Empire State Building
Photo Source: Stock.xching

The Empire State Building in New York City is 1,453 feet tall including the tower on top. If you heard that a tsunami was coming and ran to that building and went to the top of the tower, would you be safe? The answer has to be maybe not. The world's biggest tsunami hit part of Alaska on July 9, 1958. It hit the Gilbert Inlet and continued for the entire length of Lituya Bay. I mention this because the wave had hit the incredible height of 1,720 feet. This height was borne out because the wave wiped out all vegetation up to an altitude equal to it's height. If you had been on the top of the tower of the Empire State Building and a wave this size hit, you would have been under 267 feet of water.

When we think of big things, sometimes we forget about items like debt. Right now the U.S. is experiencing the largest debt in world history. There are many different ways of trying to figure out what it is and how it affects us. As of the writing to this article the debt clock is showing $10,203,502,000,000. As of July 2007 the U.S. Population was estimated at 301,139,947. That means that every U.S. citizen owed 33,883 dollars. A dollar bill is about 6 inches long. That means that if our national debt was expressed in dollar bills, which were put end to end they would stretch 966,240,530 miles. The average distance to the moon is 238,857 miles. That means it could stretch to the moon and back 202 times. It could stretch to Venus almost 2 round trips. This is truly a big debt folks.

World's Biggest Maching - Krupp Bagger 288
Photo Source: Creative Commons

Man has built all sorts of very big machines. NASA has classified the crawler that carries huge rockets to their pad as the biggest machine in the world, but is it? Absolutely not. As huge as it is, it pales in comparison to CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The Collider is built into a 17 mile circle of underground tubes which make it the world's biggest machine. If one is thinking about a more traditional machine, such as a crane or similar, then the award goes to the Germans. The world's biggest moving machine was built by Krupp in Germany in 1978. It is 300 meters long and weighs 45,500 tons and is used in open-air mine locations. It moves on treads. In 2001 this behemoth traveled across 13 miles of fields, villages and roadways to go to it's next destination. It is so huge that it has to go in a straight line, more or less. Workers have to prepare the route ahead of it by covering the road, streets and tracks with a high layer of sand and removing any lines that are in the way.

When we talk of buildings we have to differentiate between the tallest and the biggest. Right now I am referring to the biggest. We are only discussing buildings here that humans could occupy. The building with the largest usable space is Boeing's Everett Factory. The building contains 472 million cubic feet of space and sits on 98.3 acres of land. This building is primarily used for assembling giant airplanes. If we look toward office type buildings, the largest, the Aalsmeer Flower Auction has the most floor space with 10.6 million square feet. Every day, over 19 million flowers are sold there. The building is located in Aalsmeer, Holland. Getting to special types of buildings, the biggest presidential residence is in New Delhi, India. It is known as the Rashtrapati Bhavan and contains 300,000 sq feet of space. The longest building is located in Osaka, Japan. It is the Kansai International Airport Terminal and is 5,580 feet long. The final building category that I am going to discuss is malls. The biggest is located in Dongguan, China and is a whopping 6.5 million square feet. I bet you thought I was going to say that the Mall of America was number one, didn't you? I hate to disappoint you, but that mall is a distant 17 on the list.

Delta Rocket
Photo Source: USAF

The biggest US rocket in service is the Delta 4-Heavy. It is 230 feet tall and has about 2,000,000 pounds of thrust. Many people thought that the Saturn V was the most powerful rocket, but the Russian Energia had more thrust. The largest Russian rocket in use today is the Proton. The rocket comes in different configurations depending whether a launch is for low orbit satellite deployment or high orbit deployment. The rocket's height is about 175 feet.

Did you ever wonder what was the biggest animal ever to exist? We all know that dinosaurs once roamed our planet, but how big was the biggest of these? Scientists now believe that the largest dinosaur, which they think was Sauropod Argentinosaurus, weighed about 180,000 pounds. Did this make it the largest animal ever to exist? No it didn't, the Blue Whale can weigh up to 389,760 pounds. Female Blue whales generally weigh more than males. The whales can measure anywhere from 75 feet long to 100 feet. It's true, if you thought that dinosaurs were the biggest animals ever to exist on earth you get a demerit.

When we consider the question of who were the tallest people in the world, we have to look at every area on earth. Many think that the Bantu people of Africa are the tallest and indeed there is much disagreement on this point. While no one can actually be 100% sure, it seems that the people of the Island of Tonga are the tallest. It has been reported that ancient skeletons have been found there that were over 13 feet tall. One question that seems to have no immediate answer is why so many Pacific Islanders are so big?

Airplanes are very common in our skies and there are so many really big ones being built, but what plane is the biggest? The answer to that question is the Antonov An-225 Mriya. As you may have noticed, it is Russian. It can carry 250 tons into the sky. It was built in 1988. One unique feature of the plane is that it can carry 90 tons mounted on top of the aircraft. It was originally designed to lift rocket boosters and the Russian Space Shuttle Buran. The plane is able to carry up to 1,500 people at once, making the new giant Airbus look like a wimp. It is 245 feet long, the wingspan is almost 291 feet and the craft is almost 60 feet high.