The marines have flamethrowers and fuel to last 900 octillion

Depends on whether the ants are fire ants

>>8903917
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.

>>8903921
I thought people on this board could read.

>>8903923
the ants dont start inside the marines, but walk torwards them from all directions.

>>8903926
That doesn't make any difference.

>>8903929
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.

>>8903935
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.

>>8903929
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.

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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.

>>8903949
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.

>>8903950 deleted
Someone posted before reading again, but atleast you realised it afterwards.

>>8903908
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.

>>8903956
The stomped ants would eventually be as big as a mountain.

>>8903955
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

>>8903962
>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.

>>8903964
>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.

>>8903977
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.

>>8903977
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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuigptwlVHo

>>8903985
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?

>>8903947
>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.

>>8903985
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

>>8904044
(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.

>>8904006
>Think three-dimensionally.
OP defined it as a 2 dimensional approach.

>>8903958
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.

>>8904066
i am pretty sure a study like that has already been made.

>>8904069
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.

>>8904073
edit: grahams number not googleplex
>>8904006
ants cant stack that high, they would just kill themselves at that point

>>8904074
link?

>>8904073
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.

>>8903908
They would collapse into a black hole. You can't just neglect gravity.

>>8904081
>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.

>>8904082
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.

>>8904075
apparently the biggest number we comprehend without abstraction is five lol

N↑↑↑N 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.

>>8904075
>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.

>>8903924
>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.

>>8904086
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.

>>8904123
its a hypothetical, its not real.
do YOU realize how dumb you sound?

>>8904087
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

>>8904140
Where does the wind come from?

>>8904131
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 anon 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").

>>8904146
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.

>>8904151
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.

>>8904145
Flamethrowers heat up air, hot air rises, pulling in more air.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm

>>8903908
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.

>>8904173
>mini city
Did everyone just forget that a googolplex is also a fuckhuge number? that city would be the size of galaxies

>>8904191
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.

>>8904193
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

>>8904173
>There are some overhangs even ants cannot climb.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1252481/Pictured-Incredible-gravity-defying-ant-carry-100-times-body-weight.html

>>8904201
FUCK

>>8904193
>>8904190
>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

>>8904219
>letting the thought of nudity get in the way of scientifically approaching this problem.

>>8904193
>>8904191
>>8904190
Yo, they can make a galaxy-sized ball of impenetrable material, and it would still be crushed by the ants.

>>8904228
The ants crush themselves before they build up the mass required to crush the city.

>>8904232
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.

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Why must the ants and marines fight?

>>8904235
They must get immensely hot though, assuming there is oxygen, they'd literally burn themselves out

>>8903908
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.

>>8904242
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.

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>>8904201
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.

>>8904246
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.

>>8904255
I'm curious, is there enough components amidst the gogolplex guns, clothing and ants to construct teflon efficiently?

>>8904235
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.

>>8904267
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.

>>8903908
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?

>>8904286
The ants and marines should not be able to emit heat.

>>8904286
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.

>>8904288
So no...enthropy?
lol I can't even begin to imagine this, you can't make that a condition OP it is completely insane

>>8904294
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

>>8904286
>>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

>>8904303
>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

>>8904306
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.

>>8904309
There's still the retarded number of ants to consider

>>8904310
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.

>>8904306
Given enough time you can extract iron from dead ants and marines

>>8904316
Why would the bottom layers disappear though?

>>8904366
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.

>>8903908
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.

>>8904262
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.

>>8903977
>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.

>>8904452
Those situations wouldn't even help. The ant corpses would pile up too much and smother the Marines.

>>8904423
>> what to do with dead ants
turn them into fuel

>>8904455
The marines all die in minutes even if there are no ants. There's just so many, that the ones in the center of the group quickly overheat and run out of oxygen. The ones on the outside of the group get sucked inward by winds a million times stronger than any hurricane due to convection currents.

>>8904457
>burn the fuel
>greenhouse effect kicks in
>soldiers die

not a good idea.

>>8904460
>>8904464
No. In these types of hypotheticals, usually there is an infinite plane of battle, where there is abundant resources to last an infinite amount of time and sustain both marines and ants. The only way ants can die is from marines and marines can die is from ants.

Think about it - is a grahams number of ants realistic? No? Then why are you trying to add the constraint of reality "oxygen running out" and "overheating".

>>8903956
>Plays too much tower defense.

>>8903908
So if there is no hunger or dehydration doesn't this mean that the marines have an unlimited energy and mass source? if not then things get very weird as the water and sugars in the marines get automagically replenished.

>>8904349
Get out of this thread, magneto

>>8904470
It doesn't matter that the plane is infinite, the oxygen at the edge of the group of marines simply cannot reach the innermost marines quickly enough. I mean we're talking about oxygen crossing the entire observable universe to reach the center-most marines. It doesn't matter that the plane contains infinite oxygen, because the region the marines are in does not. If there IS infinite oxygen in the region with the marines, they'll be crushed under billions of atmospheres of pressure.

>>8903908
It would be like if a grain of sand of marines would fight a billion universes full of ants, except far, far more than that. Graham's number is larger than you think.

>>8904376
If you keep expanding the base as you are building higher the weight of the small top layers are spread over a larger area. If you have an infinite plain, this could build infinity. And the number of ants aren't a problem neither, since whatever fort the humans could make could be dwarfed buy the ant pyramid easily. You dont even need coordination between the ants to build this way, its just the natural way things pile up.

>>8904481
Stfu autist

>>8903908
Fire cleans the ants of their sin and purified the earth of their presence.
Fire always wins.

>>8904507
Well if you ignore constraints of overheating then why should flamethrowers kill ants? If you ignore constraints of pressure then why should boots kill ants?

If you ignore the need for oxygen then the marines can make totally sealed ant proof suits.

good thread

>>8904497
An ant cannot support the weight of a million ants, it will die.

>>8904530
For fuck's sake you know exactly what OP wants to know with his thread, and your hurr durr what if muh heat kills everyone doesn't help AT ALL. Nobody wants an answer like that.

>unleash the flamethrowers on the ants, it spreads to all the other ants
How are the ants supposed to win again?

>>8904554
The ants would have a tendency of moving away from the fires allowing them to eventually stop spreading.

>>8904552
Does it matter?

ants, there's too many

>>8904554
Now you created real fire ants. Imagine when the continent size pile of ants are buring, creating a fire storm that eventually envelops everything its close too. Once the marines catch fires, they will only be more fuel for the fire. The ants win, as the fire storm kills the marines long before it even takes a dent out of the ant numbers.

>>8904587
Ants cannot support a continent of ants on them. Does anyone even know the actual limit of how tall the ant wave can get before the bottom ants die out?

>>8903939
No you don't, otherwise you wouldn't even ask such a retarded question.

Everybody knows how nearly infinitely larger graham's number is to a googolplex.

>>8904611
Are dead ants a worse fuel than alive ants somehow?

>>8903918
flamethrowers are useless against fire ants, so yes very important

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>>8903908

>>8904611
A generous recent estimate has an ant's neck joint able to withstand 5000x its body weight. An average ant is .37cm. The highest the ant wave can get before it starts killing itself is therefore about 185cm. After that, it'll get taller and taller as the ants are trampled by other ants, but the amount of actually move ants will stay about the same. Ants in nature are never seen making these mythical stacks as they only ever stack to make thin bridges and such, so the idea of this giant ant tsunami is likely to never happen.

What is more likely to happen is for an endless slowmoving flat wave to continually come at the marines. This means that the first 900 octillion years will be easily dispatched by the marines, but they will become ant food after that if they don't come up with a plan to shelter themselves. This also means that a properly built dome shelter with a crew that cleans the roof off full time will never be crushed by a planet of ants as the ants will never try to occupy space that densely, and you just have to worry about ways to clean up the ants that slowly pile up on the roof.

ITT:
>Are you retarded? The mass, energy and gravity from that many ants would easily create a black hole bigger than the observable universe.

>hurr durr no, ignore all physics and sense!!! >:( I just want to see an epik marine force kill antz!!!!!!

>this is a joke guys! I swear! xD

>>8904651
they only need the outer shell of marines to hold the line so they would last way longer than 900^27 years

i think the ants would just tunnel under the marines so the battle wouldn't last very long relatively speaking. unless the marines are flame resistant, then they could last 900^27 + however long it takes the ants to tunnel

>>8903908

Assuming the ants have to approach the marines and aren't instantly spawned on top of them all:

Ants lifespan is too short. Without queens they'd all die of old age before they would be able to kill all the marines. Furthermore the ants need water and food as do the marines. And even then the marines killed by the ants will not be able to sustain their numbers. Most ants and marines would exist on the inside of incomprehensible numbers of others of their kind and would likely never even be able to encounter the opposing side just due to the sheer distance one on the inside would need to traverse to reach the front lines. But this might let the ants win as the "wave" of ants could crash in on the marines from all directions and crush them. If the ants begin on the ground or spread out over some standard distance from a central location the marines win through attrition. If the ants and marines begin stacked or relatively close in proximity the mass creates a black hole.

Marines would need to survive for a few years. Likely through cannabilism if this is a truly sterile environment with nothing but ants and marines. Otherwise it's just too much mass and it'd all collapse into a black hole.

>implying the burning ants wouldn't maintain the fire indefinitely

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>>8903908

Ants would undergo gravitational collapse and start nuclear fusion pretty fast.

>>8903949
>taking the bait
you are a moron. The marines would obviously win because they are wearing boots

>>8904030
>i don't understand how big graham's number is: the post

>>8903908
The marines would sleep in shifts, all the sleeping ones go in the middle and the rest run around the perimeter with flamethrowers. This would last 900 octillion years, and maybe during that time the marines could widen their ant-free circle zone somewhat.

Then after 900 octillion years they'd run out of fuel and they wouldn't have even killed 1% of the ants. The ants would go all over them and sting them to death. Guns and boots won't help.

Here is a rough model of the problem:

Let A(t) = Number of ants at time t, B(t) = Number of Jarheads at time t, let a be the effective rate of damage the ants can affect in proportion to the size of a given cohort, and let b be the firepower of the marines. Now solve the following linear system of ordinary differential equations:

A'(t) = b*B(t)
B'(t) = a*A(t)

The system says that the rate of change of the ants at time t is proportional to the size of the marines attacking it. Likewise the second equation says that the rate of change of the Marines is proportional to the size of the cohort of ants attacking them.

Whichever function becomes less than one first is the loser.

Get a biologist to figure out a, and a military science specialist to estimate b and I'll plug the system into MATLAB and give you an answer!

>>8905849
You need to factor in the ants and the marines reproduction. The marines probably won't be as important but the ants can reproduce fast enough that it becomes a factor. Espicially if the rate of reproduction is greater than the rate being killed by marines.

>>8903908
... it's a stupid question

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This is how it will go down:
>rotating ring of troops maintain the parameter with flamethrowers
>meanwhile marines in the center areas begin searching through the marines for the smartest and most scientifically gifted minds
>with a sample size of a googolplex they find a lot of absurdly smart statistical outliers
>set the billions of supre-geniuses to work using whatever materials they have (mostly dead ants,uniforms,human body parts,and flamethrower fuel) to create advanced technologies
>after a few million years of research, they manage to create self-replicating ant-killing nanobots that replicate using nothing but ant corpses
>release the nanobots into the waves of apporroaching ants
>the wave of nanobots spreads out, wiping out the approaching ant armies more quickly than they can walk forward
>a graham's number of days later the wave finally hits the end of the wave of ants and the marines, now a type 4 civilization, each marine being effectively a God, enhanced by their mastery of mastery of ant-corpse based technology and cybernetics to the level of omnipotence and omniscience

>...after that its handguns and boots.
How much ammo do they have?

>>8905919
they don't have any handgun ammo at all but they have 3 replacement clips for the boots

>>8905904
v funny
i wonder how the population would vary as generations die and female marines have 100 kids each
what a strange universe

>>8904102
This.

Can the shitposting stop using G64 and use G1 instead? It's still inconceivably large but at least we could make a dent in the number.

1. OP said no reproduction
2. It's not about numbers, it's about sustainability
The ant killing nanobots would degrade and fail as well, given there is a small chance of faliure and a smaller chance of simultaneous faliure
So after a few type II civilization cycles the marines would still get drowned in ants

>>8904242
They would burn themselves out far more effectively than the flamethrowers would, and still the ants would win.

>>8904552
I thought rules said only marines could kill ants

>>8903984
Wrong.
Grahams number compared to a googleplex is more similar to Grahams number compared to 1.

Most of the marines would never even see the frontline.

What we need is a good social structure of the marine society based on dead ants, clothing and weapons. It is safe to assume most elements will be able to be synthesized by this flourishing and immortal civilization.
During the first crucial 900 octilion years progress would have been made on hyper-sustainable ships capable of traversing through planet sized masses of ants while shrugging off their attacks like they are a dense toxic atmosphere. We would take off from the Great Central Marine Formation in those ships and traverse the flat planes for the eternities that will come, using toroid generators to produce infinite sustainable energy and spiritually advanced society to keep peace and cohesion between the galaxy-sized fleet of ships equipped with everything imaginable.
After that, it's just a matter of time as the primitive ants accidentally kill each other by forming a tower higher than 185 cm.

By all accounts this very planet we live in may have been formed by the hubris of dead ants, handguns, flamethrower fuel and uniforms. The blackness of space we see around? It's not dark matter. It's ants.

>>8906071
Top fucking lel

ants, without a doubt
the difference between graham's number and a googolplex is approximately graham's number

>>8906199
But then again a googolplex is huge as well, imagine how much such a society could achieve in 900 octillion years. They would absolutely obliterate the ants before spending even a quarter of their flamethrower fuel.

>>8906614
The difference between Graham's number and 900 octillion is approximately Graham's number.

>>8906665
But an ant doesn't take a year to kikl

>>8906670
No but after 900 octillion years they've still likely got about Graham's number of ants to kill.

>>8906670
If every marine killed 900 octillion ants per second they wouldn't even put a dent in it after 900 octillion years.

>/sci/ is so autistic they will discuss til the end some /b/ tier b8
O how good is to be home.

>>8905070
>> fusion
Even the ants/marines aren't gravitationally attracted to each other, if the bodies experience a down force we will have fusion when the piles of bodies get high enough.

Although there is probably no way the marines can win. Even if no marines are killed by ants, the rate of deaths by slipping is likely to be high enough that all marines die long before all the ants have been killed.

For this question the more brainlet you are the longer your answer is, because your tiny-ass brain underestimates how much bigger Graham's number is

>>8907127
It boils down to sustainability.
Can you keep killing ants indefinitely? If yes, marines win.

Prolly not tho

Wierdest factorio thread ever

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>>8903926
>tfw you'll never have G64 ants walking towards you on an infinite plain

>>8903908
>The fight takes place on an infinite flat field
>infinite
The ants never reach the marines, it's an eternal stalemate.

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>>8903924
>On this board
>Still on 4chan expecting people to be capable of processing fucking letters
>Pic related

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>>8903908
Thanks for the good laugh.

What if the marines worked really hard to reduce Graham's number by proving that there exists a much smaller number n such that if you connect each pair of geometric vertices of an n-dimensional hypercube to obtain a complete graph on 2^n vertices, then colour each of the edges of this graph either red or blue, then you always get some monochromatic complete subgraph on 4 vertices that are coplanar?

>>8903908
Ultim8 zerg vs terran
>inb4 >>>/v/

>>8907406
>Zika
Not actually Zika. His parents are the trashiest of white trash and probably abused alcohol and pills while pregnant. They dope him up on morphine and take vacations with donation money. They're great people.

>>8906665
Marine technology grows exponentially, ants would be BTFO in a matter of millions of years.

The marines win.
Towards the center they would create a civilization with ghe highest technological level possible. Then they could easily kill the advancing ants faster than they advance.
G64 is smaller than infinity.
Decay and wear aren't modelled in this extremely simple universe and could be cancelled by the high technological level anyways.

What if the marines had an anteater with a quantifiable amount of anger equal to graham's number with them?

>>8903973
even if every plank volume of our universe was itself a full universe like ours and you repeated that process for those universes a million times it's still vastly tinier than Graham's number.

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>>8903932
ur assuming the hive mind isn't simply broadcasting/emitting commands

it would be extremely inefficient for there to be two-way communication

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900 octillion years is [math]2.838*10^37 seconds[/math]
the american m9 flamethrower consumes half a gallon of fuel per second
therefore each marine is responsible for [math]1.419*10^37[/math] gallons of fuel
this is 1/85 the volume of the red supergiant star Betelgeuse
The volume of the universe (in gallons) is [math]9*10^82[/math] gallons
The combined fuel volume of a mere [math]6.342*10^48[/math] marines would fill the observable universe
Remember there are a googolplex ([math]10^{10^100}[/math]) marines

Assuming that all marines store all their fuel in a spherical building (the radius of which is a mindblowing [math]1.0864*10^{\frac{{{10^100}+34}}{3}}[/math] meters), even if the marines set up a defensive perimeter underneath the sphere, a googolplex marines are tasked with defending a circular zone with a circumference far exceeding the circumference of the known universe. This is even after minimizing radius as far as possible, to the point where the ceiling formed by the fuel sphere over the marines' heads is only 3 meters from the ground.

If the marines are equally spaced around this circle, they are each more than 30 meters from their nearest ally. This constitutes a problem, as the effective range of an m9 flamethrower is 15 meters. It is only a matter of time before the marines are surrounded, as their friends cannot protect their flanks.

I wasted far too much time thinking about this bullshit so this latex better fucking work

>>8908509
J U S T

No one really, i mean the gravity of the ants is kinda just gonna kill everything sooo..

>>8905347
>I don't understand infinity: the post

The Anon is right. If the ants are spread out enough, a single marine with a boot could do this.

>>8908862
If the ants were spread out enough, no number of marines could do this.

>>8908515
>sooo..
You have to stop talking like this.

>>8908869
Why? Time is not a problem in the context presented by the OP. The ants march towards the marines from their starting point. Even if they didn't and wanted to avoid them, if we assume that a marine is to any extent faster than an ant, it would be done within a certain amount of time, provided the marines know which direction they have to go for each ant.

>>8908878
this

marines win

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Even if the marines manage to form up a defensive circle and sleep in shifts it's still impossible for a phalanx of flamethrowers to repel tidal wave of ants 100%. Sooner or later more and more ants would leak past the effective range which would lead to the marines either risking friendly fire or having to fall back to a more unfavorable position.

In the end the marines requirements for personal space would be their doom while ants just pile ontop of eachother for a more effective assault.

Let's keep this thread alive boys. Bump.

>>8909501
Okay.

This was touched on earlier.

How many years of stomping ants would it take for your average Marine to go irreversibly insane?

Marines lose every time in every possible situation.
The magnitudes between the two are comparable to a planck-length string vs the size of the observable universe. Even way bigger than that. The only way the marines might win is if you specify that the ants can only come at the marines in little groups at a time, which is not fucking fair. You wanted a FAIR battle between marines and ants, well only way is to put ALL OF THEM an arbitrary distance from each other to start.

>>8910410
cont.
also, even if the ants only came at the marines in manageable groups, it would take way longer than 900 octillion years for the supply of ants to be exhausted.
the problem is a lot of anons in this thread still do not comprehend how big grahams number is.

>>8908901
Don't forget that due all the dead ants, the fuckillions and fuckilions of ants will fall from above.

The marines win. Ants are communists, and one of the laws of the universe, according to physics, is that not all the communists in hell can overrun marines.

>>8903908
Ants win. All the marines would have ended up accidentally shooting themselves before they could kill all the ants. Marines aren't very bright.

>>8903908
>900 octillion years

Assuming ants are almost infinite, marines lose

If the ants come with such voraciousness that a ring of fire could be continuously regenerated from the energy density of their bodies, the Marines could sit back and conquer Iraq while their at it.

>>8903926
>>8903923
It would take longer than 900 octillion years for the last ant to reach the marines, ants are not fast

>>8903917
Underrated