Not that I just found out but I'm very much still disappointed. In so many ways. The germans are going to build a mountain, a tiny silly one, but still a mountain. http://www.the-berg.de/
What disappoints me is that a friend and I had the exact same idea some 5+ years ago. Why didn't we go through with it? We could have been known as the mountain kings or similar all over Europe. Sweet. And sour.
Actually it wasn't exactly the same idea. We would have made a decent mountain. 4 km high. At least. Making it possible to go skiing much of the year. And since we are Danes and Jutlanders we (with a bit of help) would have placed the mountain in Jutland, which is basically an enourmous, in danish terms, piece of flatlands. This would surely have put Denmark on the ski-map, if such exists.
Still, the ideas are pretty close. So why didn't we build the damn thing?
Well none of us knew or know anything about building anything. But both of us seemed to like the process of estimating. Especially estimating things that we know nothing of. So how do you go about building mountains? And how much time does it take to build?
The mountain we chose was the old school solid one. Build out of dirt, rocks and everything else you get when digging up dirt, rocks and everything else. Building is then accomplished by tossing more of this on top of the already build mountain. Problem solved. So the difficult part is really finding out how much time it takes. Here is one estimate. It might be close to our original estimate. I think so.
We need 1 mountain, 4 km high, with an inclination of approximately 10 degrees. That should hopefully make skiing ok. Mountains are sort of cone formed, but the volume of a cone is sort of hard to remember or recreate when you are uninterested. And finding the radius of a cone is sort of the same business. So instead we go for the good old cube. One guess, try waving your hands for inspiration, is that a cube with sides of 4 km might have somewhat the same volume as the mountain cone. That is 64 cubic km.
Having determined the volume needed, we need some truck drivers. And trucks to move them around. I only know a few truck drivers, if any at all. And even fewer trucks. But I guess you could easily get 1000 trucks down at the big truck station. And put 3000 truck drivers in them. Making them operable 24 hours a day. How big are trucks I hear me ask, let's say 5 by 5 by 20 meters. 500 cubic meters. Or 0.0000005 cubic km.
So, assuming we can dig freely (we might have to ask someone about this) somewhere nearby, Jutland, Funen or Schleswig, a truck might deliver 10 truck loads each day.
64 cubic km divided by 0.0000005 cubic km per truck yields 128,000,000 truck loads. I guess.
The truckers do 10,000 truck loads a day, yielding 12800 days of building. Or approximately 30+ years.
As I recall, we didn't build the mountain mostly due to the above, who wants to wait 30 years for anything. And I think we had other reasons to. I recall I had soccer practice later that evening. I don't think we did an estimate of the price of building the mountain, but I imagine that is not negligible.
In fact I think we ended with 80+ years in our original estimate making it even more hopeless. But I also recall we settled for just a quarter of a mountain. That might also be a viable option now.
I guess construction engineers and everyone else might have better estimates or methods for building. But that's not the point. I guess.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
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