Expensive Shoebox

What would be the most expensive way to fill a size 11 shoebox (e.g. with 64 GB MicroSD cards all full of legally purchased music)?

Rick Lewis

A shoebox full of valuable stuff seems to top out at about $2 billion. Surprisingly, this turns out to be true for a wide range of possible fillings.

The MicroSD cards are a good idea. iTunes songs cost about $1 each, and MicroSD cards have a capacity of about 1.6 petabytes per gallon. A men's size 11 shoebox is about 10-15 liters, depending on the brand and type of shoe, which means it can hold up to 1.5 billion 4 MB songs (at about a dollar each). (That's about 20 times as many songs as the iTunes store offers, so you'll have to buy some of the songs more than once.)

Expensive software like Adobe®©™ Photoshop®©™ CS®™ 5™ has a slightly higher cost-to-megabyte ratio, since it retails for several hundred dollars and takes up several hundred megabytes of space. Or, at least, it used to, until Adobe moved to acloud model.

Once you start considering software prices, you can probably crank the "cost" of things in a shoebox as high as you want by making unlimited in-app purchases. And while the resulting RPG character may technically represent the result of your spending that much money, it's hard to argue with a straight face that your character is in any sense worth a trillion dollars.

So let's think about actual objects.

There's gold, of course. 13 liters of gold is worth about $10 million as of this writing. Platinum is a little more expensive at $13 million/shoebox.[1] That's about 10 times the value of a shoebox full of $100 bills. On the other hand, a shoebox full of gold would weigh as much as a small horse.

There are more expensive metals. A gram of pure plutonium, for example, would cost about $5k. As a bonus, plutonium is even denser than gold, which means you could fit almost 300 kilograms of it in a shoebox.

Before you spend $3 billion on plutonium, take note: Plutonium's critical mass is about 10 kilograms. So while you could fit 300 kilograms of it in a shoebox, you could only do so briefly.

High-quality diamonds are expensive, but it's hard to get a handle on their exact price because the entire industry was built on a scam the gemstone market is complicated. One site quotes a price of over $300,000 for a flawless 600 mg (3 carat) diamond—which means that a shoebox full of perfect-quality gem diamonds could be worth as much as $20 billion—but $1 or$2 billion is more reasonable.

Many illegal drugs are, by weight, more valuable than gold. Cocaine's price varies a lot, but in many areas is in the neighborhood of $100/gram.[2] Gold is currently less than half that. However, cocaine is much less dense than gold,[3] so a shoebox full of cocaine would be less valuable than one of gold.

Cocaine is not the most expensive drug by weight. LSD—probably the most widely-consumed substance sold to consumers by the microgram—costs about a thousand times more than cocaine by weight. A shoebox full of pure LSD would be worth about $2.5 billion.

Some prescription drugs can be just as expensive as LSD. A single dose of brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris) can cost $13,500, which—for the average patient—puts its shoebox value in the same $2 billion range as LSD, plutonium, and MicroSD cards. Other drugs are even more expensive.

Of course, you could always put shoes in the shoebox.

Judy Garland's shoes from The Wizard of Oz sold at auction for $666,000, and—unlike the other things we've considered—may have, at one point, actually been placed in a shoebox.

If you really want to fill a shoebox with an arbitrarily large amount of money, you could get the US Treasury to mint you atrillion-dollar platinum coin.

But if you're open to leveraging our monetary system's legal authority to impart value into an arbitrary inanimate object ...

... you could just write a check.

Global Snow

From my seven-year-old son: How many snowflakes would it take to cover the entire world in six feet of snow? (I don't know why six feet...but that's what he asked.)

—Jed Scott

It's been too hot where I live, so I like thinking about this question!

Snow is fluffy because it has a lot of air in it. The same amount of water that makes an inch of rain would make a lot more than an inch of snow.

An inch of rain is usually equal to about a foot of snow, but it depends on what kind of snow it is. If the snow is light and fluffy, an inch worth of rain could make over 20 inches of snow!

All the clouds in the world, combined, hold about 13 trillion tons of water. If all that water were spread out evenly and all fell at once, it would cover the Earth with an inch of rain—or a foot of snow.

Most of the Earth is ocean. If we only made water fall on land, there would be enough for three or four inches of water. That's how much falls in a very big rainstorm.

So three or four inches of water should add up to three or four feet of snow, right?

Almost, but there's a problem. When snow piles up, the snow on the bottom gets squished. If a foot of snow falls, then another foot falls, the snow on the bottom gets squished, which means the whole pile is shorter than two feet tall.

If you leave the snow there, it will slowly get less and less deep as it settles down and compacts. This means that even if six feet of snow fell everywhere, it would only be six feet at first. Before long, it might be five feet. (This happens to humans, too. You get shorter throughout the day as your body compresses a little!)

This can make it hard to record exactly how much snow falls, and sometimes even weather experts have a hard time! If you wait until the end of a snowstorm to measure snow, maybe it will have all squished down, or some of the snow might have melted, so your measurement will be too small.

Instead of waiting until the end of the storm, you can measure the snow in parts. You let some snow fall, measure it, then clear it away and wait for more snow to fall.

You have to decide how much snow to clear away. If wait too long, the snow might become too squished, but if you measure it too often, it will all be light and fluffy and you'll get a number that's way too high.

Believe it or not, the National Weather Service has written special guidelines for how often to clear away snow, so everyone can measure it the same way. They use a special snow-measuring board, which is probably just a regular piece of wood, but I like to imagine that they treat it like a precision instrument and store it in a special locked case until it's needed.

The official guidelines say that you should clear the snow-measuring board every six hours. A few years ago, there was a big snowstorm, and the Baltimore airport measured 28.6 inches of snow. That would have been a new record. But then the National Weather Service learned that the person measuring the snow had cleared the board every hour, instead of every six hours. So they didn't know whether to count the record or not.

I didn't see what they ended up deciding, because four days later, another blizzard hit Baltimore and everyone suddenly had more important things to worry about. (Then there were more after that one. It was a snowy winter.)

Still, people have never seen a winter with six feet of snow across the entire world. A snowfall like that would—to answer the original question—take a total of about a mole of snowflakes, give or take a few zeros. With that much snow, every one of the 70 million kids in the United States would be able to make enough snowballs to hit every other kid with a snowball three times over.

Or you could keep some of the snowballs for yourself. Right now, in the hot weather where I live, that sounds wonderful.

Disappearing Water

What would happen if all the bodies of water on Earth magically disappeared?

—Joanna Xu

As is often the case with these questions, everyone would die.

The first people to notice would be swimmers and boaters, for obvious reasons.

To avoid a glass half empty scenario, we'll assume the water is replaced by air.

Most people swim in water which is relatively shallow, so most of them would survive the fall to the bottom, albeit with a few broken bones.[1] People out on the ocean, on the other hand, would be in trouble.

The ones in shallow water would hit bottom first, since they wouldn't have as far to fall. Within the first second, a large fraction of the boats in lakes, rivers, and harbors would crash into the bottom, and many of those on board would survive.

Boats out on the ocean would take longer to fall. Over the next five seconds, a wave of crashes would spread outward from the continents, as boats struck the continental shelf farther and farther from shore. These boats would be smashed to tiny fragments, killing everyone on board.

After the first six or seven seconds, there would be a brief lull in the ship destruction rate. Continental shelves drop off steeply, and most of the ships out over the deep sea would take a little longer to fall.

The Titanic sank in about two miles of water. After it disappeared beneath the surface, the two halves of the ship took between 5 and 15 minutes to reach the bottom.[2] Without the ocean there, it would have reached the bottom in about 30 seconds, striking it at airliner cruising speed.[3]

Within the first minute, just about every large ship would be on the bottom. The final boat to reach the bottom would probably be a small sailboat or life raft that was crossing an ocean trench when the water vanished. Thanks to low weight and/or drag from the sails, one of these vessels could take many minutes to reach the bottom.

If there were a seaplane floating on the deep ocean, it could conceivably survive, although it would take some luck and quick thinking by the pilot. The plane would initially drop, but as it gained speed it would tend to pull into a glide. After the initial shock, the pilot would have a reasonable amount of time to try to start the engine. Thanks in part to the thicker air, it's possible a seaplane could successfully land on a smooth patch of seabed. If the engine got started, the pilot could also try to fly to shore and land on a runway.

Fish, whales, and dolphins, and nearly all marine life would die immediately. Those near the bottom would suffocate or dessicate, while those near the surface in deeper water would suffer the same fate as boats.

Then the really weird stuff starts.

Without evaporation from lakes and oceans feeding the water cycle, it would stop raining. Without pools of water to drink from, people and most animals would dehydrate and die in a matter of days. Within a few weeks, plants would start withering in the ever-drier air. Within months, mass forest die-offs would begin.[4]

Huge amounts of dry, dead vegetation lead inevitably to fire, and within a few years, most of the world's forests would have burned. Forests store huge amounts of CO₂, and this burning would roughly double the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, accelerating global warming.

All in all, Joanna's scenario would result in virtually all life dying out pretty fast. But then things would get even worse.

Without a water cycle to weather rocks, the carbon-silicate feedback system which acts as a long-term thermostat to stabilize climate[5] would shut down. Without this feedback, volcanic CO₂ would build up in our atmosphere, leading—in the long term—to scorching temperatures similar to what's happened on Venus.[6]

We were going to lose our oceans anyway. As the Sun gets hotter, eventually water will start escaping through evaporation, and—one way or another—the planet will dry out and heat up. However, the loss of the oceans never seemed like something worth worrying too much about, since it's a billion years in the future. The oceans will be here long after our species is gone.

Unless Joanna ruins everything.

Keyboard Power

As a writer, I'm wondering what would be the cumulative energy of the hundreds of thousands of keystrokes required to write a novel.

—Nicolas Dickner

You probably shouldn't invest in a keyboard-based generator any time soon.

People like figuring out places where we can recover "wasted" energy. Avoiding waste is a great goal, but sometimes it's hard to judge how much energy is actually moving around in a particular system. Cool-sounding ideas like the recent "Solar Freaking Roadways" campaign don't always work out when you run the numbers. On the other hand, some clever ideas for collecting waste—like recovering the energy from doors opening or cars braking—turn out to be totally practical.

In the case of keyboards, there's a lot of engineering research into the force required to press keys, in part because so many people suffer fromrepetitive strain injuries. Using data from a study of rubber-dome keyboards—the most common type these days—we can estimate that the energy required to press a key is around 1.5 millijoules for a letter key and 2.5 for a big key like the enter key or spacebar.

How much is 1.5 millijoules? Well, it's enough to heat a drop of water by 1% of a degree. It's also enough to lift a squirrel 300 microns—all the way from the ground to the top of a stack of four sheets of paper!

Now that we know how much energy a keypress takes, we need to figure out how many keypresses are involved in writing a novel.

A typical novel might have half a million to a million characters in it,[1] so typing it out would require at least that many keypresses. The amount of backspacing and rewriting varies wildly from person to person. Some people write straight through without pausing, while others rewrite every sentence endlessly.

It turns out not to make a big difference which kind of writer you are. If you write straight through without editing, you'd expend about a kilojoule. With a lot of rewrites, you might expend several kilojoules—but you'd need to rewrite every word 10 times to match the energy stored in a single AA battery.

Writing one full novel would provide enough energy to run a laptop for a total of about 15 seconds. If each novel takes you six months, you'd spend one second out of every million running off keyboard power. This would save a fraction of a penny of electricity.

Now, a few novels every six months seems like a lot of typing, but plenty of people type more. The site WhatPulse offers tools to track mouse clicks and keystrokes, and hosts a community of users who post their statistics online and compete with each other to accumulate the highest total.

WhatPulse been running for more than a decade, and its oldest and the most active users have logged over 100 million keypresses. A heavy WhatPulse user types the equivalent of one novel every two months, and some of them manage one novel every few weeks.

However, that's still not fast enough to represent a lot of energy. To keep a laptop running from keypress power alone, you'd need to write a novel every ten seconds. To run a microwave would require one novel per second.[2]

No matter how fast you type, writing isn't exercise.

Burning Polen

What if you were to somehow ignite the pollen that floats around in the air in spring? Other than being a really bad idea, what effect would it have?

Jessica Thornburg

The first thing we have to figure out is whether pollen is flammable. Some questions are best answered through academic research, but some questions can be answered much more quickly with a Youtube search. The answer is yes; pollen is extremely flammable.

(Note: Before we go any further, I want to point out that much of the US is under extreme drought, fire season is underway, and wildfires—90% of them caused by humans—kill firefighters every year. Please don't try to set pollen on fire.)

Now, back to the question.

What is fire, anyway?

Lots of materials oxidize when exposed to air. Bananas go bad, copper turns green, iron rusts. Fire is another kind of oxidation reaction. (In other words, our cars are always oxidizing; we just try to keep it from happening suddenly.)

Reactions like oxidation often go faster when the fuel has more surface area.[1] The more pieces you break something up into, the more surface area it has, which means that dust has a lot of surface area. Dusts can be very flammable; even normally non-flammable things like candy, milk, and iron[2]can—when converted to powder form—combust violently in a dust explosion. Pollen can explode, too; all those Youtube videos of burning pollen show miniature dust explosions.

When it burns, it releases energy, which brings us back to Jessica's question: What if all the pollen in the air suddenly (somehow) caught fire?

As anyone with seasonal allergies will tell you, pollen is everywhere. As anyone with seasonal allergies and giant stilts will tell you, high concentrations of pollen extend upward hundreds of meters above the ground.[3]

When pollen is burned, it releases energy. One gram of pollen releases 15 to 28 kilojoules of energy when burned, which means a handful of pollen contains roughly the same number of calories as a hamburger.

A grain of pollen weighs on the order of 10^-9 grams. In areas with a high pollen count, every cubic meter of air can hold thousands of grains of tree pollen. Fortunately for Jessica's scenario, this means that—when burned—the pollen floating in the air won't have much effect at all. It would raise the air temperature by a fraction of a degree—nothing more.[4]

The reason the pollen explosion is so mild is that the pollen is so finely spread out. What if we collected it together?

If you took all the pollen from the air across the United States, put it in a gigantic pile, and ignited it all at once, it would rapidly release on the order of 10¹³ joules of energy. That's about the yield of a very small nuclear weapon.

So look at it this way: Seasonal allergies may be bad, but they could be a lot worse.

$2 Undecillion Lawsuit

What if Au Bon Pain lost this lawsuit and had to pay the plaintiff $2 undecillion?

—Kevin Underhill

The bakery-cafe chain Au Bon Pain (with a few other organizations) is being sued. This is how much money the person suing them is demanding:

This is how much sellable stuff there is in the world:

This is the estimated economic value of all goods and services produced by humanity since we first evolved:

Even if Au Bon Pain conquers the planet and puts everyone to work for them from now until the stars die, they wouldn't make a dent in the bill.

Maybe people just aren't that valuable. The EPA currently values a human life at $8.7 million, although they go to great lengths to point out that technically this is not actually the value any specific person places on another person's individual life.[1] In any case, by their measure, the total value we place on all the world's humans is about $60 trillion—less than the total value we place on all the world's oil.[2]

But while people may be worthless,[3] we're hardly all there is on the planet. Out of all the Earth's atoms, only 1 out of every 10 trillion is part of a human.

The Earth's crust contains a bunch of atoms,^{[citation needed]} some of which are valuable. If you extracted all the elements, purified them,[4] and sold them, the market would crash.[5] But if you somehow sold them at their current market price, they would be worth ...

Oddly, most of this value comes from potassium and calcium, and most of the rest comes from sodium and iron. If you're going to sell the Earth's crust for scrap, those are probably the ones you should sift out.

Sadly, even selling the crust for scrap doesn't get us close to the numbers we need.

We could include the core,[6] which is iron and nickel with a dash of precious metals, but it turns out it wouldn't help. The amount demanded from Au Bon Pain is just too large. In fact, an Earth made of solid gold wouldn't be enough. The Sun's weight in platinum wouldn't be, either.

By weight, the single most valuable thing that's been bought and sold on an open market is probably the Treskilling Yellow postage stamp. There's only one known copy of it, and in 2010 it sold for $2,300,000. That works out to about $30 billion per kilogram of stamps. If the Earth's weight were entirely postage stamps, it would still not be enough to pay off Au Bon Pain's potential debt.[7]

If Au Bon Pain & co decided to be intentionally difficult, and pay their debt entirely in pennies, they would form a sphere that would squeeze inside the orbit of Mercury.[8] The bottom line is that paying this settlement would be, in almost any sense of the word, impossible.

Fortunately, Au Bon Pain has a better option.

Kevin, who asked this question, is a lawyer and author of the legal humor blog that reported on the Au Bon Pain case.[9] He told me that the world's most highly-paid lawyer—on an hourly basis—is probably former Solicitor General Ted Olson, who recently disclosed in bankruptcy filings that he charges $1,800 per hour.

Suppose there are 40 billion habitable planets in our galaxy, and every one of them hosts an Earth-sized population of 7 billion Ted Olsons.

If Au Bon Pain hired every Ted Olson in the galaxy to defend them in this case, and had them all work 80-hour weeks, 52 weeks a year, for athousand generations[10]...

... it would still cost them less than if they lost.

Pyramid Energy

What took more energy, the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Apollo Mission? If we could convert the energy to build the Great Pyramid, would it be enough to send a rocket to the Moon and back?

Michael Marmol

No.

A Saturn V's fuel contains enough stored energy to lift up and stack about 20 pyramids worth of rock from the surface.

That's the simple physicist-style answer, based on calculating the energy required to lift idealized blocks of stone against the Earth's gravity.[1] In practice, pyramid construction wasn't so simple. Thanks to friction, the Egyptians probably expended more energy dragging the stones across the ground than lifting them upward—and the "lifting upward" involved a lot of friction, too.

Most of the energy they expended was lost to the heat of friction, but about 10¹² joules of it remains in the Great Pyramid, stored as gravitational potential energy. If all this energy were liberated and—somehow—used to accelerate an Apollo spacecraft ...

... it wouldn't be enough to launch it to the Moon.

On the other hand, the reverse probably wouldn't work, either.

But maybe we're making the wrong kind of comparison. Why did Michael—like many others—compare the pyramids to the Apollo program in the first place? Perhaps it's simply that they both look like they took a huge amount of work—and maybe that's the best way to compare them.

The Great Pyramid, according to one analysis, took an average of 13,200 people 10 years to construct. The Apollo project took an average of about 200,000 people, working over a similar period of time, to launch six Moon landings and another 6-10 missions using the same equipment before and after—which, if you divided it up equally,[2] is about 15,000 hours each. In other words, each Apollo mission took about the same amount of work as each pyramid.[3]

There are all kinds of ways we could measure the energy that went into various megaprojects, but we end up making a lot of subjective judgment calls about what counts as part of the project. Instead, let's go back to the simple idea of gravitational potential energy, and see how the Great Pyramid compares to other structures by that measure.

The gravitational energy locked up in the Great Pyramid—on the order of 10¹² joules—is more than in even the biggest modern skyscrapers. The Burj Khalifa may be huge, but it's mostly empty space. Egyptian pyramids, on the other hand, are solid rock nearly all the way through.

However, the Great Pyramid isn't the human structure with the highest "gravitational potential energy" score. The Three Gorges Dam, built across the Yangtze River in China, is both taller and heavier than the Great Pyramid. It contains an order of magnitude more potential energy than the pyramid in its concrete and steel alone—without even considering the far larger potential energy of the water behind it.

The Great Pyramid has a few other big competitors. The former Fresh Kills Landfill probably had more gravitational potential energy, as do various other giant dams. The Great Pyramid of Cholula in Mexico has a larger volume than the pyramid at Giza, though probably weighs slightly less and has less potential energy.

But these are all dwarfed by our biggest rock-and-dirt-lifting projects: mines. Mining involves lifting even more matter against gravity than building concrete dams, pyramids, or landfills. Humans have put a huge amount of industrial power into digging mines, so it's no surprise that the biggest mines involve 10¹⁴ to 10¹⁵ joules of gravitational energy—orders of magnitude more than the biggest aboveground structures. After all, open-pit mines are basically reverse pyramids:

These projects are pretty big. However, the Dutch have envisioned something bigger.

In 2011, a Dutch writer launched Die berg komt er, a semi-serious plan to build an artificial mountain in the Netherlands. Some versions of the plan would involve moving far more material than in even the largest mines, and the immense weight would probably cause the Dutch countryside to sink—which isn't really something they need more of.[4]

This plan is obviously impractical. Fortunately, someone else has come up with a better one.

A group of Germans, led by architect Jakob Tigges, have decided that Berlin already has an artificial mountain. Built on the site of the former Tempelhof Airport, "The Berg" towers 1,071 meters above the surrounding landscape, edging out the Burj Khalifa as the tallest manmade structure on Earth. It has a website, a Facebook group, photos, testimonials, and tourism information.

Now, nobody can see this mountain. But supporters insist that it's there.

If only the Egyptians had thought of that one.

Billion Story Building

My daughter—age 4.5—maintains she wants a billion-story building. It turns out not only is that hard to help her appreciate this size, I am not at all able to explain all of the other difficulties you'd have to overcome.

Keira, via Steve Brodovicz, Media, PA

Keira,

If you make a building too big, the top part is heavy and it squishes the bottom part.

Have you ever tried to make a tower of peanut butter? It's easy to make a little tiny one, like a blobby castle on a cracker. It will be strong enough to stay standing. But if you try to build a really big castle, the whole thing smushes flat like a pancake.

The same thing happens with buildings. The buildings we make are strong, but we couldn't make one that went all the way up to space, or the top part would squish the bottom part.

We can make buildings pretty tall. The tallest buildings are almost 1 kilometer tall, and we could probably make buildings 2 or even 3 kilometers tall if we wanted, and they would still be able to stand up under their own weight. Higher than that might be tricky.

But there would be other problems with a tall building besides weight.

One issue would be wind. The wind up high is very strong, and buildings have to be very strong to stand up against the wind.

Another big problem would be, surprisingly, elevators. Tall buildings need elevators, since no one wants to climb hundreds of flights of stairs. If your building has lots of floors, you need lots of different elevators, since there would be so many people trying to come and go the same time. If you make a building too tall, the whole thing gets taken up by elevators and there's no space for regular rooms.

Maybe you can think of a way to get people to their floors without having too many elevators. Maybe you could make a giant elevator that takes up 10 floors. Or you could make fast elevators that work like roller coasters. Or you could fly people up to their rooms with hot air balloons. Or you could launch them with catapults.

Elevators and wind are big problems, but the biggest problem would be money.

To make a building really tall, someone has to spend a lot of money, and no one wants a really tall building enough to pay for it. A building many miles tall would cost billions of dollars. A billion dollars is a lot of money! If you had a billion dollars, you could rent a giant spaceship, save all the world's endangered lemurs, give a dollar to everyone in the US, and still have some left over. Most people don't think giant towers a few miles tall are important enough to spend a lot of money on.

If you got really rich, so you could pay for a tower to space yourself, and solved all those engineering problems, you'd still have problems making a tower a billion stories tall. A billion stories is just too many.

A big skyscraper might have about 100 floors, which means it's as tall as 100 little houses.

If you stacked 100 skyscrapers on each other to make a mega-skyscraper, it would reach halfway to space:

This skyscraper would still only have 10,000 floors, which is way less than your billion floors! Each of those 100 skyscrapers would have 100 floors, so the whole mega-skyscraper would have 100 times 100 is 10,000 floors.

But you said you wanted a skyscraper with 1,000,000,000 floors. Let's stack 100 mega-skyscrapers to make a mega-mega-skyscraper:

The mega-mega-skyscraper would stick out so far from the Earth that spaceships would crash into it. If the space station were heading toward the tower, they could use its rockets to steer away from it.[1] The bad news is that space is full of broken spaceships and satellites and pieces of junk, all flying around at random. If you build a mega-mega-skyscraper, spaceship parts will eventually smash into it.

Anyway, a mega-mega-skyscraper is only 100 times 10,000 = 1,000,000 floors. That's still a lot smaller than the 1,000,000,000 that you want!

Let's make a new skyscraper by stacking up 100 mega-mega-skyscrapers, to make a mega-mega-MEGA-skyscraper:

The mega-mega-MEGA-skyscraper would be so tall that the top would just barely brush against the Moon.

But it would only be 100,000,000 floors! To get to 1,000,000,000 floors, we have to stack 10 mega-mega-MEGA-skyscrapers on top of each other, to make one Keira-skyscraper:

The Keira-skyscraper would be pretty close to impossible to build. You would have to keep it from crashing into the Moon, being pulled apart by the Earth's gravity, or falling over and smashing into the planet like the giant meteor that killed the dinosaurs.

But some engineers have an idea sort of like your tower—it's called a space elevator. It's not quite as tall as yours (the space elevator would only reach partway to the Moon), but it's close!

Some people think we can build a space elevator, but other people think it's a crazy idea. We can't build one yet because there are some problems we don't know how to solve, like how to make the tower strong enough and how to send power up it to run the elevators. If you really want to build a gigantic tower, you can find out more about some of the problems they're working on, and eventually become one of the people coming up with ideas to solve them. Maybe, someday, you could build a giant tower to space.

I'm pretty sure it won't be made of peanut butter, though.