re: 12 mile high elevator. Would you go up this thing?

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And why the hell do you need a 13,000 mile high space elevator?

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Supposedly, that's how far out the counter weight (space station) had to be to support the weight of the cable.

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Where is it going?

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To a space station.

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I'm pretty sure that only a few miles of that would actually fall to the surface and the other 13,250 miles would be left floating out in space.

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In the book, the top of the cable was disconnected from the counterweight/space station, and with nothing to support its weight, the whole thing fell to the surface.

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How do you even get that much building material to Mars in the first place?

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They mounted rockets onto a large asteroid from the asteroid belt and steered it into Mars orbit, then robots built the cable and its counterweight space station from the asteroid material itself, slowly extending the cable down and moving the counterweight further out until the cable reached the surface. Centrifugal force acting on the space station supported the weight of the cable.

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How do you protect it from asteroids?

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I doubt many asteroids come within 20,000 miles of Mars very often. What brought it down was environmentalists determined to prevent the further development of Mars.

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Come the frick on!

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It's a sci-fi novel. What do you expect?