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Rigorous Science

Building a full-sized Lego Earth - what would it look like at various levels?

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Lego representations of Earth have been made at various scales, for example this one:

enter image description here

Suppose Slartibartfast made a full-size Earth from Lego (including the oceans being represented as solid blocks. It is made inside his huge cavern inside Magarathea.

Magrathea is an ancient planet located in orbit around the twin suns Soulianis and Rahm in the heart of the Horsehead Nebula.

It was the home of a new form of specialist industry: custom-made, luxury planet building. Hyperspatial engineers sucked matter through white holes in space to form dream planets - gold planets, square planets, glass planets, platinum planets, soft rubber planets with lots of earthquakes, planets covered with fish - all lovingly made to meet the exacting standards... https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Magrathea

Clearly the gravitational force of the artificial Earth would affect it in some way. Presumably the core would melt but the surface would still consist of individual blocks.

Question

What would a cross-section of this planet look like in terms of layers? At what depth would Lego blocks be welded together by pressure and at what depth would they melt?

Notes

The average Lego density is 0.565 g/cm3 - https://www.wired.com/2016/12/heres-much-lego-brick-stepped-worth/

ABS maximum temperature is 80°C (176°F) and melt at 105°C (221°F) Polycarbonate plastic used for transparent bricks melt at 267°C (512.6°F) https://bricks.stackexchange.com/questions/547/how-much-heat-can-lego-bricks-withstand

Diameter of the Earth = 12.742 million meters - https://www.space.com/17638-how-big-is-earth.html

EDIT For the sake of calculations, let us use the classic brick with 8 knobs, 2×4. It can be assumed to weigh 2.22g

Units in diagram are all in millimetres. enter image description here


Additional Lego and ABS information

ABS Plastic in LEGO - https://legoways.com/abs-plastic-in-lego/

Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) - https://www.makeitfrom.com/material-properties/Acrylonitrile-Butadiene-Styrene-ABS

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/137109. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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