What if your elevator couldn't stop going up? (PART - 1)

#universe #space #whatif It's just before sunset in Marina Bay, Singapore. You step into a glass elevator on the outside of a tower and press 70. At 70 the display says 71. The elevator keeps going: past the fastest lift on Earth, through the clouds, higher than Everest and the airliners, out through the edge of space and past the space station. You weigh less and less. At geostationary orbit you weigh nothing, then you drift up onto the ceiling. Eight minutes and twenty seconds after the doors close, the Moon goes past the glass in a third of a second. Every number on screen is real. The top floor is 280 m up. The fastest elevator in service, in Guangzhou's CTF Finance Centre, was certified at 21 m/s. The Burj Khalifa is 828 m and Everest is 8,848.86 m (2020 survey). Airliners cruise around 35,000 ft, and a Rüppell's vulture was hit by one at 11,300 m over Abidjan in 1973. Concorde flew as high as 60,000 ft. Somewhere near 19 km, water boils at body temperature. The SR-71's sustained-altitude record is 85,069 ft, and Alan Eustace jumped from 135,890 ft in 2014. Space starts at 100 km, the Kármán line. The ISS orbits about 418 km up, and Polaris Dawn reached 1,400.7 km in 2024. GPS satellites fly at 20,180 km and geostationary orbit is 35,786 km. Parker Solar Probe's 192 km/s record is measured against the Sun. Your weight comes from real gravity and the real spin of the Earth: on a tower at the equator, the two cancel at exactly geostationary height. Not all of it is real. No building's shaft keeps going past its roof, and no tower could reach the Moon. Climbing this fast would mean thousands of g, which you never feel in this story. The cabin keeps its air the whole way. The city is a stylized stand-in. The Moon is drawn bigger than life on the way up and placed overhead, so you can pass it 763 km from its surface. And no elevator has a floor at Proxima Centauri. Apollo crews took three days to reach the Moon. You took one elevator ride. 0:00 Cold open 0:19 The doors close 0:52 Floor 70 1:13 Into the clouds 1:33 Above the clouds 2:08 The oxygen masks 2:27 Higher than Everest 2:49 Where blood would boil 3:04 The sky goes black 3:42 Space 4:05 The thin blue line 4:23 Escape velocity 5:07 Higher than anyone has orbited 5:28 Half your weight 5:52 Night falls below 6:06 Faster than anything built 6:45 The satellites 7:07 Weightless 7:21 Upside down 7:54 The Moon 8:27 The flyby #whatif #science #time #space #universe #spaceelevator