How High Can We Build?

Steel could hold itself up for four and a half kilometers. The tallest building on Earth stops at 828 meters, and almost a third of it is a spire nobody can use. Bob climbs step by step, from a two-storey house and the Statue of Liberty to the Great Pyramid, the Empire State Building, the Burj Khalifa and the tower now rising in Jeddah, to find out what really stops us going higher. CHAPTERS 0:00 Steel could go 4.5 km. So why don't we? 0:35 Step 1: A house and the Statue of Liberty (93 m) 1:02 Step 2: The Great Pyramid (147 m) 1:27 The cathedral that lost its record to the wind 1:52 The Washington Monument (169 m) 2:11 Step 3: Steel and the Eiffel Tower (330 m) 2:29 The Empire State Building (443 m) 2:58 Step 4: The height race and the secret spire 3:32 Step 5: Burj Khalifa (828 m) 4:08 Problem 1: The elevator rope 5:02 Problem 2: The wind 5:43 Problem 3: The core and the money 6:19 29% spire: the empty top of the Burj 7:00 Step 6: Jeddah Tower and the 1 km mark 7:34 The mile-high tower and X-Seed 4000 7:56 Mountains, Mars and the 10 km sky 8:30 The space elevator 8:52 So, how high can we build? 9:27 Next: how fast can a human run? PEOPLE & PLACES MENTIONED Statue of Liberty and One World Trade Center (New York, USA) · Great Pyramid of Giza (Egypt) · Lincoln Cathedral (England) · Washington Monument (USA) · Eiffel Tower (Paris, France) · Empire State Building and Chrysler Building (New York, USA) · Burj Khalifa (Dubai, UAE) · Merdeka 118 (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) · Shanghai Tower (China) · Guangzhou CTF Finance Centre (China) · Taipei 101 (Taiwan) · Jeddah Tower (Saudi Arabia) · Frank Lloyd Wright's "The Illinois" · X-Seed 4000 (Taisei, Japan) · Mount Everest · Olympus Mons (Mars) Bob is a stick figure with one problem: he can't stop asking how far things go. How deep, how high, how fast, how long. Every video follows him to the limit, with sources. New episodes Tuesday and Friday. #burjkhalifa #skyscrapers #science