On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 12:05 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
The following web site shows how to build fractal structures, which would be appropriate for this tower. If the tower is designed correctly, it shouldn't need superglue, although it might be more wind-resistant and/or earthquake resistant if it did glue the blocks together.
I think that's only true if you use it as your definition of "designed correctly". Yes, if your structure had tens of millions of blocks and a square-mile base, it could hold together without glue. But I don't think any reasonably-sized structure (say, less than 100K blocks) of that height built entirely of legos with no stronger attachement would have any chance of not either collapsing or falling over in the slightest breeze.
Using robots would be much more efficient for a Lego structure, because all of the bricks are identical, and therefore it would be much easier to build such a robot.
I find it interesting that you're so confident that you have all the engineering knowledge to make such judgements about all the engineering difficulties involved in building a 3.5 kilometer tower of legos, when the tallest structure anyone has ever built, with no restrictions whatsoever on the materials involved, is less than a quarter that tall. If using all identical steel girders to build skyscrapers makes it much cheaper, because it becomes easy to build robots to do it, why is it that no-one has ever built a skyscraper that way? Suppose you built your robots and gave them a sufficient supply of legos, and assume that we made the legos out of something stronger, so they wouldn't crush the bottom legos under their own weight at 1.6km (or much higher, assuming you put more legos on the bottom than the higher layers). Surely you don't think they could build a tower 100 miles tall. At some point the tower would collapse or fall over. Why are you so sure that collapse or fall over point wouldn't come at a height less than 1.6 kilometers? Andy