Ignoring the insensitivity of the chosen example and substituting a block of concrete as the model, assuming you could increase the weight and decrease the drop length, so a 500,000 ton block of concrete (without any human beings inside) could you drop 1,800 feet in ten seconds for the same HP...
I read about a proposal for storing potential energy by hoisting heavy weights that can be dropped when needed to generate electric power. So using the numbers from a hydraulic turbine from Hoover dam, how heavy would a hanging weight have to be to generate 178,000 horsepower as it descended...
If you had a tube a couple of miles long filled with very compressed air, say 6,000 PSI, would an object you dropped in it fall very slowly? Even a heavy object like an anvil, how long would it take to drop?