You’re as sweet as…?

Another estimation problem

(Adapted from Classic Mathemagic by Blum, Hart-Davis, Longe & Niederman)

The Sugar Daddy Company makes sugar cubes, and naturally enough, wishes to encourage
people to use them, so they organize a puzzle competition. The first person to get all the
estimates correct (i.e. within the right ballpark) wins free sugar for life…and presumably free
diabetes medication as well .

Here is the puzzle:

You have been sent a million cubes of sugar: yes, 1,000,000 or 106 of them. Each one,
conveniently for us, and the British tea drinkers, is just a cube with sides ½ inch long. There are
various possibilities for their arrangement once they have arrived on your doorstep (along with
the morning paper):

1. They arrive wrapped together in the form of one giant cube. You decide to leave them in
this form. Where would you put it? Under a table? In the garage? Or would you need a
warehouse?
2. You decide to lay the cubes out in the form of a square on the ground, all packed together
but only one cube deep. How big an area would you need? Your living room floor? A
tennis court? Or a parking lot the size of a city block?
3. Being up for a challenge, you decide to pile all the cubes one upon the other into a
vertical tower just one cube thick. This should not be done on a windy day…or a wet one
either… How high will the pile be? As high as a two-story house? As high as the Empire
State Building? As high as Mt. Adams in Washington State ( ≈ 12,000 ft) or Mt. Everest (
≈ 29,000 ft)? Or will the pile reach the moon ( ≈ 240,000 miles)?