What If An Elevator Kept Rising and Couldn't Stop?

You step into a glass elevator on the side of a tower and press the top button, and it can't stop. You rise past the rooftops and the tallest building in the world, through the clouds, higher than Mount Everest and the airliners, through the stratosphere to the edge of space, past the space station and the radiation belts, until you float weightless at geostationary orbit, pass the Moon and keep going until Earth is just a pale blue dot. The readouts on screen follow you the whole way. Your weight is what a scale in the elevator would show for someone who weighs 70 kg on the ground, on a tower that turns with the Earth, so gravity gets weaker as you climb while the spin pushes you outward. The floor number assumes 3.5 metres per floor, and the air outside follows the standard atmosphere. The numbers are real: the fastest elevators on Earth climb about 20 metres per second, the tallest building is 828 m, Mount Everest is 8,849 m, airliners cruise at about 10 to 12 km where it's around −56 °C, space officially begins at the Kármán line, 100 km up, the International Space Station flies at about 420 km and circles the Earth every 92 minutes, GPS satellites orbit at 20,200 km, geostationary orbit is 35,786 km up, the Moon is 384,400 km away, the James Webb Space Telescope works about 1.5 million km from Earth, the Parker Solar Probe has reached about 190 km/s, and Voyager 1 took the Pale Blue Dot photo in 1990 from about 6 billion km. Some of it is not real. No tower or cable could be built this tall: real space elevator designs need materials far stronger than anything we can make today and would end around 100,000 km with a counterweight. Past the Moon, a tower turning with the Earth would tear itself apart, so we let it stop turning. Nothing could climb this fast either. The city, the mountains and the Earth are stylized stand-ins, the sky is simplified, and the Moon and the planets are placed for the camera. You started on the ground floor and ended more than 10 billion km up, past floor 3 trillion. By the end, a message from the lobby would take about ten hours to reach you. 0:00 The lobby 0:35 Going up 1:03 Above the rooftops 1:40 Taller than any building 2:21 Above the clouds 2:58 Higher than Everest 3:29 The stratosphere 3:59 The edge of space 4:36 The space station 5:14 The radiation belts 5:54 The GPS satellites 6:39 Weightless 7:25 Past the end of the cable 7:55 The Moon 8:43 Deep space 9:27 As far as the Sun 9:57 Back to the lobby #whatif #science #space #elevator #earth