Arthur Clarke’s final Odyssey called cuckoo

The book describes buildings that are 36-km-high and gird the earth around the equator belt with tubes connecting them together. Earthlings make these their world, leaving the ground to the lesser animals.Rawal says this is impossible not the notion of spending one’s whole life in a building but its height. The problem is not about some futuristic FSI limit or 24-hour water supply but that, according to Rawal, a structure that high would defy all known scientific laws.

But surely, assuming humans are still around when the calendar says 3000 AD, technology would be advanced enough to make such a staggering vision possible, perhaps with new space-age materials and levitation techniques? And might not new laws of nature by then relegate our laws to chapters on classical physics? Rawal does not think so.

"No matter how light the building material — even if it is only a few microns thick it will not be able to sustain a structure so high," he argues. He refers to his article, `How High Can a Mountain Be?’ in Science Age, January 1986, in which he says the strength of a structure is directly proportional to the binding energy of the constituent atoms. And while the structure does not explicity depend on the size or the shape of the base, a stage will come when the addition of even one atom will cause the whole structure to collapse the binding energy will not be enough to keep it together and it will sink to eliminate the excess energy. This will break the inter-atomic bonds. The maximum height of a structure is, therefore, the balance between the gravitational and electrical forces. Rawal has also determined the maximum height possible — 12 km. And he has asked Clarke to delete portions about the super-buildings from 3001…. A tall order indeed. But such objections take the fizz out of sci-fi? Certainly the transponders in Star Trek also defy belief, despite all flashing lights on the beeping machines and Spock’s psuedo-scientific babble. Or the warp speed which makes galaxy-hopping as easy as switching channels on TV.

And, well, everyone knows about the immutable laws which limit terminal velocity to the speed of light and also exponentially increase your mass if you try to question that limit. And what about those stereo sounds of laser guns and hi-fi missiles blasting your target in space in Star Wars and its countless clones? Any science student will tell you that sound does not travel in space.

But that is what science fiction is all about — start with a black hole and a couple of equations and end up with a death duel between the inter-galactic saviour and the villain out to re-colonise your friendly neighbourhood.

Rawal agrees that these should not be whipped by physical laws. But he points out the difference between sci-fi and fantasy. "In a fantasy, you can say anything. But when you are writing sci-fi, you have to stick to the natural laws. Otherwise you will mislead the readers," he says.

Does he get a nod from them? Certainly not, according to architect Noshir Talati. "Everything is possible. Such buildings will be the wonder of the world in the future."