Humans like building really big things.

Sometimes, it’s because a dude wants a monument to show the world how great  he is, even when he’s dead. Sometimes, it’s because we  want to show nature who’s boss, and make a place more livable than it was before… whether or not it messes things up  for everything else that lives there.

And sometimes, it’s because a  really big thing is the only way we know to understand some of the  tiniest bits of reality itself. In this episode, we’re going to look at some of the most massive things humans have ever built, and some of the interesting science  that happened along the way. [♪ INTRO] Let’s start with one of the classics. Literally.

The Great Pyramid at Giza, which  clocks in at over 5 million metric tons, and is made of over 2 million  giant granite and limestone blocks. It was built around 4500 years  ago for the pharaoh Khufu, to serve as his personal tomb.  And even though it’s that old, we’re still fascinated by  how those workers did it. Of course, people have floated  a lot of ideas over the years, from literally floating the  blocks via water trenches, to more fantastic hypotheses.

But thanks to archaeological  evidence, and modern experiments with stonecutting tools, some  archaeologists think this massive vanity project might have  needed a scant 20,000 people, who made use of both good  planning and really big ramps. We’d love to learn more about  what’s going on inside this giant but not entirely solid…stack of  blocks. But there’s a bit of a problem.

Digging things up in order to  poke around, or taking a bunch of samples would definitely  diminish the pyramid’s majesty. So scientists have to turn  to less invasive techniques, like ground-penetrating radar, or showers of subatomic particles that came from space! But how about using a massive  building to study the world around it?

In 1984, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu started construction on or just  like Khufu millennia before him ordered people to start constructing what might be the heaviest building in the modern world. Today, it’s called the Palace of the Parliament. And also today, it’s technically not done.

Ceaușescu’s government was toppled  five years into the project, and while construction continued in the 90s, most of the 1,100 rooms were never finished. Still, this thing clocks in at  roughly 4 million metric tons. Which, yes, is not heavier than the pyramid, but it is slightly bigger in terms of volume.

And one of the cool things with  having a building that size is that scientists can monitor how  it settles and moves over time. For example, both radar and interferometry, a way to track distances and  movement using beams of light suggest that different parts of the  palace are both rising and sinking. And in 2017, scientists used  this huge administration building to investigate  tectonic activity in Bucharest.

It’s not causing the activity.  The Earth itself is doing that. But the building is so  weighty, and covers so much of the underlying bedrock, that  it’s a good case study in a way that a smaller house or jumble  of separate houses isn’t. These researchers took  measurements at different parts of the building, and found that  they could map out fractures and fissures in the palace’s structure  as if it were a mini tectonic plate.

They also revealed that the entire  city of Bucharest may be subtly shifting, thanks to a nearby tectonic  fault system to the east of the city. But what if you could fit a  whole city into a building? This concept, often called an  arcology, is mostly science fiction.

But Saudi Arabia is working  on a 170-kilometer-long building-slash-city in the middle  of the desert called “The Line”. Take this news with a grain of salt, though. It’s a proposed megaproject, and history has a long list of defunct proposed megaprojects.

But we wanted to highlight  this one because it’s so recent and, well, other reasons we’ll get to. The idea behind The Line is  to build one very narrow, but very, very long building that’ll contain everything people would need to survive. Kind of like a massive, linear mall, I suppose, with people moving around via subway.

While construction has technically  started, we can’t guess how heavy the project will end up being, whether  it’s the size of a city or not. But we’re highlighting this megaproject  in part because of the potential consequences that could arise  when you build something this big. Some of the more fanciful  design plans, like constructing a fake moon to shine down on  the city, or painting the beach sand to glow, would probably be  bad for animals living in the area.

But there may be more mundane ecological and environmental problems, too. For example, one study suggests there’d be a significant risk of oil spills. Plus, if you’re building what’s  essentially a 500-meter tall solid fence, you’ll wind up dividing animal ranges and mess with air currents and water flow.

But we already have finished examples to show how massive structures can affect  the environment around them. Like China’s Three-Gorges Dam contains roughly 28 million cubic meters of concrete. With a little back-of-the-envelope  math, that means the concrete alone would clock in  at around 67 million metric tons.

And that’s not taking into account  all the steel and machinery inside! But if we can count not just the building itself, but what it’s holding back, the Three Gorges Dam… and other dams like it may well be the heaviest structures we’ve ever created. Because it holds back 40  cubic kilometers of water, weighing 40 billion metric tons.  And that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the Bratsk Reservoir in Russia, which is holding 170 billion metric tons of water.

It’s been speculated that big  reservoirs like these contain enough mass to alter how the  Earth wobbles as it spins… like putting just a little extra  weight onto one part of a spinning top. But if you want to talk about  big things humans have made, we may want to abandon the concept of a building entirely and embrace the Earth-altering thing. Because there’s also a very long history of humans making whole islands!

In Scotland and Ireland, neolithic people made small islands called crannogs to live on, often by driving a circle of wooden  stakes into a lake or river bed, then filling in the middle with whatever  was on hand, like rocks or soil. And over in the Aztec  empire, they created floating artificial islands called chinampas for farming. These are still used in Mexico today, and feature woven fences  surrounding piled-up soil.

But of course, if humans are  going to build something, we’re eventually going to build it big. To make the Palm Jumeirah  archipelago off the coast of Dubai, builders had to dredge up and then pile together 120 million cubic meters of sand. Which, depending on the density, would land somewhere around 180 million metric tons!

And something like a quarter  of the Netherlands is what’s called reclaimed land, created  from a combination of pumping water out of low-lying wetlands,  blocking off water with dikes, and sometimes building up land with sand or earth. But of course, the largest  island we’ve ever made is the continent of Africa ‘cause all it  took was building the Suez Canal. With how varied artificial islands are in how they’re made, their size,  and what we do with them, it’s hard to make broad  generalizations about their impact.

But we do know that, kind of by  definition, they involve turning one ecosystem, like a lake bed  or shoreline, into another one. Their presence can also  affect water currents in the rest of the lake or shoreline,  or increase erosion. Luckily, there are also some  positives to artificial islands, like protecting, restoring,  or even creating important ecosystems like mangroves and wetlands.

Not only do they serve as havens for biodiversity, they can help protect human  infrastructure from the ocean. Of course, whether you’re  trying to build a building, or an entire island, you’re  gonna need some machinery. And maybe that’s what you’re really interested in.

It’s one thing to stack a bunch  of blocks on top of one another. But how big can we make something that also has a lot of complicated parts? Danke Babbel for supporting this SciShow video!

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Start speaking a new language  in three weeks with Babbel. Click the link in the description or scan the QR code to get 60% off  your Babbel subscription! One candidate for the heaviest  land vehicle is Bagger 293, a mining machine that weighs  a hefty 14,000 metric tons.

But the heaviest movable object period may very well be the Troll  A Offshore Gas Platform. It clocks in at a whopping 656,000 metric tons. And these big offshore platforms  have some serious engineering behind them, since they need to  be able to withstand the physical force of the ocean, as well as  the corrosive power of seawater.

For example, they’ve got these  giant structures built into them that work kind of like springs,  helping to dissipate the energy of the massive waves that batter the platform. These kinds of offshore platforms  have historically been used for oil extraction. But these days  we’re seeing them increasingly used for wind power instead, which is much cooler.

Of course, once that wind is  captured or that oil is burned the energy still has to be transmitted  to the people who need to use it. And that leads us into another  massive thing we’ve built: our electrical grid. There’s no one single weight for  it, but in the US, just the wires in our three electrical grids stretch  more than 8.8 million kilometers, connecting the roughly 11,000 power plants to homes and businesses across the country.

And these are not light cables.  Truly massive aluminum-steel ones, like you might find in overhead wires, can weigh up to something  around 4 tons per kilometer. Of course, different sizes of cables  are used for different purposes. You don’t need a super-high  capacity monster to just hook your house up to the grid.

But  even so, any weight multiplied by millions of kilometers is going  to end up being a big number. And even if the real average is only,  like, a tenth of the mass of those monster cables, that’s still over three  million tons of electrical cables. And that’s not even counting the power plants, transformers, transmission  towers, and all the other stuff that the system needs to work.

Of course, depending on how you count what’s a part of the electrical grid,  its total mass is changing. Because one of the big  transformations going on right now is finding better ways to  integrate renewable energy. And that often comes from many small generators, like rooftop solar or small wind farms, instead of single massive power plants.

While we’re talking about cables, we may as well shout-out the internet, too. At a typical weight of 1.4 tons per kilometer, there must be something like 1.8 million tons of undersea cables, alone. And that’s all to move itty bitty  particles, like photons and electrons.

Over a decade ago, one physicist  calculated that all the electrons that make up the information  stored on the entire internet have a combined mass equivalent to a strawberry. Lastly, our final example  is another case where we had to build something very large  to handle something very small. One of the largest machines that humanity has ever built is underground,  straddling the border between France and Switzerland.

It’s the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. It’s hard to pin down a  single figure for its total, but we do know some of the individual components. Like, there are 1,200 tons of  electrical cables that power a 27-kilometer long ring of  super powerful electromagnets.

And over 10,000 metric tons  of coolant are needed to keep about 37,000 tons of equipment  at the right temperature. Plus, there are the detectors  that collect the actual data. Like ATLAS which weighs in at  7,000 metric tons, and the CMS.

That’s 14,000 metric tons. The LHC has to be this massive  in order for physicists to learn about some of the tiniest things in  the universe: subatomic particles! And by learning more about  how they work and interact with one another, we’ll get a  clearer picture about all of this.

See, here’s the problem: the  fundamental building blocks of reality as we know it are very tightly  bound up inside regular matter. So we need to hit larger subatomic particles, like protons, very, very hard  to get them to break apart. And that means getting the  protons to move very, very fast.

Scientists can do that using  magnets. The more magnets you have, the faster you can make charged particles go. But the faster they go,  the wider a track you need.

It’s just like a race car track. Too  tight, and the particles fly off course. Technically, you can make particle accelerators small enough to fit on a desk.

But as we’ve looked for ever smaller, rarer, and more fundamental particles, we’ve needed to smash them together ever harder, with even more energy. So over the years, they got bigger and bigger until they reached the massive machines of today. And now, CERN has proposed  building an even bigger particle accelerator to explore even  more extreme particles, like whatever makes up dark matter.

That said, the member states won’t  vote on that proposal until 2028. And if it gets approved, it wouldn’t  be fully operational until the 2070s. So check back in five decades, when SciShow pulls me out of retirement for one final hosting gig.

Sometimes, studying the  biggest, most massive things humans have ever built  means peering into the past. And Sometimes, it means understanding the effects… not always great ones, we’re  having on our world right now. And sometimes, it means harnessing  immense amounts of power all in the name of creating the  future and exploring the universe.

All thanks to some clever engineering. And good project managers who  aren’t afraid of a big job! [♪ OUTRO]