What's the Tallest Thing We Can Possibly Build?

This is a video by RealLifeLore, made possible by Blinkist. Read the key insights of over 2,000 non-fiction books and save 20% off your new subscription by clicking the link in the description. 12,000 years ago in the hills of modern-day Turkey, our ancient ancestors built what is to our knowledge the oldest temple in the world. It has always been a human desire to see how far up into the sky their creations can reach. Ancient humans used to gaze up at the night sky and dream about reaching the stars with their buildings. It is only natural for humanity to push further than ever before and to build taller and taller than anybody before them. But surely there must be a limit to how tall we can eventually build something, right? What is actually the tallest thing that we could theoretically ever build? To begin with a sense of scale, this is a standard height for a one-story family home about four and a half meters tall above the ground. Moving up from there at 128 meters high is the tallest statue in the world. A statue so tall that if you jumped from the top of its head it would take you five and a half seconds before hitting the ground. Just a bit higher at 139 meters is the tallest roller coaster in the world, but that's not quite as high up as the Great Pyramid of Giza which was built a very long time ago in 2570 BC. Once completed it was by far the tallest thing that we humans had ever built and it maintained that record for an unbelievable 3,881 years until it was finally beaten in the year 1311 in England. The Lincoln Cathedral reached a soaring height of 160 meters into the sky and that remained the tallest thing that humans had ever achieved until kind of recently in 1884 when the Washington Monument in Washington DC finally surpassed its height at 169 meters. The tallest ferris wheel in the world currently is roughly the same height as this monument so the monument clearly didn't remain the tallest structure for very long. The Eiffel Tower surpassed it quickly and was 301 meters high above the ground which absolutely dwarfed everything that humans had ever built before it. The Eiffel Tower kind of opened up Pandora's box though in terms of how tall we could possibly build something. With the advent of wrought iron and steel the height of our structures could get much greater. The Chrysler building at 319 meters tall finally unseated the Eiffel Tower after 41 years of holding the record but the very next year after it was completed the Empire State Building stole the crown at a massive height of 448 meters but even this record wouldn't last for very long because starting in 1963 the tallest thing ever built by humanity would actually be The tallest of these ever built was the Warsaw Radio Tower which ascended to a staggering height of 646 meters. It collapsed in 1991 but its height was never surpassed until very recently in 2008. To prepare for the scale of the tallest thing ever built by humans so far I'm going to include several other very tall and recognizable buildings onto this graph first but by far taller than any of them is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. This monster building is 830 meters tall. It takes 2,909 steps to walk up from the ground floor to the top or you can take an elevator ride that takes 2 minutes and 40 seconds. If you jump from the top and somehow hit the ground without hitting any part of the building it would take you 20 seconds to fall the entire distance. Go ahead and start a timer at 20 seconds to understand how long of a fall that actually is but the Burj Khalifa is only how tall we have built not how tall we possibly could build. If we wanted to we could build something significantly higher so what's preventing us from doing that right now? In theory there really isn't a limit to how tall we could build something at all so long as we kept expanding the base of the structure to support the added weight on the top. Since the earth is spherical there obviously is a limit to how much we could expand the base of the structure by so given our current technology and resources the tallest thing we could possibly build right now is likely the XC-4000 the tallest structure ever fully envisioned with completed blueprints. It would soar to an insane height of four kilometers into the sky which would make the Burj Khalifa look puny in comparison and it would be even taller than Mount Fuji is in Japan. It would even reach about 45 percent as high as Mount Everest or 2,748 Toyota Corollas stacked on top of each other. The base of the tower would have to be six kilometers across in order to support the enormous weight on the top. It would basically be a metal mountain capable of housing over 1 million people inside of it and it would be so gargantuan that it would likely disrupt weather patterns around wherever it is built. The cost of building such a titanic structure however is perhaps as equal a ludicrous thought. Estimates range anywhere from 479 billion dollars on the lower end up to 1.4 trillion dollars on the higher end which is higher than the entire GDP of Russia. The XC-4000 is a true testament to possibility and if we decided to build it today there's nothing that could stop us from finishing it tomorrow. In the future it may become possible to build even more outrageous structures like a space elevator 100,000 kilometers above the earth's surface but since that currently isn't possible I decided to leave it out of this video until now. There doesn't exist a material that we can produce enough of that is both strong and light enough to build a space elevator but if our technology advances enough in the future it is theoretically possible to build which makes this probably the tallest thing that could ever be built on earth in humanity's future. For some perspective the international space station only orbits around the earth this far away from the surface while the 100,000 kilometer space elevator would stretch all the way out to here. Due to the earth's rotation the top of this elevator would be moving incredibly fast relative to the surface this means that people on board would experience a modest amount of time dilation similar to what astronauts on board the international space station experience today. Astronaut Scott Kelly for example spent an entire year aboard the space station and as a result of time dilation he returned back to earth 0.01 seconds younger than his identical twin brother. It may not seem like much but Scott Kelly in effect time traveled a very small amount due to the speed that he was traveling at. I learned a lot about time travel and how it could be possible just yesterday in a few spare minutes by listening to Blinkist a new digital learning app that distills the key insights behind great non-fiction books including time travel a history by James Gleick. If you want a sneak peek at an upcoming video of mine dedicated to time travel and would like to learn more about the subject then you should definitely check this book out on Blinkist next. They offer an easy way to learn about new topics fast and if you enjoy listening to my videos I guarantee you'll also enjoy listening to similar topics in more depth over at Blinkist. New subscribers to Blinkist can get 20% off a full year subscription by following the link below or you can try Blinkist for free for 24 hours first by going to Blinkist.com slash real life lore. You were born curious so continue learning more by giving Blinkist a shot. Other than that if you enjoyed this video I hope that you'll consider subscribing to my channel by clicking here. If you'd like to support the channel directly you can visit my Patreon and I look forward to seeing you again for another brand new video next Friday.