Friday, August 8, 2008

Build a bridge to the moon out of MacBooks


For the price of the Iraq War, we could've bought enough MacBooks for a bridge to the moon 2 MacBooks wide. (Then we could take them down and give eight of them to each American, and one to each Canadian.)

The moon is about 380,000,000 m from the surface of the earth. A MacBook is .325 meters long, so it would take 2.34 billion of them to reach the moon if laid end to end in two rows. At $1099 each, that would cost us $2.57 trillion, which is less than Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes' estimate of $3 trillion for the cost of the Iraq War.

Image used under a Creative Commons license from Jeronimo Palacios.