Well, it’s still a fun Fermi calculation problem, anyway.
Let’s see, the Pyramids have been the targets of tourism since at least the original catalogue of wonders of the ancient world, Antipater of Sidon ~140 BC which includes “the great man-made mountains of the lofty pyramids”. So that’s ~2150 years of tourism (2012+140). Quickly checking, Wikipedia says 12.8 million people visited Egypt for tourism in 2008, but surely not all of them visited the pyramids? Let’s halve it to 6 million.
Let’s pretend Egyptian tourism followed a linear growth between 140 BC with one visitor (Antipater) and 6 million in 2012 (yes, world population & wealth has grown and so you’d expect tourism to grow a lot, but Egypt has been pretty chaotic recently), over 2150 years. We can just average that to 3 million a year, which gives us a silly total number of tourists of 2150 * 3 million or 6.45 billion visitors.
There are 138 pyramids, WP says, with the Great Pyramid estimated at 100,000 workers. Let’s halve it (again with the assumptions!) at 50k workers a pyramid, 50,000 * 138 = 6.9m workers total.
This gives us the visitor:worker ratio of 6.45b:6.9m, or 21,500:23, or 934.8:1.
And of course the pyramids are still there, so whatever the real ratio, it’s getting better (modulo issues of maintenance and restoration).
You’d need a heck of a lot more tourism than for Egypt… although apparently there’s quite a range of estimates of deaths, from less than 20,000 a year to more than 200,000 a year. Given the substantially less tourism to the Aztec pyramids (inasmuch as apparently only 2 small unimpressive Aztec pyramids survive, with all the impressive ones like Tenochtitlan destroyed), it’s safe to say that the utilitarian calculus will never work out for them.
It seems to me that any historical event that was both painful to the participants, and interesting to read and learn about after the fact, creates the same dilemma that’s been discussed here. Will World War Two have been a net good if 10,000 years from now trillions of people have gotten incredible enjoyment from watching movies, reading books, and playing videogames that involve WWII as a setting in some way?
The first solution to this dilemma that comes to mind is that ready substitutes exist for most of the entertainments associated with these unpleasant events. If the Aztecs had built their pyramids and then never sacrificed anyone on them it probably wouldn’t hurt the modern tourist trade that much. And if WWII had never happened and thus caused the Call of Duty videogame franchise to never exist, it wouldn’t have a big impact on utility because some cognates of the Doom, Unreal, and similar franchises would still exist (those franchises are based on fictional events, so no one got hurt inspiring them).
In fact, if I was to imagine an alternate human history where no war, slavery, or similar conflict had ever happened, and the inhabitants got all their enjoyment from entertainment media based on fictional conflicts, I think such a world would have a much higher net utility than our own.
Sure—but can you offhand fit an exponential curve and calculate its summation? I’m sure it’s doable with the specified endpoints and # of periods (just steal a simple interest formula), but it’s more work than halving and multiplying.
Well… integral from t0 to t1 of exp(at+b) dt = (exp(at1+b)-exp(a*t2+b))/a i.e. the difference between the endpoints times the time needed to increase by a factor of e… a 6-million-fold increase is about 22.5 doublings (knowing 2^20 = 1 million), hence about 15 factors of e (knowing that ln 2 = 0.7) i.e. about one in 150… hence the total number of tourists is about 1 billion (about six times less than Rhwawn’s estimate—my eyeballs had told me it would be about one third… close enough!)
Well, it’s still a fun Fermi calculation problem, anyway.
Let’s see, the Pyramids have been the targets of tourism since at least the original catalogue of wonders of the ancient world, Antipater of Sidon ~140 BC which includes “the great man-made mountains of the lofty pyramids”. So that’s ~2150 years of tourism (2012+140). Quickly checking, Wikipedia says 12.8 million people visited Egypt for tourism in 2008, but surely not all of them visited the pyramids? Let’s halve it to 6 million.
Let’s pretend Egyptian tourism followed a linear growth between 140 BC with one visitor (Antipater) and 6 million in 2012 (yes, world population & wealth has grown and so you’d expect tourism to grow a lot, but Egypt has been pretty chaotic recently), over 2150 years. We can just average that to 3 million a year, which gives us a silly total number of tourists of 2150 * 3 million or 6.45 billion visitors.
There are 138 pyramids, WP says, with the Great Pyramid estimated at 100,000 workers. Let’s halve it (again with the assumptions!) at 50k workers a pyramid, 50,000 * 138 = 6.9m workers total.
This gives us the visitor:worker ratio of 6.45b:6.9m, or 21,500:23, or 934.8:1.
And of course the pyramids are still there, so whatever the real ratio, it’s getting better (modulo issues of maintenance and restoration).
Maybe those pyramids in Egypt are not so bad, after all.
But with how much tourism you can justify Aztec pyramids, where people were slaughtered?
How many billion tourist should come to be worth to start with them all over again?
You’d need a heck of a lot more tourism than for Egypt… although apparently there’s quite a range of estimates of deaths, from less than 20,000 a year to more than 200,000 a year. Given the substantially less tourism to the Aztec pyramids (inasmuch as apparently only 2 small unimpressive Aztec pyramids survive, with all the impressive ones like Tenochtitlan destroyed), it’s safe to say that the utilitarian calculus will never work out for them.
It seems to me that any historical event that was both painful to the participants, and interesting to read and learn about after the fact, creates the same dilemma that’s been discussed here. Will World War Two have been a net good if 10,000 years from now trillions of people have gotten incredible enjoyment from watching movies, reading books, and playing videogames that involve WWII as a setting in some way?
The first solution to this dilemma that comes to mind is that ready substitutes exist for most of the entertainments associated with these unpleasant events. If the Aztecs had built their pyramids and then never sacrificed anyone on them it probably wouldn’t hurt the modern tourist trade that much. And if WWII had never happened and thus caused the Call of Duty videogame franchise to never exist, it wouldn’t have a big impact on utility because some cognates of the Doom, Unreal, and similar franchises would still exist (those franchises are based on fictional events, so no one got hurt inspiring them).
In fact, if I was to imagine an alternate human history where no war, slavery, or similar conflict had ever happened, and the inhabitants got all their enjoyment from entertainment media based on fictional conflicts, I think such a world would have a much higher net utility than our own.
Big romances have been inspired by much smaller events, it should be noted.
The first approximation which springs in my mind would be an exponential growth rather than a linear one.
Sure—but can you offhand fit an exponential curve and calculate its summation? I’m sure it’s doable with the specified endpoints and # of periods (just steal a simple interest formula), but it’s more work than halving and multiplying.
Well… integral from t0 to t1 of exp(at+b) dt = (exp(at1+b)-exp(a*t2+b))/a i.e. the difference between the endpoints times the time needed to increase by a factor of e… a 6-million-fold increase is about 22.5 doublings (knowing 2^20 = 1 million), hence about 15 factors of e (knowing that ln 2 = 0.7) i.e. about one in 150… hence the total number of tourists is about 1 billion (about six times less than Rhwawn’s estimate—my eyeballs had told me it would be about one third… close enough!)
I’m actually a little surprised that his such gross approximation puts it off by only 6x. For a Fermi estimate that’s perfectly acceptable.