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[Bryan Derksen]

<3 space elevators.  If anyone has read 'Red Mars' (and it's sequels), then you know about the space elevator in that book.  It connected Mars to an asteroid (and was easier than it would be on Earth, thanks to Mars' low gravity) and served as a very profitable launching point for trade.  And then, in the coolest real-life possible thing I think I've ever read in a book, someone blew up the connectors on the asteroid, sending it spinning into space.  The entire 40,000+ kilometre long cable scorches through the atmosphere, wrapping around the entire planet 1.5 times, leaving everything within a huge distance of the impact area vaporised.

Soo cool.

And then they built another one 

Fortunately, a real-world space elevator wouldn't be nearly so spectacular if it were to fall. The whole point of fiddling around with carbon fibers and whatnot is to make the mass of the cable as small as possible; the lower reaches of a space elevator will probably weigh a matter of grams per meter. Furthermore, carbon-based stuff is generally of low density. The lower stuff will enter too slowly to burn up and will instead waft gently to the ground, and the higher stuff will make for a pretty meteor shower that burns up well before it gets near the surface. The most significant danger will come from concentrated chunks of debris such as falling elevator cars.

There's some discussion of this over at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator#In_the_event_of_failure

[Osmosis Jones]

Incidentally, a big problem with the space elevator is where you put it. Has to be equatorial, but then it'll pass right through the geosynchronus band (hence you better hope you are good at dodging satellites and other assorted junk).