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Skyscrapers are mostly empty space inside. The Great Pyramid of Giza weighs about 6 million tons, so we’d be producing about 7000 of them annually. Maybe we cou

Skyscrapers are mostly empty space inside. The Great Pyramid of Giza weighs about 6 million tons, so we’d be producing about 7000 of them annually. Maybe we could just plop them all in the ocean? ;)

deleted 8y ago
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mcbits 8y ago
I'd probably mess up the arithmetic, but I wonder how many skyscrapers or Great Pyramids could be packed in a volume of 1 cubic mile. That's how much oil we use per year.[0] (All sources combined are equivalent to about 3 cubic miles of oil.) It would be nice to find a way to bump that up a couple orders of magnitude without actually pulling that much oil/equivalent out of the ground, since there literally isn't enough there. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
- shoo 8y ago
  Start with a Great Pyramid of Giza, or locally sourced substitute following the traditional recipe [1]: * 5.5 million tonnes of limestone * 8,000 tonnes of granite * 500,000 tonnes of mortar For a simple approximation, we ignore ingredients that are not limestone. mass of limestone in great pyramid of giza = 5.5 * 1e8 kg of limestone Volume of limestone in one great pyramid of giza, assuming medium-high density limestone at 2500 kg / m^3 [2] = 5.5 * 1e8 kg / (2500 kg / m^3) = 2.2 * 1e5 m^3 allegedly there are 4.168e+9 m^3 cubic metres per cubic mile. That gives about 19,000 great pyramids of giza per cubic mile. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza#Materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza#Material... [2] http://www.natural-stone.com/limestone.html http://www.natural-stone.com/limestone.html edit: when i try to estimate by geometry from the pyramid dimensions, instead of by density, i end up with about 2,000 great pyramids of giza, but that's without trying to understand what the volume of a pyramid actually is, because i am not clever enough to do that.
  - damon_c 8y ago
    Intuitively, isn't the volume of a pyramid going to be 1/3 of that of a prism with the same width/length/height?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mcbits 8y ago

I'd probably mess up the arithmetic, but I wonder how many skyscrapers or Great Pyramids could be packed in a volume of 1 cubic mile. That's how much oil we use per year.[0] (All sources combined are equivalent to about 3 cubic miles of oil.) It would be nice to find a way to bump that up a couple orders of magnitude without actually pulling that much oil/equivalent out of the ground, since there literally isn't enough there. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil

shoo 8y ago
Start with a Great Pyramid of Giza, or locally sourced substitute following the traditional recipe [1]: * 5.5 million tonnes of limestone * 8,000 tonnes of granite * 500,000 tonnes of mortar For a simple approximation, we ignore ingredients that are not limestone. mass of limestone in great pyramid of giza = 5.5 * 1e8 kg of limestone Volume of limestone in one great pyramid of giza, assuming medium-high density limestone at 2500 kg / m^3 [2] = 5.5 * 1e8 kg / (2500 kg / m^3) = 2.2 * 1e5 m^3 allegedly there are 4.168e+9 m^3 cubic metres per cubic mile. That gives about 19,000 great pyramids of giza per cubic mile. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza#Materials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza#Material... [2] http://www.natural-stone.com/limestone.html http://www.natural-stone.com/limestone.html edit: when i try to estimate by geometry from the pyramid dimensions, instead of by density, i end up with about 2,000 great pyramids of giza, but that's without trying to understand what the volume of a pyramid actually is, because i am not clever enough to do that.
- damon_c 8y ago
  Intuitively, isn't the volume of a pyramid going to be 1/3 of that of a prism with the same width/length/height?