As I understand it (see: not at all), if you leave a spaceship with no suit on, you’d get baked like Marie Curie’s ovaries from the radiation. It’s mainly our atmosphere that protects us from most of the nastiest stuff. Would a giant cable reaching from Earth all the way to a platform outside the atmosphere become dangerously-radioactive over time? And if so, would that eventually cause the entire planet to get radioactive over hundreds of years? Kinda like if the hole in the Ozone layer were replaced with a Mario pipe.
And if that is the case, maybe we could forget the elevator aspect of it and just aim for a free eternal source of radioactive energy, like a really shitty Dyson sphere 👀
It wasn’t just the ovaries, it was the whole Marie
(and Pierre too, but he died from an accident before the radiation could kill him)
And tbf, her ovaries worked fine for quite some time it seems - she had two daughters who both were exceptional people in their fields as well - one got a nobel prize in chemistry, the other was a Pulitzer prize nominee, fought the nazis, was a war correspondent, had role in the establishment of NATO and UNICEF and -as a representative of UNICEF and together with her husband received a nobel peace price for the organisation. The later one died in 2007,btw.
(The whole family is totally crazy,btw. Both on her sisters and cousins side, but also her daughters and grandchildren and now grandgrandchildren. Everyone excelled in their scientific field)