It’s hard to truly grasp the size of famous science fiction megastructures like the Death Star or the Halo ring and basically impossible to understand how big the Millennium Falcon or Starship Enterprise is because they all exist in different universes, which sadly isn’t the same one we exist in. If only we could look up and see the Borge cube or something. Luckily, we can translate the size of sci-fi to something we all understand: the little Lego brick. That 15.8 mm x 3.2 mm piece we’ve all played with.
Sure, millions and billions and trillions aren’t exactly easily visualized concepts either but it’s at least rooted in our real world. Of course, if these structures were to actually be built, they’d need more than just Lego bricks because without a steel frame or glue, they’d just collapse on themselves.
[LEGO Expert] Matija Puzar also alerted us to some real-life LEGO creations to help us with our equations. A man in Austin, Texas, actually built his own fully functional LEGO R2D2 using 16,000 bricks along with a steel frame and a motor from a remote control plane. Our master builder also pointed us in the direction of an actual, working car that was built entirely out of LEGO. Although he was quick to remind us that the plastic LEGO bricks wouldn’t “fancy the temperatures around the engine,” that didn’t deter us! Using the real LEGO car as a basis of comparison, we were able to determine that it would take 573,314 LEGO to build and travel through time with the flying Delorean from “Back to the Future Part 2” and 955,200 LEGO to build and bust ghosts in the Ghostbusters’ Ecto-1. Our master builder also had a friend who built a life-size Tardis from “Doctor Who” with 150,000 LEGO. But, of course, that number would go way up if you built the inside to scale as well. (There are more LEGO on the inside.)