A study conducted by a gaming site calculates the amount of LEGO blocks it would take to build some of America’s famous landmarks and structures. The research by im-a-puzzle.com reveals the number of LEGOs and the price of the construction of The White House, The Empire State Building, and even the Grand Canyon. Similar virtual constructions have been made in Minecraft, but these real-world block builds would require work on a different scale.
LEGO is a puzzle game brand that offers physical puzzles for all ages but also has widened its scope with video games, like LEGO Star Wars. In the study, im-a-puzzle.com calculated the volumes of five of the most popular landmark buildings and four of the greatest natural structures in the United States. With the volume of each structure, the researchers figured out how many 2×2 LEGO bricks it would take to cover the necessary footprint. The website im-a-puzzle.com is an online community for puzzle-loving folks looking to spend time solving jigsaw puzzles, picture puzzles, or other games.
While the usual LEGO constructions fit on a living room table, more extreme feats and even life-sized LEGO projects have become more popular. The researchers at im-a-puzzle.com don’t believe these nine landmarks are necessarily going to be built life-sized, but it’s a very interesting thought experiment. The smallest of the buildings is The White House, which required 19 billion LEGO bricks, followed by The Empire State Building, Willis Tower, and One World Trade Center with a number of bricks in the hundreds of millions.
However, by far the largest construction selected for the study is Kennedy Space Center, which would require a massive 1.4 trillion 2×2 LEGO bricks to build, more than 2 million times bigger than Comic-Con’s LEGO Bowser. With one brick costing around 11 cents, the prices of these buildings range from $2.1 billion to $157 billion.
Although the Hollywood walk of fame is 1.3 miles long, the flat surface means that it would be by far the easiest LEGO project with 26 million bricks. The Statue of Liberty and Central Park in New York City would need 900 million bricks and Mount Rushmore 253 billion bricks. While all those would be massive tasks, natural wonders can be on a different scale. Those that have visited the Grand Canyon likely have an inkling that it would require much more than a few hundred billion, or even the trillion bricks of the Kennedy Space Center.
Building the Grand Canyon would require an astounding 1.6 quintillion bricks and cost $177 quadrillion – or quadrillions of times more than a simple Nintendo Switch made from LEGO. According to the study, this would mean enough bricks to build a tower to Pluto 3137 times and would cost 35 times the amount astrophysicists have estimated to be the value of the entire Earth.
Source: i-am-puzzle.com