A Hypothetical Situation

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Suppose we have a plane on a treadmill, and the people on board are being served dinner. Suppose that our hypothetical treadmill has the ability to spin its tracks at an infinite speed, but as it speeds up it makes more and more noise. Assume we are dealing with an 747 being operated by Southwest with 3 flight attendants and 100 passengers.

Before dinner is served, the plane is too heavy to get enough thrust to escape the accelerating treadmill, which always speeds up to counteract the speed of the plane. After dinner is served, is the plane able to escape because it weighs less?

Consider the fact that each meal has to be assembled by the flight attendants ahead of time, consisting of a beverage, a side, and entree that all have equal mass and volume, or in other words, each portion of the meal is 1/3 = 0.333333… of the meal. If each person eats their entire meal, the entire plane has only consumed 99.9999999… meals, so where did the extra 0.000…01 part of the meal go?

Also consider that the first 2 portions of the meal are located in the front of the cabin, but the entree is in the back. Flight attendant A knows that she can’t leave flight attend B alone with the beverages or he will drink them all compulsively, but he also can’t leave B with C because they will get into a fight. C also tends to cough and sneeze when near pepper, and unfortunately the entree is peppered beef, so C can’t stay near the entrees for too long either. Assuming that flight attendant A travels at 99.99% the speed of light, c, how can she re-arrange the meal portions and the other flight attendants around the cabin in order to assemble and deliver the meals while also not aging more than 10 seconds less than the other flight attendants?

Bonus Question: If all the people on the plane are deaf, and there are no other people in the world, does the treadmill motor make a sound as it speeds up to keep the plane from moving?

2

Airlines don’t serve meals during takeoff.

3

Don’t fight the hypothetical!!!

4

I have an elegant solution to this hypothetical.
But it won’t fit within the margins of this comment box.

5

What color are the food trays?

-D/a

6

The passenger in seat A1 paints everyone’s tray blue who do not paint their own trays. Since no one else has any paint, they are all blue, except for A1’s tray, which may or may not be blue depending on the resolution to this paradox.

7
  1. No wait…no that was right, the answer is 3.
    ETA: And the hotel clerk has the extra the extra 0.000…01 part of the meal.
8

I don’t have an answer, I’ll be over here in my lawn chair eating popcorn.

9

As should be immediately clear to the educated observer, the plane will€>ū^**(&".xgkîïė

CARRIER LOST

10

Ha! The old missing dollar riddle. Now I see the connections! Thanks for the help.

11

Just one. In the rain.

12

Yes, fine, but, Where will they bury the survivors?

13

Since Flight Attendent A is only traveling at .9999 c, it will take a finite amount of time (t) for her to travel from the front of the plane to the Emergency Exit row. From that point it’s trivial to show that she can never reach the rear of the plane.

14

I have no idea.

However, I do know that the fattest flight attendant de-clawed her cat.

15

I get the bury the survivors and the Zeno’s paradox, but I’m lost on the fattest flight attendant declawing her cat. Doesn’t she know PETA doesn’t approve of that?