What's the Tallest Thing We Can Possibly Build?

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 2500 70 BC once completed it was by far the tallest thing that we humans had ever built and it maintained that record for an unbelievable three thousand eight hundred Eighty-one years until it was finally beaten in the year thirteen Eleven 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 a TV mast 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 two thousand nine hundred and nine steps to walk up from the ground floor to the top Or you can take an elevator ride that takes two minutes and 40 seconds? If you jump from the top and somehow hits 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 limits 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 exeed 4000 the tallest structure ever fully envisioned with completed blueprints it would soar to an insane height of four Kilometres into the sky which would make the burj kalifa look puny in comparison And it would be even taller than Mount Fuji is in Japan it would even reach about 45% as high as mount everest or 2748 Toyota Corollas stacked on top of each other the base of the tower would have to be six kilometres 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 one point four 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 onboard the International space station Experienced 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