For all we know, the pyramids were just as unpopular with the Egyptian public in their time.
While it's easy to remember only the excited children gathered around TVs to watch the first Moon landing, the truth is, spending public money on space exploration has never been all that popular with the general public. The Apollo program was unpopular at the time people thought it was a waste of money. In other words, each Apollo mission took about the same amount of work as each pyramid.
The Apollo project took an average of about 200,000 people, working over a similar period of time, to launch six Moon landings and another 6-10 missions using the same equipment before and after-which, if you divided it up equally, Which is a bit of a stretch, since launching a second Apollo mission probably lets you reuse a lot more of your work on the first one than building a second pyramid. The Great Pyramid, according to one analysis, took an average of 13,200 people 10 years to construct. Why did Michael-like many others-compare the pyramids to the Apollo program in the first place? Perhaps it's simply that they both look like they took a huge amount of work-and maybe that's the best way to compare them. On the other hand, the reverse probably wouldn't work, either.īut maybe we're making the wrong kind of comparison. it wouldn't be enough to launch it to the Moon. If all this energy were liberated and-somehow-used to accelerate an Apollo spacecraft.
Most of the energy they expended was lost to the heat of friction, but about 10 12 joules of it remains in the Great Pyramid, stored as gravitational potential energy. Thanks to friction, the Egyptians probably expended more energy dragging the stones across the ground than lifting them upward-and the "lifting upward" involved a lot of friction, too. In practice, pyramid construction wasn't so simple. That's the simple physicist-style answer, based on calculating the energy required to lift idealized blocks of stone against the Earth's gravity.
What took more energy, the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Apollo Mission? If we could convert the energy to build the Great Pyramid, would it be enough to send a rocket to the Moon and back?Ī Saturn V's fuel contains enough stored energy to lift up and stack about 20 pyramids worth of rock from the surface. What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions comes out 9/13.
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