Irony? I think not...
I recently heard that they were building this mega skyscrapper in Dubai called the Dubai Tower that was going to be massive and touch clouds and be like 40 or 50 times taller than the CN Tower. Here a concept:

now...this bears a striking resemblence to two things to me.
This one came to my mind the moment i saw it. This is the Combine Citadel in City 17 in Half-Life 2:

Its quite a resemblence, if you imagine looking at it from the distance you are looking at the Dubai Tower from above...
the second one just came to me, its the Emerald City in Oz:

hm...could this be the start of an alien cyborg invasion? Or the work of a crazy madman with a color changing horse? We shall see...

now...this bears a striking resemblence to two things to me.
This one came to my mind the moment i saw it. This is the Combine Citadel in City 17 in Half-Life 2:

Its quite a resemblence, if you imagine looking at it from the distance you are looking at the Dubai Tower from above...
the second one just came to me, its the Emerald City in Oz:

hm...could this be the start of an alien cyborg invasion? Or the work of a crazy madman with a color changing horse? We shall see...
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Comments
IMO, it looks like the designer is trying to compensate for something. hint hint hint.
With today's modern alloys and composite matierials the weight vs. strength & durability ratio has dropped dramatically. A contractor friend in Tucson said that just using engineered beams & trusses, along with wooden I-beam floor joists has reduced the overall weight of a standard home by over 2 tons. He sure that using PEX and PVC tubing for the plumbing, instead of copper and iron has had significant weight saving too.
Dubai certainly has the funds to use cutting edge contruction materials on a building such as this. Even with the $$$ and the newest building materials, I think this building might remain a artist's concept, over an actual building.
I understand that I'm in the industry. But still you have to rationalize the structural stress at that level. The amount of flex it'd have to have at the top is insane.
As for the tower you are speaking of it's not a dream. It is a reality, though a fraction of your initial post. It's called the Burj Dubai, it's scheduled for occupancy in 2009 and it's currently 587m heigh (CN Tower is 558) It's scheduled height is around 700m.
So Gate's 40x50 prediction way off. Wherever the hell he heard that. Sounds like internet shenanigans to me. More like 40-50% higher, which is a big difference then 40-50 times higher.
This is a pic of it as-is...its a little less than halfway done and its taller than the CN Tower, so maybe i exaggurated just a teeny tiny but...:rolleyes2
Silly organics ....even with all the clues, you still have not deciphered the signs that this is already fact!
Carry on...