The tallest building in the world is Dubai's Burj Khalifa at a dizzying 2,722 feet high.
Of course, it won't have that title forever.
The Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia is under construction.
When it's finished will be a kilometer tall dethroning the Burj.
So, that got us thinking, how much taller could
we actually go and what would hold us back?
Let's build one together.
I'm Patrick Jones and this is Cheddar explorers.
This is Bill Baker.
He's the Burj Khalifa's structural engineer.
Bill help me identify the issues that building this hypothetical tower.
If designing the tallest man-made structure is an impressive enough,
he's also walk down all 2,909 steps.
I would be so forever,
let's skip the basics.
We already knew that we can build something really high at least according to Bill.
Bill told me his run calculations and says he's pretty sure
we can realistically construct a building that's a mile tall.
Bearing that in mind,
let's start at 138 feet.
That's the height of the Home Insurance Building or
the world's first skyscraper which went up in 1885 in Chicago.
All proposed buildings look at
environmental impact foundation and issues specific to the geography,
but the most important aspect is this building was the
first to use metals support both inside and out.
This allowed towers to be taller for cheaper.
The method quickly caught on and skyscrapers were suddenly getting taller drastically,
but more height equals more problems.
Next step, One World Trade at 1,776 feet.
At heights like this,
concrete becomes a major issue.
Because concrete takes so long to travel from the bottom to the top of the building,
it hardens in roof.
The Burj made history after
builders use the new pump to send concrete 2,000 feet in the air and fast.
That brings us to our last stop in reality.
Here we are on the roof of the Burj,
2,716 feet above Dubai.
At this height, everything gets trickier especially construction.
You have to incorporate construction techniques into the building's actual design.
Bill shared that you'd have to use stage construction that
would create temporary platforms or aprons around the building.
You would use those to take up material,
store it and rather than pick from the ground,
you'd pick from the staging area.
But so far, all these heights have been reached.
We wanted to see how far we can take this thing.
Meet the X-seed 4,000,
a concept blueprint designed by Taisei Corporation in 1995.
It would reach a height of 13,000 feet,
have 800 floors, and a massive two square mile footprint.
The taller we get, the bigger the base has to be.
By the same token,
we can pretty much build as high as we want so long as we have that base to support us,
but there are limits.
So, we made this two mile high building, but can we live in it?
To keep our residents happy,
we need to protect them from
the considerable air pressure differences as you go up into the atmosphere.
The FAA requires planes to have cabin pressurization above 15,000 feet,
but to keep people comfortable,
we'd want to consider pressurization way before that level.
If you've ever been jogging in Denver or Mexico City,
you know exactly what I'm talking about.
There are limits on Earth, sure,
but let's go even further to rebuild into space, it's up for debate.
Think about a space elevator.
A space elevator in theory is made of a cable that's
anchored to earth and extended up to a space station.
In order to function,
a space elevator at the very least needs to stand in what's called a
geostationary orbit 26,000 miles above the earth.
The challenge there is that contract material both
strong and light enough to work in space.
But one Japanese company is already trying to corner the market.
The Obayashi Corporation is running tests and reps have said
they hoped to get a space elevator up and running by 2050.
The structure which stretches 16,000 miles,
which is more than twice the circumference of the earth.
By that logic, we can theoretically build as high as the moon because once we get there,
the moon's orbit will eventually slam into our elevator or our building.
But who knows? Considering all the buildings
behind me were once considered to be impossible,
we say keep building.
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