Like the Pyramids

Listened to the radio journalist Edi Stark talking to NASA astronaut Piers Sellers about his three space shuttle missions this afternoon. Magic stuff really since at the age of 13 the Scotsman was watching the first lunar landing on black and white television in an Edinburgh flat and a decade or so later he was helping construct the International Space Station as a Spacewalker 200 miles above the earth. The views were amazing he said and I believe him.
Now, I have been fortunate enough to see a few of the most iconic man made structures on this earth but never live from 200 miles overhead. They say the Giza Pyramids, the Potala and Mauna Kea Observatories are all visible from space using only the naked eye. The first because of its sheer size and the latter two because of sheer altitude.
According to some buzz on face book today a man by the name of Gohary, a jihadist with self-professed links to the Taliban, has called for the "destruction of the Sphinx and the Giza Pyramids in Egypt," drawing ties between the Egyptian relics and the Bamiyan Buddha statues on the basis of some ideas to do with idolatry.
Now I don't wish to but in here, but the Giza Pyramids are bigger than the Bamiyan Buddha's by a long shot. The most famous, Khufu's Pyramid, contains around 1,300,000 blocks ranging in weight from 2.5 tons to 15 tons and is built on a square base with sides measuring about 230m (755ft) and covering over 13 acres.
As far as I know, the only power on earth which could even dent these 500,000 year old structures is the sea and that's a mighty long way from Cairo.