Dubai has several wonders. Among them is the Burj Khalifa: the tallest building in the world (828 m, 165 floors).

It looks like a needle piercing the sky, like a scene from Star Wars. Calling it a landmark would be an understatement. There are more than 1700 high-rises in Dubai. Every building has a different shape. But when compared with Burj Khalifa, other buildings are like chicks and Burj Khalifa is like a huge, elegant crane…

I was in Dubai to teach a cementing software course. I would not miss the opportunity to visit it. The ticket to go up was AED 100 Dhs ($33) if booked on line or AED 400 Dhs if purchased on-site. And you have to select a particular time slot, e.g., 9:30am. The most popular time slots from 4:00pm to 8:00pm are often sold out.

It took the elevator less than 1 minute to rise from the ground to the 124^th floor. Visitors can step onto the terrace on the 124^th floor and see the world sinking to the bottom.

I felt like I was on top of the world and wondered what kinds of challenges they had to face to build this dream. I am almost certain that one of them was financial. The tower was originally named Burj Al Dubai. During the late phase, it was renamed Burj Khalifa to honor the UAE President for his injection of much needed money, the critical blood of life, to complete the construction.

This blood of life must have originated from another type of blood: oil, especially in the Middle East.

Talking about the quest for oil and gas, the deepest well ever drilled is Russia’s Kola Superdeep Borehole with the deepest point below the surface (12,262 m or 40,230 ft).

For the sake of comparison, I put the tallest and deepest points together on this graph.

Doing simple math, we can find that for every 1 meter of the tallest building, we drilled 14.8 meters of rock.

It is much easier to drill a well than build a skyscraper.