowing that they secured a stalemate. After all... There are some overhangs even ants cannot climb.
Flamethrowers heat up air, hot air rises, pulling in more air.
en.m.wikipedia.org
You know how much a googolplex is? The Marines have fucking flamethrowers and can create fortresses out of the charred skeletons of the ants. If they play their cards right they can set up a trap in such a way that just a handful of Marines is enough to stop the ants, while the rest can go and chill in the fortress and jerk off.
>mini city
Did everyone just forget that a googolplex is also a fuckhuge number? that city would be the size of galaxies
This. Googolplex is huge, and all of the Marines equipped with the right stuff (which is the case) they can eventually whip up a gigantic fortress and find ways to BTFO the ants.
If the field is really infinitely big the ants would just skitter away with some redirection anyway, ants can instinctively avoid stampedes so they would
>There are some overhangs even ants cannot climb.
dailymail.co.uk
FUCK
>mfw the marines research ways to create advanced renewable weaponry out of the material in their clothes in the 900 octillion years that makes disposing of the ant problem trivial
So what everyone is saying is that the first step to defeating the ants is all marines getting naked?
this site though
>letting the thought of nudity get in the way of scientifically approaching this problem.
Yo, they can make a galaxy-sized ball of impenetrable material, and it would still be crushed by the ants.
The ants crush themselves before they build up the mass required to crush the city.
They would crush googplexes of googlexes of themselves and keep piling up, crush the city, and still not make even remotely a dent in their numbers. They crush that city easily.
Why must the ants and marines fight?
They must get immensely hot though, assuming there is oxygen, they'd literally burn themselves out
The Marines need to figure out the perfect stomping--switching--sleeping--switching--stomping technique. I'm ignoring the flame throwers, because they will not last until the end anyway, so you might as well not use them at all and go straight to stomping. The marines need to form a compact circle where the outer most rings of Marines are all busy with stomping. If they can figure out a technique with which they a) dont lose any ground b) dont lose any men and c) incorporate the switching of rested personnel from the inner rings than they should be able to fight of the Ants indefinetely, and therefore at some point will kill all of them.
In fact, I think you wouldnt even need one gogolplex soldiers to form one of those perfect ant stomping spheres, but only a couple of trillions or so. So you could build several of these spheres, which allows quicker and more efficient ant stomping, bringing down the time it takes to beat them significantly.
All in all, I'd bet my money on the US Marines.
I mean, so would the Marines. They would both be the two largest structures in the universe by far. They would easily outweigh the amount of matter needed to collapse into stars. So if we allow for that kind of physics to happen, nobody wins, and everyone becomes a universe-sized star.
The marines could also use some of the metal from their weapons to build a chemical plant to process dead ants and extract the tiny bits of fluorine in them to make teflon.
Ants can climb teflon. In the lab, this is used to keep whole ant colonies in trays.
There is also the possibility of the marines using chemical warfare against the ants. With the right pheromones ants will fight each other.
You are forgetting the element of chance.
Even if all the marines were trained perfectly for the technique you described. Over trillions of years, human error would pile up. Even if one marine is lost due to a freak ant accident every 100 years, the ants. would. still. win.
I'm curious, is there enough components amidst the gogolplex guns, clothing and ants to construct teflon efficiently?
You act like there would be another system of defense of keep the number of corpses down, or to recycle the corpses into an ant destroying weapon. Remember, they have at least 900 Octillion years of fuel to invent ways to convert the material in their clothes, boosts, and guns into ways that can protect them from ants. If a google number of people are dedicated scientists for an Octillion Years, the amount of knowledge they accumulate will be unfathomable.
You don't need much teflon as you only need to encircle the marines. You also have enough ants that you don't need to worry about efficiency.
The more interesting question is how long it would take for the marines to build up enough infrastructure to go from ants to fuel and extract enough metals from dead ants to build tanks for killing ants.
You should probably define a few extra things so you don't get any "hurr black hole" idiots
>"Gravity" is just an omnipresent force pulling everything towards the ground at 1 g, the ants or marines do not have any gravitational pull in this alternative universe
>The ground is flat rock that cannot be destroyed
>When an ant or marine dies, they disappear (too many issues with letting that many things die and pile up)
Anything else?
The ants and marines should not be able to emit heat.
Better. That solves the collapsing into a star problem. But it also makes it so the Marines can't use ant corpses as a resource. I think it's better if the bodies stay.
So no...enthropy?
lol I can't even begin to imagine this, you can't make that a condition OP it is completely insane
There's just too many ants, though
Like one dude said, the ant corpses would eventually create incomprehensibly tall mountains
In addition a mountain of ant corpses could be used to hide the ants as they approach the marines, probably making it much more difficult for the marines to kill the ants
>>When an ant or marine dies, they disappear (too many issues with letting that many things die and pile up)
The ants winning strategy relies on killing themselves to pile up big enough to breach the marine's defenses. Otherwise, the marines literally just have to build steel walls by melting down their guns. Or building a huge funnel out of the metal to ensure the ants go into a machine that auto kills them
>Otherwise, the marines literally just have to build steel walls by melting down their guns
That could be another rule, though
Marine guns are indestructible
I don't see any winning strategy by the ants that doesn't rely on building up so much mass that they kill the base layers.
There's still the retarded number of ants to consider
If they can never build up enough mass to breach the boot city, then they cannot win. All they'll do is get to the point where they build up their numbers to carrying capacity and the bottom rows die off, disappear, and build up continuously until they all die out.
The ants would form into a ridiculously massive star, which would later collapse into a black hole, killing all remaining ants and marines.
Given enough time you can extract iron from dead ants and marines
Why would the bottom layers disappear though?
Read the replies. This is in response to the dead disappearing. The bottom layers would eventually get crushed due to gravity once the numbers of ant build up reaches a certain point.
easy they will not battle but just become one gargantuan soup of protein water and other materials
Easy, just change the rules so much that the marines are able to win.
The fight will clearly last at least a billiin years. During this time, the marines would invent interdimensional teleportation devices and singularity generators, which they'll use to destroy that universe and go to another.
OR
They all die of suffocation or temperature within 5 mins or less, coz the details you've mentioned are not anywhere close to be enough for any living thing to survive.
Losing one soldier every hundred years isn't very significant though. The bigger problem is what do with the dead ants. The stomped ants rather quickly will be a huge problem. I think the best way would to be if you stomp, then swipe and there are deidcated soldiers that spread the dead ants around evenly so it forms a plateau where the circle of soldiers stands on. This could go on theoretically idenfinetely.
So i suggest modifying the stomping technique:
Stomping -- Swiping -- Switching -- Plateuing -- Sleeping -- Plateuing -- Switching -- Swiping -- Switching -- Stomping.
>it would be bigger then our current universe.
The vast majority of both armies will suffocate. They will quickly use more oxygen than can be reasonably brought in.
You mother fuckers have been told dozens of times already in this thread how big grahams number is and you STILL are trying to think of scenarios where the marines win. IT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. (Unless you
a. placed the ants very far away from the marines
b. made a constraint so that only a few ants at a time can come at the marinee
)
which is fucking stupid. might as well had said in the OP that the marines have an unfair advantage. Place all the marines and ants right next to each other to start, because it's the only fair way. In that case the marines never win.
Those situations wouldn't even help. The ant corpses would pile up too much and smother the Marines.