Let's say a genie granted your wish for infinite monkeys. Imagine once per second, a random form of monkey spontaneously appears somewhere in the US. This process will never end no matter what. How long before the planet is uninhabitable? How long before the Earth itself is at risk of being destroyed by the sheer mass of simians? Assume the monkeys are otherwise completely normal, they can die, but like any matter they cannot be completely destroyed. The monkeys can generate at any height, so they might form on the surface and be fine, fall from immense heights or spontaneously form underground.
>>17006093Underground is huge. So is the sky. 3600 monkeys per day, so around 1.2 million monkeys per year. That probably wouldn’t even fill up a typical football stadium, volume-wise. So it would take multiple decades before there are unmanageable amounts of monkeys everywhere. Certain areas could probably be shielded off indefinitely, and it would take centuries for monkeys to start piling up as dead mass. The monkeys wouldn’t be able to reach Eurasia for at least a few millennia, as they would either have to travel through the cold north or somehow fill up the ocean and start floating to Africa or Europe. I think we would have plenty of time to make preparations to live on Mars. I think over time there would probably be some sort of microorganism that evolves to consume the dead monkey flesh at extremely fast rates, likewise the ocean will fill with sharks that eat the monkeys as soon as they appear. So it probably wouldn’t even be necessary to go to Mars. They would destroy the American ecosystem, sure, but their birth rate mass would be a decrease from the existing birth rate, and eventually their flesh would be consumed at a faster rate, so it might reach an equilibrium. Thinking about the sharks, it might be practical to bring in the largest carnivores like lions and tigers, this would speed up the consumption process even more. So I think the only real negative consequences would be the disruption of the American economy and having to send hundreds of millions of people to other areas. We wouldn’t go extinct and the whole planet would be fine.
>>17006099(cont.)3600 monkeys per day is about 75 monkeys per state on average. So we could distribute about a few hundreds tigers/lions per state and the monkeys should be consumed rapidly.I suppose the real question here is how the addition of mass would affect earth in the extreme long-term. I don’t feel like doing the calculations but this would probably take millions of years, so either way I don’t think this would be a huge problem for humans if we can just settle on Mars.
>>17006099What about very long term though? You still have what is essentially an endless source of matter increasing from nothingness. Even if the monkeys are all getting turned into stool or we are carpet bombing the containment zones with acid bombs or something to reduce their mass as much as possible, some degree of matter of still increasing, forever.
>>17006099>>17006105You missed twenty-four hours per day.
>>17006106From a quick ChatGPT prompt, it says it would take a few billion years for other continents to be meaningfully affected. So the sun would probably explode before the planet becomes uninhabitable.
>>17006110Oops. Even then, the only question is the accumulation of the mass on a long time frame, and this would take billions of years according to ChatGPT. It should be easy to have enough tigers and scavengers to clean up the monkeys, but this does add biomass (then again, since monkeys are largely composed of water, ChatGPT’s calculations might not even take this into account, as water-mass can spread evenly around the planet, so it would take even longer for the mass to have a significant effect).
>>17006115The main issue on a solar timeframe seems to just be the rise in global ocean levels, but this would only be about 6 meters after a billion years. The monkey water-mass would only add 0.16% of the current ocean mass. The American continent would rise about 14 meters in dry mass. Even if the sun didn’t explode, we would probably have the technology to fly the mass away from earth and keep ocean levels stable for a while.
>>17006093Globally, approximately 4.3 babies are born every second. And it's at the risk.
>>17006093Would be more interesting if the monkeys couldn't die.
>>17006134absolut horror scenario, after one monkey the world could be doomed, because we simply couldn't stop him.
>>17006126I think better question is how long until Earth gains too much mass. Because human babies are made from Earth matter, but these apes are made from nothing, additional mass being made from nothing. Also it says forever, so even 100 billion years in future after heat death of universe, these apes spawn with energy rich body mass and body full of microbes, at the end of the universe there could be a small planet of dead decomposed monkeys sustaining ecosystem in the darkness from just eating the monkey corpses that keep spawning.
>>17006265We turn the monkeys into biofuel for spacecrafts that are purpose built for shipping enormous amounts of dead monkeys into deep space
>>17006265Well.. Earth is like a giant space station portal that can spurt large volumes of new people out into this part of the void.
>>17006093you managed to beat philosophers in useless thinking. quiet the feat
>>17006265Wouldn't the perpetual monkey manifestation prevent heat death precisely because each monkey spawns ex nihilo but alive, thus introducing negentropy?
>>17006370It made me laugh, therefore it wasn't useless
6 million monkeys would already be unreasonable to dispose of.
>>17006093Humans could essentially keep going like nothing had happened except for one thing which is accidents. If the monkeys can appear anywhere then they will cause a relatively high amount of accidents and general nuisance when ever they appear in the middle of a road or a backyard or something. Disposing off few thousand monkeys every hour would be tedious but easily manageable by an industrial society. For comparison we eat about 300 million cows year, 30 million of those in the USA and billions of chickens and fish and other smaller things. A monkey every second is merely 31.5 million monkeys that have to be disposed off so similar in scale to the cattle industry.Of course there would have to be quite a massive scale of monkey hunters and the like since they aren't conveniently all already in the farms like cows but I'd imagine we would simply eat most of them if monkey meat turns out to be any good. Burning them for fuel is probably the second option. Imagine the smell.If they can generate on any height then practically most of them will just spawn underground and be never seen or in the air and instantly die. Disposal would be more disgusting but much easier than if they just spawned on the surface and had to be caught before they cause trouble. The mass is totally irrelevant. 31.5 million monkeys * extremely heavy 0.5 ton obese gorilla is merely 16 million tons of matter which converted to say granite is a cube with a side length of 175 meters, large in human scale but to a continental plate or the volume of the oceans essentially nothing. Of course that itself is about a magnitude too big to account for small simians. If that much matter was dumped into the oceans it would raise the surface by about 15 nanometers a year, not quite a hundred million years for a meter, or hundreds of thousands of times slower than we are raising them by melting the glaciers currently. Sun would swallow the earth before this had a meaningful effect.
>>17006382Yes, everywhere except the dark monkey-covered Earth would be dead with maximum entropy, and then Earth and some space around it being sustained through neg entropy.
