Skyscrapers are pretty high but they can only go so high before they become unstable and susceptible to the high winds and also there's the whole problem with lift shafts and pumping water around etc. Now a pyramid building would be completely stable and would never topple over and with it designed like it is plenty of lift shaft could be fitted in to allow travelling to all levels. For a pyramid building to be stable it has to be at a certain angle. What angle would it be stable at? 45 degrees would be most stable I suppose but surely it could rise at a steeper angle and still remain stable? Now for my ultimate question: If we were to build a pyramid so the tip of the Pyramid reached orbit (orbit being in this case the location where the Earths atmosphere borders the Vacuum of space which is 75 miles I think??) how steep could we have the pyramid and how much land area would it need to take up in order to have a pyramid at that angle and at that height? Could a building of that magnitude be built with todays technology if resources money and manpower was not a problem? What problems would a building of that magnitude have? What benefits could be had with a building of that magnitude that reaches the border of the atmosphere? I know this building would be insane and impossible but it's a genuine question i'd like to know the answer to. Thanks to anyone who can help with information. Now on a more realistic question. How high right now do you think we could build a pyramid shaped skyscraper?
I'm referring to the epiphany you had wherein all things were made clear to you. For a brain as supercharged as yours, figuring the optimum angle and area of a 75 mile high pyramid should be child's play.
well if you had a sky-scraper 75 miles high, you'd need a 5625 square mile base...assuming you were going to have it at a 45 degree angle... it'd be doable but why would you want to?
Stop trolling my thread please. Well that's the thing, I think it could be done at a much smaller angle than 45 degrees and still be hugely stable allowing for an even smaller base. Just curious that's all. I'd also wonder what benefits it could bring to space exploration. Not only do we get a large building for habitation we get a possible platform that could be used for getting craft or satellites into low and high Earth orbit. A corner of the Pyramid could be built solely as an accelerator to propel a craft 75 miles up.
How many continents would we have to dismantle entirely simply to get enough material to build a 75 mile tall pyramid with a 5625 square mile base? Like all Tacky ideas, it's utterly insane to even consider.
well purely because this actually sparked my interest, you'd need 140625 cubic miles of material if the entire thing was solid...
One would need the base area of a country like Togo, just square, to build such giant building.. If you take the following graph as an example of how to calculate the base area http://www.hyperflight.com/images/pyramid-pinch.gif you get the following results: h = b, as the triangle is isosceles (has two sides with the same length) when you assume a 45° angle. As h=120km (your 75miles converted to metric), so b = 120km. Pythagoras > a = 169km To calculate the base area: 2*a*2*b = 240*240 = 57600 sqkm Togo has 56,785 sqkm. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/graphics/locator/af/to_large_locator.gif https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/graphics/maps/large/to-map.gif And those Flash adds kill my CPU. Fracking poor and stupid concoction. EDIT: @ JB2005, have I calculated wrong?
As I said in my original post, if materials, manpower and money was not a problem. I also said even myself that it would be a crazy insane idea but I am simply curious as to the answer which is why I am asking the question.
Personally, I like this idea about building a pyramid to space. Think of the potential here, they could use it to lift space parts, like satellites and other space needs into orbit quite easily. It would be a massively hybrid structure, think of the possibilities, hotel, resort, shopping, bio-dome type living, tourism and an elevator to space. There is potential in every sector here.
First of all, there's no magical "border" where you're either in earth or "in orbit." The atmosphere gets thinner and thinner as you go up until it's eventually nothing.
Other problems to consider. The immense wight of the structure would need a solid foundation. How would the lifts handle the pressure changes as you approched space? What is the travel time of the lifts from base to top. Individual fire departments per floor nearer the base?
Excellent points. Would the lifts be effected by pressure changes if they only travelled so far each? meaning you change lifts multiple times on the way up so each lift notices only small changes in pressure each?
That's one of them. I think such a structure is theoreticaly "possible" and using a pyramid design is a good way get around some of the height limitations but there's so many other problems that crop up with such a massive structure. One big one is that the building would have to be self-contained to maintain pressure (or atleast the higher floors would have to be contained. Then you'd need a way to provide atmosphere for the many hundreds or thousands of cubic meters of habitable volume on the upper floors. (BTW 75 miles, 396,000 feet, 39,600 (or so) floors.) Then you'd need so massive-assed pumps to pull municipal waters supplies to the top floor to then feed down to all of the other floors (which would probably give them tremendous water pressure that would put a firehose to shame) then there's tons of other logistics problems. Hell the structure itself is the "easy" part. The hard part is making it a useful structure.
Not necessarily, it's a pyramid. You could have water tanks every so often between floors on the way up, the higher tanks would become smaller and smaller and smaller as you go up the pyramid because each level becomes smaller and smaller. What about rainwater collection and filtering too? a building of that size could collect a ton of rainwater each day or so all the way up feeding it all through a filter and into the tanks. The entire pyramid could act like one huge reservoir, it is after all taking up an area the size of Togo and that's a lot of rainwater.
Buildings pump water to the top floor and then send it down to the lower floors to maintain good water-pressure without the need of pumps on each floor to give the water pressure.
But this would not be your average run of the mill skyscraper, meaning changes would have to be made. There would have to be separate water systems.