It would take 300-500 Saturn V moon rockets to assemble the Space Elevator hub. If we launched one rocket every other month, six per year, it would be around 100 years before we finally got the thing working. Imagine a construction project continuing on-time and on-budget for that long. Wow! What's more amazing is that we could actually do it -- it is possible, it just isn't in our nature. Furthermore, once we have such a system working it would be many more decades or centuries to build sizable orbiting colonies.

It makes me think about the Drake Equation. What the famous equation is really about is a measure of our own intelligence. We estimate the number of civilizations in the universe based on their development of our level of technology (radio). It is now apparent that WE are still centuries away from being a true spacefaring species. So what if a few lucky astronauts get there before everyone else, it says nothing about our overall capabilities.

What if we finally discovered a civilization out there that had built a space elevator, large orbiting colonies, even a starship? They would be at least centuries ahead of us, perhaps millennia. What would they think of our "space age", or "nuclear age", or "information age". Such terminology might seem quaint.

What if we discover a terrestrial planet around nearly every star in the sky showing signs of industrial effluent in their atmospheric spectra? What if we strongly suspect a civilization for all of them but we cannot detect any transmissions? It could be because their "information technology" had effectively gone silent long ago.

Old theory. New reasoning.