What if we wanted to build a modern Great Pyramid?

Everybody knows about "The Great Pyramid" in Egypt. It was built about 4,600 years ago. What would it cost if someone wanted to build a Great Pyramid today? Would modern technology make the project any easier?

Even today the Great Pyramid is amazing. The pyramid measures 756 feet by 756 feet at the base and is 481 feet tall. It is made up of more than 2 million blocks weighing about 3 tons each.

If you wanted to be completely authentic about reconstructing it, you would do the whole project with people power. It is believed the great pyramid was built with the labor of 5,000, 20,000 or 100,000 people (depending on which expert is doing the estimate). It took 20 years or so to build it. No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of effort. Even if you paid your workers minimum wage, the project would cost billions of dollars just for the labor if you tried to do it that way today.

Building it out of blocks is also going to be a major pain. You would have to find a quarry containing that much stone, cut the stone out of the quarry, load it onto trucks or trains, haul it to the site, unload and lift it and so on. It's certainly doable. Modern cranes and trucks would make it a lot easier. But it is a pain nonetheless.

There must be an easier way. Using today's technology there is. To do it the modern way, you would definitely go with concrete. It would be something like building the Hoover Dam, which has about as much concrete in it as the Great Pyramid has stone. With concrete, you can mold the shape you want and pour.

The Hoover Dam took over 3 million cubic yards of concrete. How much concrete is that? Imagine measuring off four square miles of land and pouring a foot of concrete over all of it. Or imagine building a tower that is 3 feet by 3 feet at the base and stretches up 1,700 miles into space. It is a LOT of concrete.

Concrete takes a couple of days to set. As it is setting, it creates a lot of heat. So they poured the Hoover Dam in sections. A section measured 50 feet by 50 feet on a side and 5 feet deep. Workers embedded cooling pipes in the concrete as they poured it. Cold water ran through the pipes to help remove the heat. A 5-foot-deep block would set for 36 to 72 hours. Then they poured another block on top of it. Using this technique, they poured the entire Hoover Dam in less than 2 years.

Concrete would work great for a new Great Pyramid. The Great Pyramid is a little smaller than the Hoover Dam - so for our new one, you'd only need about 2.5 million cubic yards of concrete. However, this would still be an expensive project.

If you are buying it by the truckload, concrete costs about $80 per square yard. For a big job like this, you would build your own concrete plant, and let's say that by doing that you get the cost down to $50 per square yard. That means concrete alone will cost $125 million. By the time you add in labor, design costs, form work and so on, you probably end up doubling that. So your new Great Pyramid might cost something on the order of $250 million to $300 million.