OT: Building O'Neill habitats on Earth?

Maybe my intuitive reasoning is wrong, but I think that the pressure
distribution in a sphere or cylinder 10 Km across would be completely
different in Earth's gravitational field - which is basically uniform
close to the surface, very different from the radial "gravitational
field" of a habitat. So I don't think that pressure alone could
sustain the building, if that is what you are hinting.

However, a tether-tower with hydrogen balloons at the upper end seems
feasible. :-P Though it would be a sitting duck for terrorists. <:-(

On 7/3/05, Ian Woollard wrote:
> I just had a funny idea. O'Neill habitats, for example Island 3 have the
> interesting property that the forces due to the atmosphere on the inside
> surface are (IRC) about 5x of the forces due to the rotation. Now Island 3s
> can be as large as 10 km across.
>
> This implies, that, with some modification to the design you could probably
> build a building 10 km high on the Earth...
>
> Inflatable skyscrapers anyone?
>
> I like the idea of a skyscraper so high that aeroplanes at cruising altitude
> have to steer to avoid it :-)
> --
> -Ian Woollard
(...)