> "else natural occurrences like mountains would not be possible since they would collapse on themselves" One way of looking at how mountains can get so high i

> "else natural occurrences like mountains would not be possible since they would collapse on themselves" One way of looking at how mountains can get so high is to think of them as if they already have collapsed on themselves. There's no more collapsing possible, so they can pile up higher. A lot like the Pyramids, they're so big and so old and haven't fallen down because they can't, they're basically a collapsed heap already. Which is something Isaac Arthur mentions in his YouTube series on space elevators, if you can make the base wider, you can make the top higher, and then you don't need Graphene or Scrith or other future super-strong materials to go high enough (in theory, in practise the base would have to get wider than Earth).