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NPR Talks Skyhooks
David writes "NPR's Talk of the Nation this past week featured Brad Edwards, President of Carbon Designs Inc., to talk about their plans to develop an elevator that would lift people to an object orbiting in outer space. The project's homepage details their plans and ambitions. The discussion expands on callers' concerns about such problems as commercial airliners running into the super long cable or if it would act as a conduit for lightning."
Sorry, posted the wrong link. Here's a live one that includes the oceans.
A space elevator is not really that hard to make once you have the cable material sussed. And if you can work out some way to make descending cars power the ascending ones then it is also quite energy efficient as well.
Compare that to gravity manipulation: there's no solid evidence that it is even possible, at least at any scale likely to be useful, and even if it is it is likely to consume astronomical amounts of energy to get anything sizable up the gravity well.