Build skyscraper for all.
From the Pyramids of Giza to the
Burj khalifa, humanity has always strived to build bigger, better, and higher! but what if we built the most extreme building ever: everyone just living in one single building? imagine the views you would get from standing on top of this building.
Or looking at it from the far distance.
As you’ll soon find out, the levels of engineering and ingenuity required to construct this building are truly astounding. But is such a big building even possible? To build something to house every single human seems like a crazy idea. But believe it or not, this idea isn't too far off from buildings that have already been proposed
Take the X-Seed 4000 for example. This 4000 meter tall building was proposed to be built in Tokyo in 1997 and would have had 800 floors to accommodate up to 1 million inhabitants. So with this capacity, 1 in 14 people in Tokyo could live in this building. But an even grander proposal was The Tokyo.
Tower of Babel. This building would be able to house a population of roughly 30 million people and was designed to be 10 kilometers tall. You can visualize its height by imagining Mount. Everest - with the Burj Khalifa at its top. This massive tower could house the whole population of Tokyo, two times over. You could easily house the entire population of. Australia within that single building. But as you can imagine, it is not that simple to build such a tall tower.
At the time of the proposal, it was estimated that it would take around 150 years to complete the whole building. If the Tokyo Tower of Babel could house 30 million people, to house everyone human on earth we need a building 260 times the size of this! But before we map out the blueprints of this mega skyscraper, let’s take a look at the buildings we have so far. Believe it or not, the world record for the building with the most people living in it is not in China, The US, or Dubai, but in. Switzerland. Le Lignon is an urban development in the town of Vernier outside of Geneva and houses roughly 6,000 people. 1 in 6 people in this town lives in this one single building. The tallest building in the world - The Burj Khalifa - can hold up to 10,000 people at any given time and is a mixed-use building with residential, office, and recreation spaces. To build our mega skyscraper, we’re gonna need to go much bigger and bolder.
If we assume 50 square meters of living space for each person and 3 meters of ceiling height, we need something that has about 800,000 times more space than the Burj Khalifa. This is obviously going to be a very, very large building. So let's start a little smaller first and try to fit all of New York City in one building. To fit all 8.4 million people currently living in New York City, you would need to build 1680 stories into the sky. This building would have a width of 500 meters and a height of 5,040 meters. To make this building more livable, we could possibly add another 10% onto it for basic amenities, which would make it 5,544 meters high. But what would it be like to live in this building? Sure the views would be amazing. When you look out your balcony, it would simply be like looking out of an airplane window.
But could you even walk out onto the balcony? The further you go up, the less dense the air is and the more difficult it is to breathe. This is why the people living on the upper floors would have to be constantly supplied with additional oxygen. But not only that, but the upper floors would also have to remain permanently sealed to prevent pressure loss, similar to an airplane cabin.
This means that you are not allowed
To open a window or step onto your balcony at any time which makes your balcony quite useless.
But living so high in the clouds also has an advantage. Due to the strong winds at this altitude, wind turbines could be deployed to harvest energy and generate electricity. Another obstacle is the elevator. These tend to travel at about 3 km per hour.
If you live 3km high, it will take you an hour to get to the bottom floor. Even if we installed the world's fastest elevator used in Shanghai Tower, it would still take you 15 minutes to reach the bottom. And as anyone who lives in an apartment building is probably already thinking, what if the elevator doesn't work or there's a fire in the building? Imagine a 5-kilometer walk consisting only of stairs! A building that tall doesn't sound very practical. So maybe instead of building higher, we'll just build wider. To decrease the height of the skyscraper, we could simply increase its width. If we take this to the extreme, we get a cube. A cube-shaped building that would house all of New York City, including 10% additional floors for amenities, would need to be 1,115 m wide and 1,115 m high. So this building would be only 35% taller than Burj Khalifa and could be placed in Central Park occupying only a third of its total area.
But even still, this wouldn’t be as simple as it looks. It would disrupt the skyline, it would disrupt air travel, and it would even disrupt the weather. And it would also be extremely expensive. The Burj Khalifa cost $4.1 billion to build. If we just assume that something about 850x in volume also costs 850 as much, the cube would cost over $3.5 trillion. However, this is using. Dubai prices. It costs significantly more to build something in New York, meaning that the construction of the New York cube would actually cost $5.4 trillion.
To give you an idea, that's about 25% of the 2021 GDP of the entire United States. In addition, the construction of the Burj Khalifa took six years. If we - again- simply assume that something 850 times the volume also takes about 850 times as long to build, it would take 5,100 years for the New York Cube to be finally completed. But that's obviously a very, very long time and who knows what the world will be like by then. Even if the Egyptians had started building the New York Cube at the time of the Pyramids of Giza, it would not be finished for another 500 years. While the size of this building exceeds anything we have ever built on Earth, it is nothing compared to what we need to house all the people of the world in one building. So let’s scale things up. What would a building look like that the whole world could live in? One thing is for sure.
And now, let's get back to our mega skyscraper.
If we assume the same footprint as our skyscraper in New York City to accommodate all 7.9 billion people currently alive, we would need to build a skyscraper with 1.7 million floors.
The World Skyscraper would be so massive and tall that people on the middle floors would be able to see the ISS fly by from their windows. You would essentially be building into outer space. Traveling from top to bottom by elevator would be a longer journey than going from Vancouver to Miami - a journey that takes 8 hours by plane! But what about construction materials? The Burj Khalifa required 39,000 tons of steel. However, the World Skyscraper has roughly 800,000 times the volume of the Burj Khalifa. So if we assume, again simplified, that this building requires 800,000 times as much material, we would need 31 billion tons of steel. But the world can only produce 1.86 billion tonnes of steel per year. Clearly, the resources & technology are not available for this building and we need to look elsewhere for materials. One of the most ambitious construction projects proposed at the moment is the space elevator, which will allow people and objects to travel up to space without the use of rockets.
The material proposed for this is the carbon nanotube, mainly because of its much greater strength and lighter weight. Although there are still numerous problems with this material, it could be the key to humanity building further up into the sky and eventually constructing the World Skyscraper. But for now, a building this tall clearly wouldn’t work, so let’s try a cube-shaped building again. Using the same assumptions as before, a cube-shaped building that could house all the people in the world would have to be about 11 km wide and tall - or roughly 945 New York Cubes. Surprisingly, this is not that big in direct comparison to the tower version. The World Cube would be as tall as the Tokyo Tower of Babel with a Jeddah Tower on top. In terms of area, it could almost fit into Pelham Bay Park in New York, the largest park in New York. But how much would it cost to build? If we assume the same construction prices as for the Burj.
Khalifa, this building will cost just over $3.3 quadrillion. If we wanted to build this in New. York, it would cost $5.1 quadrillion - or roughly 12 times the total wealth of the whole world. If we again follow the logic that it took 6 years to build the Bur Khalifa, it would take 4.8 million years at the same rate. If the price wasn’t already a massive stumbling block, this most certainly is. Even if it did take only 10 years, the world's population grows by 1% every year so the World Cube would need to be extended by 1 percent every single year. Ultimately it looks like this building would be logistically impossible, but this doesn’t mean that this milestone could never be achieved. When they were designing the pyramids in Ancient Egypt, they couldn’t possibly have dreamt that their buildings would have been dwarfed by something six times their height.
Did people 2000 years ago think it would be possible to visit the moon? As long as humans continue to innovate, evolve, and push boundaries, there’s no telling what can happen. For now, it’s just a crazy idea. But maybe one day, maybe in millions of years, we’ll all be neighbors! What do you think about this idea?