What life could look like if everybody on Earth lived in one building

Life in huge apartment blocks might suit you really nicely or make you feel cooped up, but there's no getting around the fact that millions of people around the world live in them.

Still, as humanity manages to build ever bigger and taller buildings, the question does occasionally come up - could it ever build something large enough to house everyone under one roof?

We're no talking about everyone in a given town or city, either - YouTube channel MegaBuilds made a video back in 2022 investigating the theoretical question of whether it would be possible to build a single building big enough to house everyone on Earth.

With nearly 8 billion people to squeeze in, it sounds impossible, but as the video demonstrates, that's technically not true.

It starts by profiling some of the most unreal proposed buildings ever - actual projects that never got off the ground but could have hosted loads of residents.

Two, in Tokyo, are the X-Seed 4000 and the Tokyo Tower of Babel, neither of which ever got greenlit.

Either would now be the tallest building in existence if built, and the latter would be able to host a staggering 30 million people, and take 150 years to build, at least.

It would also be as tall as Mount Everest with the Burj Khalifa from Dubai (the tallest real building in the world) stuck on top of it, for scale.

If you wanted everyone in one building, though, the video points out that you'd need a building 260 times the size of the Tokyo Tower of Babel, putting things in perspective.

Of course, you wouldn't have to make this a vertical construction - as pointed out by examples like Le Lignon in Switzerland, lower buildings can house many people.

MegaBuilds first designed a building that could host the whole population of New York, which would be over 5,000 meters high, a staggering idea.

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Such a tall building would need sealed upper floors and pressurised environments since the air would get thin and freezing at that altitude, although winds could make for efficient energy harvesting.

The video points out that even the world's fastest elevators would be a slow way to get around, while fire safety would be a huge issue, too.

So, a redesigned idea is far less high, instead looking like a giant cube to spread out its internal surface area - although it would still be taller than the Burj Khalifa.

Project costs and timelines would be staggering, too, and that's just for New York - trying to make this work for the entire planet, things get wild very quickly.

A cube to hold everyone on Earth would have to be around 11km on each side, according to the channel's calculations, and cost over $3.3 quadrillion, a number too big to even really imagine.

So, it will probably never happen - before you even start to imagine how cramped and miserable life would be in such a monolithic building.