[Qwertious]

Don't forget that space elevators need more than brute strength: they need to be immune to all sorts of cosmic radiation and space debris, they presumably need to be electrically conductive since the elevator carriage will need a lot of power to travel upwards a few thousand KMs before their passengers starve to death, they need to be robust against the elevator carriage's friction, and probably a few other things.

[_w1tm]

> they presumably need to be electrically conductive since the elevator carriage will need a lot of power to travel upwards a few thousand KMs before their passengers starve to death

Even a slow space elevator that can only be used for transporting cargo would already be extremely useful. You could even load it with a container filled with life support if you really need to ship living cargo.