Altergo wrote:Assuming that carbon nanotube technology allows us to build a space elevator in the next 30-50 years, would we?
I'll start my point by saying that, generally speaking, people are the problem instead of technology. So, whether one will be built or not will hinge on (1) the potential material gains from it from the only people or institutions potentially willing to invest vast sums of money in it and (2) the willingness of leaders and politicians to spend vast amounts of public money and resources on such a future instead of on the army to further their interests abroad or a welfare programme to bribe a significant part of the population into voting for them again. I mean, in the United States and Europe the space programmes have had to reduce their ambitions and aims because those governments don't have much money anymore and prefer to spend it on short-term, emotionally-popular stuff (welfare, foreign military interventions, waves of refugees resulting in part from those foreign military interventions, and this endless obsession we have with trying to turn millions of children into theoretically-educated know-nothings because we don't want our precious children to work with their hands). In short, if it's possible technologically we'd still have to find a use that would be (1) profitable for corporations and politicians and (2) easily defensible on a political level to general populations that feel entitled to free money and resources.
Altergo wrote:Would this open up space for the entire world, or provide a monopoly to a private corporation or nation?
There will likely be formal treaties and an international body to regulate it, but as it always goes whichever nation is strongest and most powerful will have the first and the most access.
And nations that are currently in a bad state in any way, from Greece to Somalia, will probably not get any access at all except in cooperative international schemes.
Altergo wrote:Being as they are much easier to create on the equator than anywhere else, would nations such as the Congo, Uganda, Ecuador and Malaysia receive alot of attention and even grow economically if resources such as rare minerals from asteroids and helium-3 or other energy resources are brought down from the elevator?
If the equator is the easiest place to build one of these things, then the authorities worldwide would pick a country that's safe, peaceful, and unlikely to seize the thing, charge heavily for its use or destroy it. So, the Congo (sheer chaos and bloodshed, the thing would end up being destroyed by some paranoid cannibalistic war lord soon enough) and Malaysia (they have a reputation worldwide for being stingy and liable to try to renegotiate an arrangement to improve the benefit to themselves) are unlikely choices. Places like Tanzania, Kenya and Indonesia are also unlikely for the same reasons. So, perhaps Ecuador, or Brazil, or some island near the equator but far from the world's major powers (Nauru, Kiribati, et cetera).