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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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240 million laptops stacked on top of each other is not going anywhere close to the moon, this is a masterclass in hyperbole.
How many laptops before the bottom-most laptop fails from the pressure?
If the bottom laptop is a Dell Latitude I think they don’t recommend stacking them at all, but with HP Elitebooks I think we got away with stacks about 15-20 high before we had the risk of getting damaged screens. Probably 10x that before structural failure, but they’d more than likely compress down instead of one side before the other.
...as if the point ever neared actually doing it..?
The thought of stacking them reminded me of this: https://www.brothers-brick.com/2012/12/05/how-many-lego-bricks-stacked-vertically-would-crush-the-bottom-brick/
If you assume they're all 13" wide laptops and stacked them on their side to get maximum height per unit, you'd still fall 305,752 km short of the average lunar distance. You normally only see this level of hyperbole in the estimated street value cops give for drugs they seize, pretty impressive.
I get the reason for hyperbole, I just hate when it’s so clickbaity. I wish they would just be more honest with us. If you assume they’re all small form factor Dell Optiplex 3070 desktops, you could make a cube of computers as tall as the Burj Khalifa.
And even if the 240 million laptops were all 24" ultra wide behemoths, that's still only ~146,304 km; not even half the average distance to the moon.
I wouldn't even call the article hyperbole, but if we take the author in good faith, then they're just terrible at math.
It could never reach the moon, the tower would fall over much sooner.
Dang... Was hoping to kill two birds with one stone and solve that space elevator thing too...
/s