In article , Louis Scheffer wrote:
(Anonymous) writes:

I recently heard that more man-hours went into landing a man on the
moon than any other single endeavour in human history-- in
particular, the great pyramid and the great wall of china were cited
as requiring far fewer man-hours than the apollo program.

If true, I find it very nice that a modern society could mobilize such
large resourcesfor such a huge undertaking. But is it true??

Without looking up numbers, I doubt it very much. Just as one example,
take the interstate highway system. Like Apollo, it has a more or
less one sentence goal "Connect all the major cities of the USA by
good roads". The total resources spent, both man hours and dollars,
must far exceed the Apollo program.

Indeed. It's not difficult to pick any "project" - "repel the German
invasion", say, or "develop economic nuclear power" - and make it
nebulous enough to have a truly immense scope :-)

My back-of-the-envelope guess suggests around a billion man-hours of
effort - I don't have the time or inclination to dig up solid numbers
just now, but I can play around with it later if you want - for Apollo.
The Great Pyramid is vastly variable wrt assumptions, but maybe an order
of magnitude less?

--
-Andrew Gray