Could the Great Pyramid of Giza be built using modern technology?
Stone blocks and TEUs
May I present to you the humble container:
A standard shipping container is around 20-feet long and can hold up to 53,000 lbs. (~26 tons) worth of goods and materials. The 20-foot container has become the industry standard for shipping containers through a measure called the Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit or TEU for short.
Currently, the largest container ship in the world is the OOCL Hong Kong, commissioned in 2017. It has maximum capacity of 21,413 TEUs. Here she is, making her first port-of-call in Europe at Felixstowe in Suffolk:
The world’s busiest container port is located in Shanghai. Each day it stacks and unloads around 100,000 TEUs worth of containers, or the equivalent capacity of five ultra-large container ships like the OOCL Hong Kong.
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The Great Pyramid at Giza is comprised of approximately 2.3 million stones weighing an average of 3 tons each . Assuming average container weight of around 14 tons, this is equivalent to around 490,000 TEUs.
This means that from a single large port in China, once every five days the equivalent weight of the Great Pyramid of Giza is loaded onto container ships and shipped thousands of miles to places all over the world.
So do I think modern-day humans could handle building the Great Pyramid if we really had to? Yeah … I am pretty sure we got this.
This was originally published on Quora in January 2018.