LAST WEEKEND, not only was the Moon out on the only clear night of the summer that never was, but so was Jupiter. You knew it was the mighty planet because it was a different colour from a star, more white than silvery-white and simultaneously twice as bright, with no discernible twinkle, beaming low across the blacked-out skyline from around 30, clearly visible to the naked eye 365 million miles away.

Then again, you wouldn't have known any such thing if you weren't fortunate enough to have a chum standing next to you who's an amateur astronomer, with a fancy telescope, who then showed you Jupiter through the lens, the formidable gas giant appearing as an actual circular object, a bit like the moon with the naked eye, only with no craters on the surface, only the faintest shadow of stripes across the middle, six of its 63 surrounding moons visible around its colossal gaseous girth. It's the kind of thing, frankly, that knocks your perspective block off, that crunches your stomach into a knot of exhilaration, that literally boggles your brain with the acutely simple yet spectacular realisation that, oh my God, it's all true. We're standing on a planet! In the middle of infinity!

On other nights we'd seen Mars, Venus and most thrillingly of all, Saturn, a yellow‑white disc in the blackness with a bulge tilting around its middle. And on nights like this you find yourself transporting away from Planet Earth and soaring upwards, imagining what it looks like down below, way down below, just like the spacemen saw 39 years ago before returning to their Earthly home in various states of philosophical ecstasy (even if some of them did, eventually, become crazed alcoholics in furtive isolation, but then some of us are like that anyway ) Space is ace. And this week we're all inching closer to becoming spacefolk ourselves as news arrived of theoretical construction developments in the world's first-ever space elevator. An actual lift to proper space! An announcement from Japan, scientists say they're now thundering ahead in a full-on space race with Nasa (and a Dubai/India collaboration newcomer) to take us, apparently, 62,000 miles upwards in carriages that run along three-foot wide, paper-thin cables they alarmingly refer to as "ribbons". More Earthly engineering than science fiction, the cables (made from "carbon nanotube fibres") will be anchored to a base station, held taught by a satellite docking station overhead "in geosynchronous orbit", while in between the likes of us shout "top o' the world ma and beyond!"

"Just like travelling abroad, anyone will be able to ride the elevator into space," beamed Shuichi Ono this week, chairman of the Japan Space Elevator Association, ahead of an international conference in November where the $5-billion project will be officially timetabled (estimated year of construction: 2025), a less risky, less polluting and far cheaper alternative to space shuttles (also a marvel for installing solar-power satellites, dumping toxic waste and a stepping stone to, crikey, other planetary colonisation).

Arthur C Clarke, naturally, was a very big fan of the original concept (first outlined by Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895), employing a space elevator in his 1979 science fiction classic The Fountains Of Paradise. Clarke was the kind of man given to pronouncements like "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". (Much as David Blaine, surely, upside down with his eyes exploding, is indistinguishable from a pointless buffoon with a death wish ) It's time, really, to Think Big. In the month the only big thinking the world could muster was a $700-billion bank bail out to dam up the worst of ourselves, £5 billion to take the public into space is a generational snip. In an era in which we spend several more billions on ever more reality-dodging ways to keep our bodies alive and looking 32 at the age of 109, it's time we paid some heed to our withering souls. The space elevator is the kind of concept that would knock our perspective block off, collectively, forever. If most of us saw the Earth below, way down below, perhaps we'd finally treat the place (and the life it sustains) as the miracle it truly is.

"It suddenly struck me," said Neil Armstrong in one of his few known post-Moon quotes, "that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." Or, as Proust once had it: "The challenge is not in seeing new places but in having new eyes."

This week, meanwhile, the New Economics Foundation also told us Earth has now slid into "ecological debt". We've already used up, apparently, all of the natural resources for this year (in forest and fisheries especially) and have, in fact, been "overshooting" nature's budget every year since the 1980s. Last Tuesday, specifically, was the day on which we used everything up for this year and from now until Hogmanay we're "dipping into our ecological reserves and borrowing from the future". As if we weren't in enough "borrowing" trouble already. So it's official: we need a lift to space sharpish or we're definitely doomed. Let's just hope, when the times comes, we're not stuck in that lift with an all too Earthly, debt-ridden suicide bomber, hmm?