Poll of the Day > Why don't we just launch all our garbage out into space

(+) Yeah! (+)

Make it space's problem now

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$

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VeeVees posted...

$

We'll make space pay for it

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Already space debris is a huge problem around Earth, launching tons of garbage into space would make that problem far worse. Space debris can damage satellites and other things we need around the planet to make things like cell phones work.

I guess if you pushed it out enough to break the gravitational pull of Earth then it wouldn't be as bad but talk about a huge expense, even in 500 years it would likely still be stupidly expensive to do that. Far cheaper just to take a giant plot of land and keep burying garbage like we currently do, I think Penn and Teller did a show on this one time and claimed that the garbage we generate over the next 50 years could at worst take up like 100 or so square miles with how deep they bury it now.

Because humans cant survive in space.

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Our garbage eventually degrades into reusable elements...

What we actually need to do is open a sky-window to let some heat out... I mean, we'd have to be careful not to let any air out though

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It'll just come back to earth in a few hundred years, haven't you seen that Futurama episode? :P

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Lokarin posted...

Our garbage eventually degrades into reusable elements...

What we actually need to do is open a sky-window to let some heat out... I mean, we'd have to be careful not to let any air out though

Very careful. Our atmosphere is basically like the skin of an apple in comparison to the earth.

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It costs $10,000 a pound to get something into space.

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it depends on your definition of launch, garbage and space

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Didn't Futurama do an episode on this?

Zareth posted...

We'll make space pay for it

Problem solved in under three posts. Get this son of a bitch a Nobel Prize.

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JixHedgehog posted...

It'll just come back to earth in a few hundred years, haven't you seen that Futurama episode? :P

We can think about that problem in a few hundred years when we have better garbage disposal technology... or just send it back into space for the generation after that to deal with it.

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Because it's illegal to send politicians into space. They made it so.

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1) Because launching things into space is expensive and has an environmental impact

2) Because there's literally no reason to do it anyway, because trash (when properly disposed) isn't actually a problem no matter what the recycling movement tries to claim. (And when it's not properly disposed, you get the same issues as now.) Which isn't to say that there aren't good reasons to recycle at least some product categories, but getting rid of material waste isn't necessarily one of them.

Monopoman posted...

I guess if you pushed it out enough to break the gravitational pull of Earth then it wouldn't be as bad but talk about a huge expense, even in 500 years it would likely still be stupidly expensive to do that. Far cheaper just to take a giant plot of land and keep burying garbage like we currently do, I think Penn and Teller did a show on this one time and claimed that the garbage we generate over the next 50 years could at worst take up like 100 or so square miles with how deep they bury it now.

This.

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We should just launch all humans into space and come back in a few hundred years and see what's up, maybe without humans it'll fix itself

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Unbridled9 posted...

Because it's illegal to send politicians into space. They made it so.

holy shit lmao epic

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Fuel costs are an exponential equation when it comes to rocket cargo.

options include:

- put in orbit: it would just accumulate in orbit, which would be bad

- leave earth sphere of influence: it would accumulate in earth's solar orbit instead

- put in sub-orbital trajectory: it would reenter the atmosphere. this would take the least energy, but I don't think we want our garbage to rain down from the heavens. this might be the most practical if we used containers that were guaranteed to disintegrate on reentry.

- fall into the sun: too much energy. actually not *too* bad, but it would still cost something like $1B per 150 pounds.

- leave sun's SOI: WAY too much energy. something like 15 times worse than falling into the sun.

(dV requirements are like 10k for orbit, 12k for escape earth, 40+k to fall into the sun, and 615k to escape the sun. sub-orbital would be a fair bit less than 10k but not sure specifically.)

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Sahuagin posted...

but I don't think we want our garbage to rain down from the heavens.

No, but it would be a good sign of the end times, if the world ever devolved into utter chaos.

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Zareth posted...

We'll make space pay for it

once we find aliens they can pay for it
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People can't even separate their recyclables, but you expect them to send their trash to a spaceship? lmao

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Krazy_Kirby posted...

once we find aliens they can pay for it

probably another reason why no aliens have shown up to earth yet. :P

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trodi_911 posted...

We can think about that problem in a few hundred years when we have better garbage disposal technology... or just send it back into space for the generation after that to deal with it.

Either way, not our problem :) *dusts hands off*

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Basically in order to make it affordable we would need cold fusion, but, if we had cold fusion, we would actually WANT to keep the garbage/matter to use....to create energy, which would basically stop garbage from being a problem anyway.

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Your idea sucks, so I got a better one. Why don't we bring space to our trash

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