The term space elevator was originally popularized by Arthur C Clarke in his book the Fountains of Paradise. A space elevator is a large structure that is physically tethered to the earth in someway and is also in geosynchronous orbit. Some think a movable sea platform as to be able to move away from debris in orbit as needed but Clarke put his on top of a mountain. . The obvious use would be to put people and satellites in space very cheaply as they could just take an elevator up (hence the name). I have other Ideas that I think will be much more beneficial.
1. Cloud Seeding
The earth has vast areas with very little precipitation. If we develop a cheap enough method to release crystals into the atmosphere we could effectively turn any areas into great farmland (with the proper fertilizer that is)
2. Sending water in to space
If people are ever serious about living on planets such as mars we are going to need lots of water. Rather then develop new technology to conserve water to the last drop a la Dune we could simply fill large balloons with water in space and send them across the solar system. we already have great pipeline technology used in the energy sector all we would need is to do is run it up the tower into the bladders attached to the other end and send them out. This could work with other liquids such as oil or diet colas.
3. Energy production
All you would need to generate heat in space would be to paint what ever you needed hot black and you would have as much energy as you needed. This would work by having it boil water and the steam released would go through a turbine just like a nuclear rector works (I know that's not all there is to it).
That is it for my ideas but I would really like to hear your thoughts below so we can continue the discussion. I might have got some spelling wrong or possibly the science but I mostly just wrote this to test out the platform. If you enjoyed my thoughts or the pictures I found be sure to up this.
Great pictures! Where are they from?
all over the place. The genre is called retro futurism I am a huge fan of the art. I wasn't sure how to add them so they are a bit ill spaced (pardon the pun)