Submarine communication cables are the largest man-made objects, with the longest stretch being over 5,000 miles. However, scientific experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider and IceCube neutrino detector are also large. The Three Gorges Dam in China is the largest man-made object by weight and 3-D volume.
The largest man-made objects in the world are submarine communications cables. The longer stretch from San Francisco to New Zealand, or San Francisco to Japan, stretches over 5,000 miles (8,000km). These submarine cables are typically 2.6 inches (6.6 cm) in diameter and weigh approximately 22 pounds (10 kg) per meter, with a total weight of over 176 million pounds (80,000 tons) over the entire length. That may sound like a lot, but it’s not a lot compared to other man-made objects: For example, the Great Pyramid weighs about 8.3 billion pounds (3.8 million tons), and the Three Gorges Dam in China weighs about 75 billion pounds. (34 million tons).
Excluding other two-dimensional objects such as railway lines, power lines, pipelines and so on, some of the largest man-made objects in the world are scientific experiments. For example, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a 16.5 mi (26.6 km) long circular tunnel, buried between 164 and 574 feet (50 to 175 meters) underground, and includes over 1,600 superconducting magnets. It collides with subatomic particles at up to a fraction of the speed of light and costs between $5 and $10 billion US dollars (USD) to build.
Another large man-made object in the form of a science experiment is the IceCube neutrino detector, located at the South Pole. Composed of an array of optical sensors distributed across strings over 0.62 miles (1 km) long, the total size of the experiment is approximately 0.239 cubic miles (1 cubic km).
Most famously, the largest man-made object by weight and 3-D volume is the Three Gorges Dam, which spans the Yangtze River in China. As mentioned above, the dam weighs approximately 75 billion pounds (34 million tons), has a length of 7,661 feet (2,335 m), a height of 607 feet (185 m), and a width (at the base) of 377.3 feet. (115m). A close runner-up is the Beijing Capital International Airport’s Terminal 3 building, which covers 240 acres (0.97 sq km) and is nearly 2 miles (3.2 km) long.
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