I'd be curious to hear from the people who think we'll build one – especially in the short term like 2035 – where they think it'll be built. It has to be on the Equator, so their answer can be very simple: just a longitude.

@BrunoParga I think there is a small chance it could happen by 2035, but it would be a pretty extreme timeline such as:

- 2026: AGI emerges and has the ability to recursively self-improve efficiently and at scale.

- 2027: The most advanced AGIs become superintelligent (ASI). These can run on existing infrastructure (e.g. DGX machines) and are soon applied at all levels of the economy.

- 2028: ASI discovers a novel set of supermaterials, in addition to new rocket, manufacturing and robotics technologies (and many other things).

- 2029: Most of the world economy is retooled around ASI. Hundreds of millions of human workers wearing heads-up displays are directed in real time by algorithms running on gpu instances in the cloud. These workers build advanced machinery that is used to rapidly scale up global industrial capacity.

- 2030: All manual work in the industrial sector is now automated. GDP growth is at 20% per month and is mostly bottlenecked by energy supply. The ASI systems continue to progress and discover even more advanced technologies at a rapid pace.

- 2031: A space vehicle with a minaturised factory (containing advanced nanotechnology capable of replicating the entire factory) is launched towards an asteroid somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. This vehicle has a fusion drive that transports the factory to its destination within a month. Once there, the nanomachines embark on a exponential industrialisation of the asteroid and start producing the elevator cable. In the mean time, a very large number of fusion reactors are being built at a rapid pace on Earth, which leads to further industrial acceleration.

- 2032: The nanofactories produce a large number of fusion drives on the asteroid, and are continuously supplied with large quantities of deuterium pellets launched from Earth. These drives start to move the asteroid, complete with its gradually elongating cable, towards Earth orbit. The asteroid contains a large amount of water ice which serves as propellent.

- 2033: The industrialisation of the asteroid is now complete. The fusion drives continue moving it towards Earth orbit. The cable reaches its full length, and small robots run up and down it strengthening it using novel techniques that are continuously being developed by the ASI back on Earth. The cable is raveled into a tight configuration around the asteroid.

- 2034: The asteroid reaches geostationary orbit around Earth, and slowly starts unraveling the cable down towards the Earth's surface. It has multiple fibers at each end, which are attached to a variety of locations around Singapore and Indonesia. Before the end of the year it is in a fully operational state, taking payloads to and from orbit. A number of other elevators are already en route to Earth orbit, and by the end of 2038 Earth will have five operational space elevators.


Note that I don't think this timeline is realistic.

@RemNiFHfMN yeah, I should have said that "except with AGI", where do folks think it'd be built. Like, I still wonder if they all agree that AGI is basically required for a space elevator in 2035, and if they disagree, how they would solve the geopolitics of there being a very narrow, conflict-prone band of the Earth where the elevator can be built.

In general, I think questions like this would work better with the unlinked multiple choice format; it lets them be nicely organized into one group that's much easier to view and interact with as a group, see graphs on, etc.

@EvanDaniel I prefer the aesthetics of yes/no questions

@RemNiFHfMN OK, sounds good!