Could We Actually Build the Great Pyramids Today

The Great Pyramid of Khufu. Defining symbol of ancient Egypt. The oldest and biggest of the pyramids at Giza. The Great Pyramid is one of the ancient seven wonders that still exist. A symbol of secrets, mysteries, and the lost knowledge of the ancients. But after 4,000 years, it sort of looks like a big pile of rocks. You've heard all about how the ancient Egyptians might have done it, or ancient aliens. But how would we go about it if we built it today? Very simple. Just show me the money. We can build anything you like. Here's the plan. We're rounding up the heaviest equipment, the latest technology, and all the money it would take. What have we learned? What have we lost? What have we forgotten? We're pitting modern machines against classic rock. And Egypt's most outspoken rock stars think we're in denial. You will never be able to build a pyramid like this today. Don't tell mummy. We're cooking up a 21st century pyramid scheme. We're on the job site of one of the world's greatest wonders. And we're wondering, how long would it take? How much would it cost? How many workers would we need? Could we even do it? If we built it today. Cairo, capital of Egypt. Its skyline dwarfed by the pyramids of the Giza Plateau, looming monuments to some of Egypt's most powerful rulers. The pyramid of Pharaoh Khufu stands above all the rest. If you can build a pyramid, you can do anything. Among the largest constructions the world has ever seen. It's big. It's really big. It's really huge. I'm talking about 147 metres high, OK? And about 12 acres. It's really huge. How high? More than 40 storeys. How wide? 10 football fields. 200 levels of stone. A total of 6 million tonnes. Each block as big as an SUV. The stones of the Great Pyramid are 2,300,000 blocks. What about the blocks? 2,300,000 blocks. The average of the weight of the blocks, some blocks about two tonnes, and some blocks, guess what, 60 tonnes. A marvel of management, mathematics, and muscle power. The source of pride to modern-day Egyptians. A testament to one of the longest-lasting civilizations in history. I always say that building a pyramid built Egypt. Archaeologist Zahi Hawass literally wrote the book on ancient Egypt. For the Egyptians to build the pyramid, they had to know about architecture, engineering, technology, and therefore, they were able to do it. Working here at Giza around the pyramid, inside the pyramid, make me always thinking what I have to do better for this place. Wael Fathi Morsi is the antiquities inspector on this celebrated site. I believe that building the pyramid was a national project for all of Egypt, because every Egyptian man or woman, they are participating in building the pyramid. If Egyptians could do this over 4,000 years ago, we could do better today, right? Not so fast. The people who know pyramids best claim this kind of know-how, artistry, and inspiration just doesn't exist anymore. I always say, Michelangelo, when he designed this beautiful church, he believed in it. Can any artist do it today like what he did? No, no way. No, if you bring all the architects of the whole world together to come to Giza Plateau, and they built a pyramid like this, they will never be able to do it. But this modern mega-developer boasts he could build something better. If he had a pyramid-high pile of cash. We can build it definitely better, last longer, and probably more sexier and more sophisticated. Armed with new technology, Francis Ferris says he could create a modern icon to rival this relic. I think if we incorporate the knowledge we have today in the technology, we can do it much better, much faster, and much more in an interesting way that reflect the culture of today. The original pyramid builders have all followed their pharaoh to the underworld. So mum's the word on how they pulled this off. We've got to start from scratch. Designing a cutting-edge monumental take more than a few gold pieces. I'm willing to say we're talking about billions of dollars. Costs could go right through the roof, especially if the inside of this vault isn't as simple as the outside. So what architectural treasure lies buried in the Great Pyramid? Turns out, it's no palace. Squat passageways lead to the chamber built for the pharaoh's remains. But this mummy dearest and his treasures were snatched by tomb raiders. So we don't have to recreate a home for the rich and famous. Heck, we don't even need a bathroom. I mean, let's think about it a little bit. Is this just a lone standing object that doesn't require plumbing? You're not going to have people in it. We can skip the plumbing. Maybe we can skip most of the electricity. It really depends on the utility of what you're trying to build. So it's what's outside that counts. Let's not get cocky. This is a deceptively simple design, the size of a mountain, intended for someone who was both ruler and high priest. The king, when he took the throne, it was in his mind one thing. I want to build my tomb. And building a tomb, they have to plan everything. We've got to plan everything too. It's going to cost a king's ransom. But before we can build the budget, we need to figure out what he'd make it out of and how he'd build it. This old pyramid could use a modern makeover. Today's pyramids are fashioned from glass and steel. But they could all come crashing down. We're searching for solid ground so our structure won't cave in. Moving rocks around the world is a logistical nightmare. How long is that going to take? Where are we going to get the right people? Can we even pull it off? I can get 3,000 people to build a pyramid for 20 years. Can you convince them nowadays? I don't think so. It's a king-sized job lining up all the parts, pieces, and people we need if we built it today. We're imagining the recreation of the Great Pyramid of Giza if we built it today. But here's a question. Why would we? 4,000 years ago, Egyptians believed that bodies needed to be preserved for the afterlife. The Great Pyramid was a five-star stopover, its sides designed so Khufu could saunter skyward. Modern Egyptians may enjoy this old way of getting around, but those old ideas, they're history. What would possibly motivate us to take on a job like this today? It's completely different. You are talking about two different periods. Khufu, national project, the tomb, the pyramid, represent the dignity and the power. But today, why? Why not? Because we are missing the motive, the religious motive. This is called the house of God. Ashraf Mohi is the general director of the Giza Plateau. He says the pharaohs were more than politicians. They were religious leaders. Building the pyramids was a national project. So all the Egyptians were participating to build the house of God. What about today? There's no motive. That's the whole thing. Why we cannot do it today? Because we don't believe what the ancient Egyptians believed. No question it's become a material world. We're going to need somebody with a God complex to get behind our modern pyramid. Or someone who's up for the challenge of a lifetime. There's a lot of ego involved in building a structure that will last for thousands of years. People like to leave legacies. People like to leave their marks on this planet and make a difference and make a change. And that's why they build the things and big structures and things that stimulates the mind, you know? If we were going to build something like this today, we would also want it to send a message of some type. And the message would either be a modern one, look at us, or it would be an ancient one. Here's something that we built to model what they did for the reason that they did it, again, to create this heaven-earth connection, to try to send a metaphysical message rather than, hey, all this money and all this time could have gone for something practical, but we decided that wasn't a good idea. We're just going to go build a pyramid. You'd want it to mean more than that. Everybody want to do better. They want to be the first to do it. They want to be doing things bigger. And that's our human nature and where we're evolving at this day and age to challenge ourselves and go further. And that's why somebody would dream of building a bigger structure or a lasting legacy. So we're going big or we're going home. We want to build a wonder for the modern world. And that mission will guide every decision we make about our modern-day greater pyramid. Where are we going to build it? What are we going to make it out of? How are we going to build this thing? How long is it going to take? How many people will we need? And how much will the whole thing cost? But before we start building, it's all about location, location, location. If we want to build it in the most exclusive pyramid neighborhood, the Giza Plateau is it. But buyer beware. This is a World Heritage site. We'd have to cut through enough red tape to wrap 1,000 mummies. And we're going to try. But we have a bigger worry about our site. Is this really terra firma? Yeah, it's supported three great pyramids for over 4,000 years. But are we pushing beyond the limits of this old plateau? You could say that's anyone's sarcophagus. Before we go making the wrong guess, is this even a level playing field? The ancient Egyptians leveled all the base. It's wrong. It wasn't a flat, it was a mound in there. Other experts say the ancient Egyptians built on bedrock. If you go inside the pyramid, you will see remains of the mound. It was built in a mound. It's like a hump. A hump? A bump? We don't want to get this wrong. If we screw this up, we can end up with something like this. The infamous Bent Pyramid, built for Khufu's dad, Sneferu. Maybe better to be forgotten than remembered like this. The angle had to be changed mid-construction because the pyramid was starting to collapse. We don't want our modern pyramid to do a humpty-dumpty. We're insisting on a stable base for our pyramid. We're going to call in the best engineers in the world. Some of the top guns are at work in Canada on what's going to be the tallest building in the country. Over 80 floors of high-end retail and condos. That calls for a sure footing. If I was going to build a pyramid today, the first thing, as with any structure that you want to build, the key is making sure you have a good foundation. The key to that is making sure you do a proper geotechnical investigation to determine the strength and distribution of those good soils or rock below the site. Geotechnical engineers like Jason Crowder know before anything goes up, something must go down. My job is to look at the actual resistance of the soils or rock and factor those loads or resistances down. That means predicting how sturdy the ground is and designing the right foundation. A good foundation provides a level base and distributes the weight evenly. Despite it being 1,000 feet tall and a very large building, the loads that we're carrying are actually quite a bit less in terms of the gravity loads than what you'd see in the pyramids. Kevin McLean is a structural engineer. He makes sure the things we build don't fall down. Our building's self-weight is around 150,000 metric tons, whereas the pyramids obviously are quite a lot heavier than that. He's got that right. Our foundation, at least 6 million tons. So you wouldn't want to build it on a peat bog or in loose sands or soils, things like that. You want a solid foundation. So very much like what we've done here, we've carried the loads very far down onto bedrock. In the case of a pyramid, you'd want to build that right on bedrock or right on very dense soils. So we're in luck. The ground under the Giza Plateau is solid limestone. Even though our new pyramid will be heavier than this skyscraper in Toronto, it should hold. If it needs to be shored up, we can count on modern engineering. Why don't we construct our new pyramid out of the same rock it will sit on? That's how they did it during ancient Egypt's fourth dynasty. When they built the Great Pyramid, they sourced local. The Egyptians, when they came to choose Giza Plateau, why? They found it's a part of the Mokattam Formation. The stones are divided to three levels. Take a look at the plateau's neighborhood cat, the sphinx. Its head is carved from stone from the Mokattam Hills in Cairo. Layer number one used to be an ocean reef. Hard to believe, 50 million years ago, this arid land was underwater. The middle of our rock sandwich? Soft shale. And it's all topped off with Egypt's hardest limestone. Identical to what towers above and sits below one of the most visited historic sites in the world. They found this is a perfect place because the third level of the Mokattam Formation stones are the best quality of stones in Egypt. And that's what they used in building the pyramid. The Great Pyramid was once encased in shining white stone. But that was loosened by an earthquake and repurposed as building material for nearby mosques and fortresses. After 4,000 years, the Great Pyramid of Giza isn't looking so great. In fact, it looks like it's ready to hit rock bottom. That won't do for our imaginary client with a pharaoh-sized ego. We're talking more than immense. We're talking immortal. If limestone isn't up to the task, what material might be mighty enough? If we built it today. We're asking ourselves how we would build our own version of one of the most iconic structures the world has ever seen. It turns out we're not the first people to ask that question. Architects have incorporated the shape in everything from the Louvre in Paris to the Luxor Hotel on the Strip in Vegas. The end of the 21st century marked the start of a post-modern pyramid boom. A new big pointy structure seemed to pop up somewhere every few months. Only these New Age pyramids are made of glass and steel. Yeah, can't wait to find out how that went. Check out this pyramid in the longtime home of the pharaoh of rock and roll, Memphis, Tennessee. It's a project that was inspired by another Memphis, Memphis, Egypt, just outside Cairo. It was supposed to be a supersized stadium on the banks of the Mississippi, a river almost as long as the River Nile. There was a lot of excitement as it was going up, but then it opened. When the pyramid opened in 1991, it actually flooded on the very first night that it was opened to the public. Today, the only sports fans it attracts are the ones who like to fish, and they don't have to go far to find a catch. Every time the river floods, the pyramid does too. When the pyramid was an arena, it was known as the Tomb of Doom, and I think that for Memphians that were here in the 90s and early 2000s, it will forever be the Tomb of Doom. Doomed to flood and flail. Let's face it, it was the wrong pyramid in the wrong place at the wrong time. The city's basketball team headed for high ground in 2004. Three years later, the whole thing was shut down. Even Elvis would have left the building. Demolition loomed, but a new tenant decided to go with the flow. They built a water feature right in. The 500,000 square feet of the pyramid has been transformed into a retail destination of Bass Pro Shops at the pyramid, which includes several swamp features, lots of animals that are inside. We have a full live exhibits team that cares for all of these animals. We have a bowling alley, a 300-foot elevator that is the tallest freestanding elevator in the world, and a hotel. So right now we're walking onto what used to be the arena floor. We used to have LeBron James here. We had the Rolling Stones play here. As you can tell, it looks nothing like an arena floor anymore. You can see these swamp features, which may or may not have been there when the arena flooded back in 1991. The fade of Tennessee's Tomb of Doom may be darkly funny, but this would be no joke if it happened near the banks of the River Nile. The construction materials used to create the Memphis Pyramid are predicted to last 150 years. The savings would make our pyramid a steal, but a steel pyramid? Not good enough. We want our pyramid to last at least 4,000 years, just like Khufu's. Hey, our dream developer, Zigo, may be so big, he'll build a pyramid that lasts even longer. To give it longevity, I would stick to the granite or the stone if you want it to last 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 years. I think my preference would be to use stone, natural stone. But building for eternity doesn't come cheap, or happen fast. If we want to talk the talk, we've got to walk the walk, like an Egyptian. Our stone has to rock on. It's got to endure the increasing wrath of our weather. Take a look at City Hall in Calgary, Canada. This heritage building is currently undercover. It's constructed of sandstone. Over a century of harsh Canadian winters has taken its toll. 100 years is a good length of time, but it's nothing compared to the 4,000 years of the Pyramid at Giza. Daryl Bell is the Director of Facility Management at the City of Calgary. We're just going into a major rehabilitation now. Every single stone here has to be doctored or ditched. Treatments can range all the way from a very basic clean all the way through to a complete replacement. When it was built, Calgary was known as the Sandstone City. But today, the quarries of the world are our candy shop. If we strut in with enough cash... We don't build with stone much anymore because of the expense of extracting it from the ground. Primarily, that's one of the reasons why we don't see so many stone buildings. The other one is the skilled workers that we used to have hundreds of years ago no longer exist because times have moved on and construction methodologies are now more on steel and concrete and glass. Get this. One of the oldest professions is not what you think. It's stone masonry. The only real difference is how you extract the stone and cut it. So now we have mechanical methods of taking the stone from the ground. That makes it much quicker. And we have big cutting plants that can shape the stones off-site and then bring them in. The skill of stone masonry remains a hands-on skill with hammers and chisels and compasses for curves. So it really has changed very, very little over the time, actually, over the period. Calgary is an oil town. The boom times have financed a forest of high-rise architecture in the city's downtown. Alongside it, the old city hall is more of a bust. We've said it before. We're going to need a harder rock. It's got to be able to take abuse for at least 4,000 years. But where are we going to get it? How are we going to move it? And what's it all going to cost if we built it today? We're imagining how we'd build a new pyramid that will overshadow the Great Pyramid at Giza. We want to build it on the renowned Giza Plateau. And we know it's going to be made of stone sturdy enough to withstand drastic desert weather conditions. For natural stones, I would say that sandstones, limestones, and granites would be the most commonly used. For a building stone, granite has been used for centuries, for millennia, and will continue to be used, I'm sure. Sandstone isn't up to snuff, not in a world of wind, water, and acid rain. Limestone isn't much better. We want our new pyramid to last longer than the Sphinx's nose did. What about granite? It's an igneous rock that makes up most of the Earth's continental crust. It's stronger than marble, and so good-looking. Between a sedimentary-style rock or an igneous rock, you'd definitely be better off using granite to build the pyramids, from erosional purposes mainly, from look. So, we're going to splurge on granite. But we're going to need a lot of it. Experts estimate the Great Pyramid was built with between 1 million and 2.3 million blocks. So, let's be on the safe side. We'll figure on 2.3 million blocks to build our new, improved structure. To source a couple million blocks of granite, we're going to need a reliable supplier with a bottomless pit. What you're looking at is the deepest granite quarry hole in the world. Geologists believe this deposit extends 16 kilometers. That's twice as high as Mount Everest. The Barrie Quarry, it started over 200 years ago. It started small, but it grew very fast. Barrie, Vermont, is the granite capital of the world. It's also a long way from Egypt. The stone here is in demand around the world, for statues, state houses, and tombstones. If we were to build a pyramid today, how would we do it? I think the logistic, aside from the logistic, definitely build it out of bare gray. Bare gray is the known granite for a monument. Since we're building a monument, it would be the stone of choice to put on the pyramid. The pyramids are, what, 4,500 years, and they're still standing, so the limestone was not a bad choice. I would say, though, that to build it in granite, the life expectation of the product will be just enhanced by a lot. Granite is much stronger, much... It will last to whatever climate you put them into. If we polish our bare gray granite, we can get the lavish look we're going for. Our pyramid needs to be as well-dressed as the Great Pyramid of Giza once was. But beauty is as beauty does. Our granite is more durable than the limestone used to dress the pyramids of Giza. It can easily be cut to our exact dimensions, and we can sand it to equal the elegance of the ancient Egyptians. But 6 million tons of stone from a single quarry is a big ask. At the current rate of production, they can only pull and polish two pyramid-sized slabs a day. That means if we built the Great Pyramid today from buried granite, we would monopolize the supply until the year 2050. If you're in the market for a countertop or a tombstone, take a number. Imagine taking a project like this would almost be impossible for the simple reason that you could not devote all your production and your expertise to something that in 20 years or 30 years from now would be gone and all your other business would be left aside. So our plan is going to create a lot of cranky customers. What if we spread our business around? There are hundreds of stone quarries worldwide. Our super developer figures we can buy our way out of this one. The biggest challenge I see is sourcing the stone. For that, I have a simple solution. I mean, instead of going to a single source, you can scout the globe and find stone in different continents and have them all quarries work simultaneously on producing the size required and get it all shipped or flown to the location. Flown? This project is shaping up to be a money pit as big as the Bury Quarry. And we still haven't figured out how we'd move all of that rock or how we'd put it together if we built it today. We're envisioning a new pyramid. Bigger, stronger, better looking. Let's just say it, greater than the Great Pyramid. Our location, Egypt's Giza Plateau. Good enough for Pharaoh Khufu, good enough for us. And to make it last, we're going to build it out of solid granite. And if we want to finish it in fewer than 25 years, we're going to have to get it there from quarries all around the world. How's that going to work? For starters, we've budgeted for 2.5 million stone blocks, cut to fit. At $1,300 each, our total cost? $3.25 billion. The stone for the exterior of the Great Pyramids came from the country's finest quarry in Tura. It was brought by barge along the Nile. The monoliths of granite for the interior chambers were transported by water too, from Aswan, over 800 kilometers upriver. You can imagine Giza Plateau 5,000 years ago. Stones coming from Aswan, granite entering, they're counting. Stones coming from Tura, they're counting. Workmen are coming, going out. You can really think that Giza Plateau 5,000 years ago was like the port of New York, busy. We're talking crazy busy. This was once the largest construction site in history. It was also a great inland port. To get granite to our job site, we need to pass through the country's biggest modern port, Alexandria. We'll take advantage of its massive container terminal. It would take three hours to haul it by truck, and that's on a good day. Some people say the shipping container is the greatest invention of the 20th century. Thousands of ships transport more than one million containers through the port of Alexandria each year. Stuff these containers with stone blocks, in a single year, you've got enough to build three pyramids. The shipping part is actually the easy part. The logistic of this we have, we're shipping already a lot of blocks to Asia and Europe. Move a great pyramid's worth of rock halfway around the world? That could be a budget buster. We're estimating half a billion for six million tons of stone. That averages out to just 85 bucks per ton shipped. Try to get that deal from the post office. Now that we know how we'll get our materials in place, we need to put together our construction crew. We want the best and brightest for this job. It was the same in Khufu's time. Historians used to think that enslaved people built the pyramids, but Zahi Awas proved that theory dead wrong. He discovered the tombs of the people who really did the job. We are here in front of the important discovery that happened in Egypt. The discovery of the tombs of the pyramid builders. The builders of the pyramids were not slaves. The builders of the pyramids were Egyptians. Egyptians who got a decent burial. The lower symmetry here is for the workmen who moved the stones, and the upper symmetry is for the technicians. So, no free labor here. The Great Pyramid was constructed by an estimated 20,000 paid workers. And we're talking trained workers, who enjoyed a beverage or two after a hard day's work. These were craftsmen. They were sort of guilds, if we can use an anachronistic term. But this is what they did for a living. It was actually a good job. It got you out of some really worse jobs. They were workers, and we gave them salaries. Beer, bread, and salted fish. Being a pyramid builder was an esteemed sort of task. I mean, this is an important project. You're not going to put some hack on it. You're going to have people who know what they're doing and their skill. You can look at the tombs built from mud brick, and also built from what's left over of building the pyramids. They saved chunks of limestone, basalt, granite, to support their tombs. And no artifacts found in any tomb except beer jars. Because workmen, they loved to drink beer in the afterlife. There are 600 graves here. That's three deaths per every hundred workers. That's not going to go over well in a modern construction site. We want to ensure our workers' lives and their livelihoods. To do that, our budget has to include a competitive wage, plus benefits including vacation and insurance against injury and death. So let's do some math. 20,000 workers for five years at today's wages. That's $10 billion in labor costs. We're thinking we could slash the number of workers to just 1,000 by relying on modern machines and technology. If we factor in engineers and architects, we're looking at an average six-figure salary. So we're budgeting $100 million for the 1,000 people we'll employ over the duration of the project. If we're going to build our pyramid with a team only 1 20th the size of the ancient workforce, they need the very best tools and technology. Our rock will arrive on site, pre-cut to our exact specifications, by automated wire saws like this one, made of the hardest material on earth, diamonds. They'll slice through granite like a steak knife through tenderloin. Just a continuous loop so you can make it the size that you want to to fit the cut that you have to do. We can make cuts up to 100 feet long by 40 feet high. The limitation of the wire is almost limitless. But this saw needs water to keep its cool. Friction makes it hotter than desert sand. It takes just a few minutes to levitate a 10-ton slab, shaped to perfection by space-age diamond jewelry. At our modern facility, it's a one-stop shop. The processing plant here in Barrie, we do the mausoleum, monument, and surface plate for the industrial product needs. At the plant, the sawing process, the polishing is there, the cutting, carving, sandblasting. And here's where we use all that geometry we learned in high school. Our stones have to be cut to a precise angle to create a consistent slope all the way to the peak. After we get the stones cut and shipped from all over the world, there's some assembly required. Once you have the plans, once you have the stone source, it all fits like a Lego. Like, every stone would be numbered. It's a lot of planning before you get to that stage, but that's the way to do it. Then it's implementing and following the plans and putting every stone where it belongs, and that's the quickest way, and that's how I would tackle it. We're ready to do the heavy lifting. With the location, materials, logistics, and labor all figured out, we're guessing this job could be done in less than five years. Will the final price tag be enough to make a mummy turn over in its chamber? We're about to do the final cost report if we built it today. So you want to build a pyramid to rival the master builders of ancient Egypt. What would it take? We're imagining a mausoleum for a client with a pharaoh-sized ego made of solid granite to last millennia. This pyramid scheme calls for 1,000 workers over five years, operating the biggest and best machines. So let's do it. Our geotechnical team advised we level the foundation. Phase one, flatten all the mounds. The ancient Egyptians toiled without wheels, cranes, gasoline engines, or electricity. All they had was a little common sense and a lot of brute strength. The ancient Egyptians used sledges to move the stones, and they faced a problem because, you know, heavy stones, the stones weight like two tons, three tons, something like that. The Egyptians did have a trick or two. They used water to wet the desert sand. When it hardened, they had the perfect sledge highway. We'll use heavy-duty loaders to lay down the first two levels of stone. Then we're going to have to steal a move out of the ancient Egyptian playbook. We have lots of theories about how they could build the pyramid. So actually it was by ramp. They make a ramp from sands, and this ramp, it goes up in a circular way around the pyramid. So they start to build the pyramid from inside. They build the passages, chambers, the tunnels, and they're going up course by course, level by level, until they reach the top. We don't know what this ancient ramp looked like. We're going to have to improvise to get our granite up more than 200 levels. For sure, there was at least one external ramp. Not to the top, again, because you just have the problem of the materials. You're using more to do that than build the pyramids, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's not practical. But at the very least, some form of external ramp. Our ramp will circle the outside of the pyramid, but that can only take us so high. Our capstone is still out of reach. We got this. We'll do the rest of the job as if it were a skyscraper. In terms of lifting materials, you'd want to have a very large crane. You would do that with one or two or four cranes on a large site, making sure they don't interfere with each other. With a crane that's capable of picking up 50, 60, 70 metric ton pieces, which is an extremely large crane. And you would be able to lift one or two of those stones at a time with today's modern cranes. Certainly when you think about building the pyramids in those times, stacking rough cut stones, even with a crane, is just one piece of the puzzle. Ensuring that everything fits together and that it's stable would be extremely challenging even with modern construction machinery. Cranes can lift high, but this build is wide too. It sits on more land than a city block. Ten levels from the top, we're stuck. Our cranes don't have the wingspan to reach the center of the pyramid. Look up, way up. We're going to use aerial cranes to fly in the final stones. That is going to drive the budget sky high. But there won't be any skimping on the ribbon-cutting ceremony for this masterwork. We'll invite the whole planet to celebrate the completion of our greater pyramid. They'll watch as our helicopter flies in the crowning touch. Our pyramid-shaped capstone. When they finished building the pyramid, it was the most important thing in the life of the ancient Egyptians. And the king would come with the viziers and the people in a big celebration, watching the workmen putting the capstone above the pyramid. When they put the capstone above the pyramid, it meant that the pyramid was finished. It'll be a party on the plateau not seen since the 26th century BC. We did it. We built it on the renowned Giza Plateau. We made it out of two and a half million blocks of the finest granite shipped from all over the world. We built it with modern ramps, cranes, and helicopters. We did it with a team of a thousand workers in five years. So, how's that all going to add up? We asked our mega-developer to crunch the final numbers. I would say, give or take around maybe $5 billion. And schedule-wise, I would say probably about five years. But aren't we forgetting something? If we want to build in Egypt, next to the great pyramid, real estate costs are going to blow up our whole budget. What if we throw in an extra $5 billion? We could still pull this off. That's a lot of cash to your typical beer-drinking pyramid builder. But there are more than 2,000 billionaires alive in our world today. There's got to be one who would pay the price to see their name etched in eternal stone. Pharaoh Khufu didn't live long enough to see his pyramid become one of the seven wonders of the world. What might our new pyramid become after its modern patron was dead and memorialized? We can imagine how we'd build a new great pyramid. But it's harder to envision what it might mean to future generations. If we ponder the question, what do the pyramids mean today? I think they tell us a lot about human ingenuity, human aptitude, human skill. Basically, that we're pretty smart, okay, and we can accomplish a lot collectively. Today, instead of us trying to do it today, maybe the most important thing, we should learn from those people. The great pyramid was created without free labor or the aid of modern machines. It was the result of the cleverness and artistry of an ancient civilization. It's not just a monument to a leader. It's the immortal legacy of 20,000 craftspeople, tradespeople, and laborers. It's a testimony to the value of hard work, determination, and the shared beliefs of a nation. Dreaming about building a new pyramid reminds us of how much we can achieve by working together. If we built it today.