How many people did it take to build the Great Pyramid?
This is very cool to see. The main takeaways for me were:<p>1. It&#x27;s easy to underestimate what is possible when you limit thinking to a short timescale. I think of the cathedrals, temples, mosques, etc. that have been built all over the world, where the people who started the work knew they wouldn&#x27;t live to see it finished, but that didn&#x27;t dissuade them.<p>Or conversely, it&#x27;s easy to overestimate the difficulty of something if you are too constrained by thinking in terms of finishing it relatively quickly.<p>2. Building things does make it easier to build things - and conversely, not building things makes it harder. There is a lot of architectural stuff in our world today, particularly fine masonry and woodwork, that is still common because so much of it was made up through the 1930&#x27;s or so, but which is actually quite difficult to produce today because most of the skilled labor and the industry that supported it is gone.<p>This also reminded me of an article about scientific glasswork, which is similarly dying out[1], and of course more familiar to the HN crowd we know about old technology that was once common and now is difficult to replicate or maintain.<p>Lots to think about.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;local&#x2F;education&#x2F;la-me-caltech-glassblower-20160613-snap-story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;local&#x2F;education&#x2F;la-me-caltech-glassb...</a>