Let’s build a Pyramid. Just like the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Why	How

---

Why?

1. To Prove We Can
2. Tourist Attraction
3. Keep Safe the World’s Knowledge
4. Challenge to Future Generations

To Prove We Can

America is a Great Nation.

In size alone, we exceed the Roman Empire.

In population, we rival major Chinese empires of history.

Our wealth is unprecedented, our work ethic unrelenting, and its time we show this in another awe-inspiring way.

Tourist attraction

Many people already fly in to PHX airport and go visit the Grand Canyon. Lots of people visit Scottsdale, and Sedona. All of this has been strictly increasing in recent years.

If we want even more, we should build this pyramid.

Millions of people every year visit Egypt to see the great pyramids, and those ones are very old.

A new pyramid that serves as a testament to the will of recent people will attract many many tourists.

In order to build the great arizona railroad, Tucson’s support will be needed. This pyramid will encourage more people to take that leg of the railroad down to Tuscon.

Keep Safe the World’s Knowledge

We sent golden disks with human sounds and knowledge into outer space. However, the most likely place to find beings that are capable of understanding human intelligence is here on earth.

It’s probably even humans. There’s a lot of scenarios in which you can imagine all human knowledge being lost.

One would be a nuclear apocalypse where almost everyone dies. Or some apocalypse in which almost everyone dies, but there’s a few surviving people for whatever reason in some forest, somewhere around the world or the arctic circle or a cave or something, and then they slowly but surely repopulate the whole world.

They don’t know everything. There’s certain pieces of information that are lost.

Or if its not humans or aliens, chimpanzees could re-evolve human level intelligent.

Earth is the most likely place our knowledge to find intelligent life.

So let’s put a big library on the inside of the pyramid.

Not a library out of paper, but out of a stone.

And then just knowing human nature, even if no one remembers that they are supposed to look inside this pyramid for knowledge, surviving humans would be attracted to this. They would worship the pyramid and library as the knowledge of the gods, so there would be an intrinsic motivation to study it, which might be absent if we just bury a disk in the ground.

Visiting alien species might recognize it as being unnatural even from space and investigate.

There is good reason to do this in Arizona. We’re very immune from natural disasters.

We’re less likely than other places to get Earthquakes. We’re practically immune from tornadoes. Way less rain weathering. Less vegetation is going to grow on the side of it and crack the rock. We don’t get hurricanes. If we use metal, it’s less likely to rust because it’s such an arid climate.

This pyramid of knowledge is a great idea and Arizona is a great place for it.

Challenge to Future Generations

It would be inspirational to future generations.

Instead of using our wealth solely to over-indulge in food or chase pleasures, the pyramid stands as a testament that we chose to build something great. To build something big and lasting.

We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

However hard and impossible seeming this task may seem, it is only more reason to make it happen.

How

There are a few possibilities:

1. Crowd-built
2. Crowd-funded
3. Publicly funded
4. Privately funded

Crowd-built

Assume when someone goes to the gym, they lift 15lbs about 50 times, across all workouts that they do. This is very likely an underestimation.

There are 7.41 million people in Arizona. Assume 25% of them go to the gym 4 or more times a week.

We now have a formula for weekly voluntary weight-lifting capacity of our state:

$7,410,000 \times .25 \times 15lbs \times 50reps \times 4 \frac{1}{week} = 5,557,500,000 \frac{lbs}{week}$.

5 and a half BILLION pounds per week

The Great Pyramid of Giza weighs about 5.7 million tons, or 11,400,000,000 pounds.

If we just build workout machines out in the area that use levers to be able to lift the rocks into place, then we can have it built in:

$\frac{11,400,000,000 pounds}{5,557,500,000 \frac{pounds}{week}} \approx 2.05$ weeks

Of course this a bit absurd to assume that 25% of the state could be on the same property for 2 weeks straight, but it does go to show that crowd-sourcing the labor is not as absurd as it first sounds.

A much smaller number of people that are much stronger than only being able to lift 15lbs 50 times per day could accomplish the monumental task.

Lets use 1000 people on the jobsite per day, each of them lifting 100lbs up 10 meters 100 times throughout the day, that gives us a total work per day of:

$1000 people * 100lbs * 10 meters * 100 times = 100,000,000 \frac{pound meters}{day}$

The math for calculating the center of mass of a pyramid is a bit complicated, so lets just say we have to lift each bit of mass an average of half of the total height. This is an overestimate which allows for the work needed to position the blocks around the base before lifting.

The great pyramid of giza originally stood at 146.5 meters tall, giving us a goal of roughly 73 meters.

$\frac{11,400,000,000 pounds \times 73 meters}{100,000,000 \frac{pound meters}{day}} = 8322 days = 22.8 years$

A bit long, but doable. How about if we get 10,000 out to the job site 200 days per year?

$\frac{11,400,000,000 pounds \times 73 meters}{1,000,000,000 \frac{pound meters}{day}} = 832.2 days = 4.2 years$

That is a very doable timetable.

Both of these, 4 years or 22, are within a single generation. If we want to fund the project with voluntary labor, we need to shoot for something between 1000 people out there every day and 10,000 people out there 200 days each year (4 days per week).

If we 10x the output of an individual, we get another drop of 10x.

Some people should volunteer as it would be a free gym. They could get a good workout without needing to pay .

This would have the added bonus of being hand-made. Which is really cool.

Financial Costs

If it cannot be built by voluntary manual labor, then professional crews and machinery can be brought in to do the project. This is perhaps slightly less cool, though.

The cheapest way to source the materials would be to purchase the land from which the blocks can be harvested. I don’t know how to find a suitable place, but I know Arizona has a lot of rocks and a lot of land, so I don’t expect this to be a major cost.

Transporting the blocks would be a major cost. The closer the better.

Also, in terms of approximating how much a professional building crew would cost on this project or how much they would need to be paid, I am clueless.

All in all, I have no valid cost estimate. It might be mighty affordable, or perhaps entirely cost prohibitive. If you have any estimates, send it to me via email tbroweber@gmail.com.

Sources of Funding

Crowd-funded

Lots of people have disposable income. I expect most people would be more enthusiastic about volunteering their time than money, but this would be an available source to some extent.

Publicly funded

The State of Arizona has a lot to gain from this, see why.

They have a budget of $18 billion so far as I can tell.

Not all of this could be allocated towards our pyramid, but combined with some federal funds, it would likely be able to provide the primary source of funding.

Privately funded

If I ever find a billion dollars laying around, I can’t think of anything I’d rather put it into than this, although I might also set aside some for building a castle.

However, I don’t have a billion dollars. Theoretically, only one uber-rich person would need to be convinced to build this great thing from their wealth, or else a coalition of several wealthy people can put together a fund so that none of them have to put all that they have into it.

Conclusion

This should be a project on the mind of every Arizonan, particularly every able bodied young man that could volunteer labor.

In the event of a large financial crisis, funding this project might serve as a major stimulus to the state of Arizona and to out-of-work people.

But we should not wait for crises before starting.

This should be considered a major goal for Americans everywhere.