"Cartman: If dolphins are so smart, why do they get caught in those fishing nets all the time?"

So, we should not address such things out of...laziness?

Of course what you say assumes that there are no other animals that ethically should be 'equal to people.'

You're a dolphin. It would be kind of hard not to know that engine/prop noise is bearing down on you...especially when you can easily outrun/out maneuver it.

Even materials have to be moved reliably and on time. Ask anyone that's planned or executed a large engineering project. A building is 'just' a lot of steel I-beams, but everything else can be held up if they're late. Or visualize this phone call...

And you'd better be pretty damn sure of traffic and demand that would justify it. Space Elevators are 'all or nothing' in that respect. As opposed to spacecraft which, like airplanes, ships, land vehicles, can be sized to the known or reasonably expected market.

If destruction bang-per-buck is your concern, there are large dams and nuclear power plants everywhere now. Yes, security may be an issue, but if it's worthwhile you do it.

The point is, that's still a small fraction of the distance to the Oort Cloud. You've gained very little. And considering that it surrounds us, you'd be fractionally farther from other parts of it.

Yep. The poor bastard had everything he needed, except a spare pair...

Indeed...!

Amen to that.

Bills have to be paid, even for superheroes. You do what you gotta do...

Dave, you're thinking Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic. SpaceX does orbital launchers.

That's true, but what's the alternative? Never build any large engineering work, or anything else of value, just because someone might want to destroy it?

"We could feasibly have nanobots, materials stronger/more easy to manufacture than carbon nanotubes, or any number of technological advances which could make building a space elevator a relatively trivial task by the year 2050."

"Power transport down to Earth through the tether? You would have enough trouble cooling the tether from the massive electron fluxes due to electromagnetic effects without trying to put more electricity down it. "

And yet we got to the Moon at the height of the Vietnam War and the 'Cold War'...

(shrug) I got no problem with that, and you really shouldn't, either. Rockets aren't near the end of technological development, and that's just chemical rockets. There's all sorts of nuclear-thermal and nuclear-electric stuff yet to be fully developed.

Fans?

Yeah, well, we know what shore leave once did for Montgomery Scott...