I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason why we haven’t done this yet. Too expensive? Would launching it into the sun cause the smoke (if there is even smoke in space) to find its way back to Earth, therefore polluting the air?
This is an incredibly stupid question.
And the one time the rocket goes kablooey on its way up, everyone down the flight path will get a shower of used hypodermic needles, disposable vapes, and old appliances.
i always say this about nuclear waste and usually i get punched in the face.
The problem with launching nuclear waste with a rocket is that you’re shooting an enormous dirty bomb and hoping it will make it out of the atmosphere. One single incident and we’ve got an environmental disaster of unprecedented scale and we’ll be lucky if the fallout is restricted to a single continent.
First - The major problem with trash isn’t the getting rid of it part, it’s the gathering it up part. If we could do that, it wouldn’t be a problem.
Second - Launching things on a rocket is kinda dangerous still, there’s a risk the rocket will blow up on launch, scattering the material across a large area. This is a big reason why things like nuclear waste is a problem to transport in general, much less flying it somewhere.
Third - Launching something into the SUN is really hard, it would be easier to send something out of the solar system than back into the sun.
https://van.physics.illinois.edu/ask/listing/43694Fourth - Someday we’ll figure out a use for everything, wall-e style. If we dump everything into a centralized landfill, we’ll eventually be able to collect/sort/recycle it into something useful. Throwing it into the sun (or off-planet) would make that stuff unavailable forever.
Finally - Throwing stuff into the sun would actually get rid of it forever, yes. It would be completely decomposed into the atoms it was made from. If we threw ENOUGH heavy metals into the sun, we could actually poison the sun making it not able to fuse hydrogen anymore, but even if we threw the entire earth into the sun, it wouldn’t be enough.
What you also forgot to mention is just how much trash we generate… that would be a massive limiting factor as well. It’s hard enough to get a few tons of stuff on a rocket going to space. I couldn’t get an exact figure on a quick google search but humanity generates somewhere on the order of tens of thousands of metric tons of trash per day
Another problem is that each item we throw into the Sun is comprised of atoms. We would literally be taking the atoms that makes up earth and throwing them away to a place where the atoms would no longer be part of earth. While a McDonalds cup isn’t going to catastrophically change earth, do it enough times and we could see a problem.
First - The major problem with trash isn’t the getting rid of it part, it’s the gathering it up part. If we could do that, it wouldn’t be a problem.
The frustrating part is that this could be the easiest to solve. Require boats to weigh in and out, and account for everything on board. Minus fuel, plus fish, but those old, broken nets and plastic waste need to return to port to be properly disposed of. Throwing even a soda can overboard should result in significant fines.
How do you weigh a boat precisely enough to detect a soda can missing?
Fair question. You’re not going to catch a soda can, but a boat should be a closed system. The thresholds should be as low as is practically enforceable.
What about fishing boats? They’re coming back with a ton of extra weight in fish.
Containers of fish are extremely easy to weigh.
Also, sending things to space is way, way, way worse for our planet per kg of stuff, because of the fuel and parts that it takes
I think it’s a great idea, the rest of these commenters are being scaredy cats who love garbage and want to keep it close
Because incineration or proper disposal is not the problem. Gathering and segregation is. Plus, launching that sort of payload is going to be insanely costly.
The sheer volume is manageable as it currentlyis, but it’s spread out so much that collecting it properly is going to take a lot of time an effort.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a bit of a misnomer, as it’s more of a vague area in which trash tends to collect. It’s not like an actual continuous patch that you can easily attack with a net.
Plus, launching that sort of payload is going to be insanely costly.
And causes its own additional air pollution as part of the launch.
The short answer is just that doing so would be ridiculously difficult and expensive. Funnily enough, “launch it into the sun” is actually the easy part at this point. If we could collect all of the ocean’s trash, we probably would have done so and compressed it by now.
I love the optimism here, but unless there was a significant potential for profit, none of the people who have the resources to begin collecting ocean plastics could care less.
The sad truth is that the majority of the world’s resources are owned and controlled by a handful of psychopaths.
I also have this incredibly stupid idea to build a very long pipe that goes all the way outside earth’s gravity pull, then launch all the garbage through it with a mechanism similar to a railgun. It doesn’t have to be thrown directly at the sun, just enough to launch stuff out of orbit.
That’s basically a space elevator (though space elevators are shorter and held up by centripetal forces). Unfortunately they’re quite outside our technological capabilities at the moment.
I’m fairly certain there’s a Futurama episode on this topic
Yeah let’s make our trash New New York’s problem.
Or better yet, New New New York’s!
This is an incredibly stupid question.
OP:
You got it: it’s expensive/ “not financially viable,” so it won’t happen
There is “not financially viable” and than there is spending 12 times the gdp of earth each year.
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