Agreed, and since Rushmore isn’t the largest bas relief sculpture in the world (that would be Stone Mountain, GA) I suppose it wouldn’t qualify at all.
Even the carving at Stone Mountain is only about 12,000 sq meters, and its deepest cut is only 3.7 meters deep.
If we include roads, then what is the longest road?
If memory serves me correctly, the Pan-American Highway may be a good candidate for this.
For that matter, could we consider the entire Interstate Highway System as a structure? It is contiguous (excepting the portions in Alaska and Hawaii, of course).
Of course, the OP specified ‘thing’ not ‘structure’. Is a city a thing? I think so. This makes the question almost meaningless, and almost certainly unanswerable. That is a bit disappointing since it seemed at first glance to be something you might be able to look up in a table of ‘really heavy things’.
I think we want to find a way to exclude extended systems. What about the telecommmunication and electrical systems, spanning the globe and connecting computers, servors, televisions, and technically just about every house and building outside of the third world. That’s got to weigh a lot. I leave it as an exercise to the reader…
My take on this would be that this is similar to the old myth about the Great Wall being the only structure visible from space. It’s long been debunked (from higher altitudes you can’t see it with the naked eye, and when yoz go down to alitudes where you can see, you can see lots of other man-made structures as well), but it’s still around. Just serves to illustrate that people tend to overestimate the size of the Great Wall. Yes, it’s very long, stretching for thousands of miles; but it’s not particularly large in cross-section, and so could be beatemn, when it comes to volume and weight, by structures which are less long, but at the same time wider and higher than the Great Wall. The Great Wall is “big” in only one dimension of space, other structures, such as dams, are big in all three.
Besides this, there is a number of arguments that could be raised against the Great Wall being regarded as a “thing” for the purposes of this thread, not just extension. You could also throw in the criteria that it must have been built within a reasonable timespan, which the Great Wall, the construction of which extended over two millennia, wasn’t. You could also throw in the argument that a “thing” for these purposes must have been built as a coherent project following some sort of master plan in mind, which, again, the Great Wall wasn’t - new sections were added as the necessity arose. If you disregard these criteria, you can count the Great Wall as a “thing”, but in that case you could also make tha argument that cities, or infrastructure networks such as highways, are a “thing”.
How about the U.S. Interstate highway system? It is at least as much of a ‘single thing’ as the Great Wall of China and it was designed and constructed over just a few decades as a cohesive system so I think it gets extra points for that. It is all connected to together outside of the Interstate highways in Hawaii so I don’t see any reason to rule it out.
Extended entity created by humans? How about the human race? Hard to say it hasn’t been created by mankind. 7 billion people, say average mass of 50kg - (allow for smaller races and children - still might be a tad high) is 350 million tons. (385 million short tons).
There are millions of Christians in the US alone who say it wasn’t created by mankind. Their evidence is a little thin, but they’re quite adamant about it.
