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How many bricks does it take to build a border wall?

on math, stub, trumpus

Lego Trump
Sources: Lego Brick wall, Lego Trump

With Trumpus all over the news about his latest Muslim "travel" ban[1], Russian collusion[2], and of course the wiretapping woes[3], it's probably time to get started on that wall. But let's do it the way that science intended - with Legos!

Brick Dimensions

I'm going to be using the measurements provided by the very helpful Robert Cailliau, who wrote up a page[4] on Lego dimensions including some very lovely diagrams:

Lego Dimensions

Source: Both images from Robert Cailliau's Lego Dimensions page, dimensions in millimeters.

You can see here that a standard 4x2 knob brick would be 31.8 mm wide, 9.6 mm high, and 15.8 mm deep.

Trump's Border Wall

According to some fake news sources[5],[6], the proposed wall will be:

  • 1250 mi long (2012 km)
  • 40 ft high (above ground) (12.20 m)
  • 7 ft deep (underground) (2.13 m)
  • 10 inches thick (254 mm)

What does this look like in Legos?

  • 6.327x107 Legos long
  • 1270 Legos high (above ground)
  • 222 Legos deep (underground)
  • 17 Legos thick

(All values rounded up to the nearest whole Lego.)

That's 1,604,780,280,000 or about 1.6 trillion Legos in total. Some more Lego stats:

  • Sticking with the basics, if the only colors used in the wall are white, red, yellow, blue, and green we'll need about 321 billion of each color.
  • The mass of each 4x2 Lego is approximately 2.304 g (0.081 oz)[7]. This would make our border wall a total of 3.697x1012 kg (8.151x109 lbs).
  • At a guestimated price of ~$10/lb for Legos, that puts our border wall at $81.51bn (USD) in materials alone.

And, according to the Gizmodo[7] article, it looks like we can create a ~2 mi high wall before the Legos begin to deform under their own weight. So we could easily make our wall much, much higher to keep the Bad Hombres out.

Of course then we'd be trapping the Orange Hombres in, but that's outside of the scope of this post.

References

  1. Barrett, Devlin. "Trump Administration Files Notice It Will Appeal Ruling against Second Version of Travel Ban." The Washington Post. WP Company, 17 Mar. 2017. Web. 20 Mar. 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-administration-files-notice-it-will-appeal-ruling-against-second-version-of-travel-ban/2017/03/17/6fe4b33a-0b1f-11e7-b77c-0047d15a24e0_story.html.
  2. Wright, Austin, and Martin Matishak. "Comey Confirms FBI Probe into Trump-Russia Collusion." POLITICO. Politico, 20 Mar. 2017. Web. 20 Mar. 2017. https://secure.politico.com/story/2017/03/adam-schiff-trump-twitter-wiretapping-russia-ties-236249.
  3. Collinson, Stephen. "Trump's Wiretapping Accusation Comes to a Head at Comey Hearing." CNN. Cable News Network, 20 Mar. 2017. Web. 20 Mar. 2017. http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/19/politics/house-intelligence-committee-hearing-russia-wiretapping/.
  4. Cailliau, Robert. "Lego Dimensions: the Measurements." Lego Dimensions: the Measurements. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2017. http://www.robertcailliau.eu/Lego/Dimensions/zMeasurements-en.xhtml.
  5. Reuters. "Trump Border 'wall' Could Cost $21.6 Billion, Take 3.5 Years to Build: Internal Report." NBC News. Reuters, 10 Feb. 2017. Web. 20 Mar. 2017. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-border-wall-could-cost-21-6-billion-take-3-n719286.
  6. Bryan, Bob. "Trump Is about to Sign off on a Border Wall with Mexico - Here's How Much It Could Cost." Business Insider. Business Insider, 25 Jan. 2017. Web. 20 Mar. 2017. http://www.businessinsider.com/bernstein-note-of-cost-of-trump-mexican-border-wall-executive-action-2017-1.
  7. Condliffe, Jamie. "How Tall Can a Lego Tower Be Before It Crushes Itself?" Gizmodo. Gizmodo.com, 04 Dec. 2012. Web. 20 Mar. 2017. http://gizmodo.com/5965451/how-tall-can-a-lego-tower-be-before-it-crushes-itself.