Here’s a depressing view of the first trip on the world’s first Space Elevator.
Why would 200 dignitaries from the world’s various nations beat each other to death bare-handedly?
There was a short story written some time ago (“Air Raid“, by John Varley) about people from a future earth, an earth in near-disaster status due to global pollution / warming, who would travel to the past, replacing live passengers on airplanes that were about to crash with matching corpses. These live humans would be returned to the future to help carry on the species. Come to think of it, there was a movie (“Millennium“) based on this story too, starring Kris Kristofferson (no, I’m not on drugs).
Anyway, perhaps something similar happened to this Space Elevator trip. Future humans, having mastered time travel, went to the past to gather up 200 people of different races & nationalities, perhaps to increase the future gene pool. They left 200 fake bodies to cover their tracks…
If you have a better guess, let’s hear it…
Air Raid and the novel Millennium are pretty good – but the movie isn’t as good as it could have been.