Ask HN: Why is the tallest manmade structure only 2,722 feet?
I don't get why nobody built a simple tower with a narrow base to best that. Is it really that hard to do, or that expensive? Why aren't there any 10,000 foot towers?
I am, of course, assuming you plan to build a useful tall building instead of an empty 10,000 foot tall shell for no particular reason.
Work on level 120 Sleep on 73 Recreation on 145 Skyway connections to neighboring mega towers every 50-75 levels.
Actually travelling to the surface world would be akin to driving for hours across the state. It's a trip and would be planned for accordingly, and happen rarely.
I must be missing something. 10,000ft is 1.8ish miles. That's like an 8 minute bike ride not a cross-state drive. Even if it took 30 minutes by elevator, that's a reasonable commute in cities like Chicago.
You're only half way to matching the tallest building, have just put an additional million and a half feet of expensive space into the local real-estate market, and your costs are only going up.
But that doesn't really paint the right picture about how expensive it is to build upward beyond a half dozen stories or so rather than building outward or just cramming more into less space.
No to put the cost of building upward in perspective: the great pyramid was the tallest building for nearly 4000 years. Lincoln Cathedral was then the tallest ever built for more than 500 [250 years if you want to say it lost the title when the spire collapsed, which brings up the point that the great pyramid would have been, but for erosion the tallest structure from 1647 to 1874, but was still the second tallest in the age of steam and iron].
So yeah, it's expensive and hard and unless you're the Pharaoh doesn't serve much purpose.
Another problem is the cost. Who is going to pay it? Do you want to pay it???
Another fun term to google for is Euler and column buckling. That's why we don't have 75000 foot tall radio towers, which at least superficially would seem to be a great idea that could get past the scaling costs because potential revenue would scale even better with surface area within line of sight. Or even more interesting a 75 kilofoot rocket launching tower so you could use higher Isp vacuum rated nozzles at launch (if you tried that at ground level they'd buckle from the outside in)