"What's the worst that can happen?" goes the optimistic saying. It's probably a bad question to ask anyone with a creative imagination. Let's consider the problem on an individual level: it's not really the worst that can happen, but would nonetheless be fairly bad, if you were horribly tortured for a number of years. This is one of the worse things that can realistically happen to one person in today's world.
What's the least bad, bad thing that can happen? Well, suppose a dust speck floated into your eye and irritated it just a little, for a fraction of a second, barely enough to make you notice before you blink and wipe away the dust speck.
For our next ingredient, we need a large number. Let's use 3^^^3, written in Knuth's up-arrow notation:
- 3^3 = 27.
- 3^^3 = (3^(3^3)) = 3^27 = 7625597484987.
- 3^^^3 = (3^^(3^^3)) = 3^^7625597484987 = (3^(3^(3^(... 7625597484987 times ...)))).
3^^^3 is an exponential tower of 3s which is 7,625,597,484,987 layers tall. You start with 1; raise 3 to the power of 1 to get 3; raise 3 to the power of 3 to get 27; raise 3 to the power of 27 to get 7625597484987; raise 3 to the power of 7625597484987 to get a number much larger than the number of atoms in the universe, but which could still be written down in base 10, on 100 square kilometers of paper; then raise 3 to that power; and continue until you've exponentiated 7625597484987 times. That's 3^^^3. It's the smallest simple inconceivably huge number I know.
Now here's the moral dilemma. If neither event is going to happen to you personally, but you still had to choose one or the other:
Would you prefer that one person be horribly tortured for fifty years without hope or rest, or that 3^^^3 people get dust specks in their eyes?
I think the answer is obvious. How about you?
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.