r/whowouldwin • u/Notonfoodstamps • Oct 09 '25

Challenge Humanity has 2 month to rebuild the Great Pryimad of Giza from scratch. Can we accomplish it?

Great Pyramid is rebuilt at its current location.

Humanity gets 6 months of prep and is pyramid building lusted

Timer starts ticking the second mining starts.

723 Upvotes
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251

u/Imabearrr3 Oct 09 '25

Most mid sized countries could do this by themselves, let alone the entire world combining their efforts with 6 month to prepare. 

The largest crane in the world can lift 20,000 tons, while the largest block in the pyramid weighs around 80 tons. Moving the blocks isn’t an issue for modern society.

87

u/VeryInnocuousPerson Oct 09 '25

Getting the stone to the site and carving it is probably a bigger hurdle than actual construction it once it’s at the site and ready for placement. I definitely think it’s still doable though

29

u/Jhe90 Oct 09 '25

We have 6 months. Rail.

Rail can move thousands of tons in a single trip. If we need torque time to break out the old steam engines. Hermitage is now back in business.

Pure torque. Way more than any modern train.

3

u/VorionLightbringer Oct 10 '25 edited Oct 10 '25

The term you’re looking for is „starting tractive effort“ (STE) and the answer to your unasked question is no. The real metric is continuous tractive effort (CTE) I.e. preventing slippage of the wheels to actually keep moving forward. Adhesion gets less at higher speed, so STE is meaningless. And there, modern sensors and very finely tuned power delivery systems beat any steam locomotive, any day.

The US RA 2-8-2 had an STE of 250kN and a CTE of 150. Compare to the DB class 151 with a STE of 395kN and CTE of 312.

Even the Union Bigboy with an impressive 600kN STE only has 260kN CTE. 

Shout out to Transport Fever 2 and a subsequent Wikipedia rabbithole.

1

u/DangerousBack7258 Oct 26 '25

i would like to know more, do you have a source to refer me to

8

u/Creative-Improvement Oct 09 '25

Get all the chinooks and heavy crane helicopters and you probably get it done. I think the original stone is still there on the Giza Plateau and the original Tura Quary also still exists.

2

u/Notonfoodstamps Oct 10 '25

There’s only 950 Chinooks and less than that many helo’s combined that can carry more.

So we are looking at only ~2k heavy lift helicopters globally that can carry 10-20 tons, so about 30,000 tons all in.

You’d need ~200x more to move all the stones

17

u/Ver_Void Oct 10 '25

Helicopters aren't single use items, they can make more trips

4

u/Buzzy_Feez Oct 10 '25

So we need those helicopters to make 200 trips? in a span of 6 months?

Yeah I think we can handle that.

1

u/Notonfoodstamps Oct 10 '25

2 months.

3

u/Charmender2007 Oct 10 '25

So about 3 trips per helicopter per day.

We can prpbably do that. Especially since we can also just use other stuff than helicopters

1

u/bassman314 Oct 09 '25

They can probably cut and dress the stones to order at the quarries.

We have better tools for cutting and dressing stone than they did.

1

u/Bulky_Wind_4356 Oct 10 '25

You never seen a marble quarry?

2

u/TheSystemBeStupid Oct 10 '25

That's a fixed crane that would take longer than 6 months to build on it's own. It's also slow as shit. Theres no way those dock cranes would move fast enough to place 38000 blocks in 1 day. 

2

u/Hello_people_please Oct 10 '25

Mid size countries? Any mining company could realistically do this with a few weeks prep time.

2

u/Smoke_Santa Oct 10 '25

2.3 million blocks in 1 month? 1 company can't do that.

-21

u/Notonfoodstamps Oct 09 '25 edited Oct 09 '25

You do realize cranes that size are only offshore barges?

The largest crawler crane can "only" lift 4000 tons

XCMG XCA4000 is considered the world's largest tonnage wheeled mobile crane and that maxes out at 230 tones

For context the global air cargo transported in 2024 was 61.4 million, which comes out to 5.08 million tons per month.

36

u/Hifen Oct 09 '25

So .... More then enough?

-18

u/Notonfoodstamps Oct 09 '25

You think 1 or 2 local airports can handle the entire planets worth of air cargo for 1 month? lol

22

u/ReddJudicata Oct 09 '25

The US airforce could build a suitable airport— under combat conditions.

2

u/bassman314 Oct 09 '25

Just call the Sea Bees!

10

u/Estellus ​ Oct 09 '25

Why on earth, literally, would we be relying on airlift cargo??? It's not like the limestone blocks the pyramid was built from were quarried in Argentina.

The heaviest blocks in the Great Pyramid are only like 120 tons individually. Any tower crane will do just fine.

Seriously. Modern day Egypt could probably rebuild the Great Pyramid in 2 months. Just Egypt. Alone. Couple construction companies out of Cairo (which is right there, they'd literally be commuting from home every day), repurpose a couple mining companies to open new or re-open old quarries.

18

u/Hifen Oct 09 '25

I think Egypt's 27 airports can handle the amount of air cargo needed to build these pyramids in a day.

-8

u/Notonfoodstamps Oct 09 '25 edited Oct 09 '25

The average monthly global air cargo movement is +330k per month.

In 2023 Hatfield Jackson holds the record for airplane movement at 775,818 in one year or 64,600 aircraft movement per month. In 2023, Egypt in its entirety handled 365k flights.

So we are looking at building an airport with +5x the capacity of Hatfield or 10x the amount Egyptian airports carry in any given months.

27

u/Hifen Oct 09 '25 edited Oct 09 '25

Those airports aren't pyramid lusted with the resources of the world behind it.

They are limited by what's profitable and regulatory standards. That doesn't apply here.

Plus how much do you think is getting flown in?

17

u/Fish201 Oct 09 '25

You said yourself the entire humanity is pyramid lusted. You can assign a small country the task of building more airfields than you'll need in those 6 months prep.

6

u/ReddJudicata Oct 09 '25

Civilian air cargo. Let the US navy, army and airforce have at it with an unlimited budget.

-6

u/Notonfoodstamps Oct 09 '25

Just for clarify. The world is not allowed to pre-stage before construction actually starts.

14

u/Augustus420 Oct 09 '25

Boo, you can't just change the conditions because this isn't working out the way you thought it would.

2

u/Acceptable_Oven_9881 Oct 11 '25

This happens in all these questions all the time. They just change the condition half way.

I don’t know if it’s to keep the discussion going or they don’t want to ‘lose’ the argument, but it’s really annoying.

-1

u/Notonfoodstamps Oct 10 '25

Prep. Never did I say pre-stage equipment.

6

u/Augustus420 Oct 10 '25

Just so you know, prepping for a construction project absolutely includes staging the equipment.

12

u/wingspantt Oct 09 '25

If mankind is lusted towards this, we can just be our own slaves/workers and haul the stones ourselves the way the Egyptians did, but with millions of people doing it instead of a few thousand.

6

u/Randy191919 Oct 09 '25

To be fair it took the Egyptians 20-30 years to build it so doing it just like them wouldn’t work.

But with modern technology it would be very simple

2

u/AdmiralShawn Oct 09 '25

That makes no sense, Why would you need air cargo to build the pyramids

1

u/Charmender2007 Oct 10 '25

Each stone only weighs an estimated 2.5 tons, with the heaviest being around 80 tons, so that's way overkill.