Why don't we launch our garbage into space?
- Thread starter Vohn_exel
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the sheer tonnage makes it largely impractical. The cost of a space launch makes it economically inefficient. Until the day comes when the mass of waste becomes a serious threat to the world, nobody will be willing to spend the time or the money on such a project. Sorry for the scathing pessimism.
My first thought^Julianking93 said:
My second thought below,
I would say that shooting all that material into outer space would be expensive and the loss of the recyclable materials would mean we would have to use up even more resources.
Jeez dont you watch Futurama? It'll just come back as a flaming ball of garbage and kill us all! Once it does its orbit like a comet.Vohn_exel said:
lol actually i have no idea why they dont just launch it into the sun.
Problems:scifidownbeat said:
a. Safety concerns. A volcano is not exactly an ideal working environment
b. Even lava cools down. Dump enough trash into it and that lava becomes a rock with a lot of trash on top of it.
c. Air Pollution. Combusting all of our trash by any means is really not what we want to be doing. Both because of global warming and air pollution just plain being bad for animals that breathe air. Like us.
Pollution: no easy solution. 'cept the 3 R's.
Ok, this problem was explained on Futurama; an amount of trash large enough could band together and come crashing down as a meteor to destroy the Earth, but of course that doesn't mean that can't happen. This means we fire them all into the Sun instead, there are no smells in space so it wouldn't matter and hey fire combusts when hit with flammable stuff.
If you can get the trash far enough away, its not a problem for us. But the thing is planets, with that whole gravity thing, tend to attract matter such as garbage. Living on such a planet ourselves, we'd just end up re-attracting the trash back to us if it didn't have a tremendous quantity of power to keep sending it away from us.Mackheath said:
And with trash floating anywhere nearby the planet, we get orbital debris/space junk. Untracked random pieces of garbage floating in space. Space travel becomes very dangerous under those conditions. We've already got a lot of dead satellites up there right now which have created a lot of close-calls for the space station.
So no, we don't want our trash floating around in space. Unless that space is defined to be anywhere far away from earth.
They usually use hydrogen to fuel rockets because it's pure, but it's also hard to make and makes energy go to waste in the process. I am also guessing we would have to waste a whole rocket to get rid of it, and we would have to make a pretty good rocket to get it away.
The problem was also explained in Futurama when the garbage ball almost destroyed New New York.
The problem was also explained in Futurama when the garbage ball almost destroyed New New York.
Maybe but probably not. However, volcanoes are where stuff is coming up. I'd rather dump the really ugly waste into the subduction zone where it's going down and let the mantle cook it for a few thousand years before we get it back. That way, in the case of half-spent nuclear fuel, it's had several half-lives to get less radioactive, it's been diluted a lot and noone gives a **** about it because they're all too worried about the cubic kilometre of radioactive molten rock at a thousand degrees centigrade that came up with it ... or the pyroclastic flow.scifidownbeat said:
Scary things, pyroclastic flows. You see ropey lava coming your way down the mountainside, three miles away and closing, and you've got time to shut down the computer, pack it, your suitcases, your documents, your favourite photographs and paintings and your heirlooms and the tools, call round for a place to stay, grab a picnic and drive out of there. The islanders just south of Iceland saw one coming and had time to pack ships into the harbour to pump cold seawater onto it along a diagonal line to cool it into a wall that diverted the rest of the flow and gave them a nice extended harbour wall. You see a pyroclastic flow coming your way down the mountainside, three miles away and closing, and you might have time to punch the throttles to full, release the brakes, watch the airspeed, haul back on the stick and climb above it ... maybe ... if you were already lined up.
Newton's first law is that an object tends to remain at rest or continue in a straight line at uniform velocity unless acted on by an external force. It's rather hard to demonstrate that. First you'd need somewhere there's no gravity.
Fire requires three things, remember.meepop said:
Ok, astronomy 101 to EVERYONE who has said we will be losing resources by sending trash into space, we will not, all of Earth's original resources come from space, every day tonnes of very small meteorites crash into our planet, this amount easily makes up for what we lose.
Now that that is out the way, let us see why this:
1:Rockets and rocket fuel are intensely, extremely, impractically expensive. To simply make one is a costly operation.
2:Rockets actually don't hold that much cargo. You would be using an entire rocket to remove one day's worth of the worlds garbage production at best on a very good day.
3:While it is true that rockets do not use oxygen from the air while they fly, some does have to be condensed to a liquid for the engine to run. (the mixing of burning hydrogen and oxygen is what causes a rockets trail to be made of steam.)
4: There is already tons of trash in Earth's orbit and it is hazardous to rockets that go there as is.
Using rockets to put trash into space is just not viable, however if we could launch trash far enough out of orbit WITHOUT rockets it just may work.
Now that that is out the way, let us see why this:
Is a bad idea.Vohn_exel said:
1:Rockets and rocket fuel are intensely, extremely, impractically expensive. To simply make one is a costly operation.
2:Rockets actually don't hold that much cargo. You would be using an entire rocket to remove one day's worth of the worlds garbage production at best on a very good day.
3:While it is true that rockets do not use oxygen from the air while they fly, some does have to be condensed to a liquid for the engine to run. (the mixing of burning hydrogen and oxygen is what causes a rockets trail to be made of steam.)
4: There is already tons of trash in Earth's orbit and it is hazardous to rockets that go there as is.
Using rockets to put trash into space is just not viable, however if we could launch trash far enough out of orbit WITHOUT rockets it just may work.
Space launches cost millions of dollars. There is the hope that we can just go through our landfills and recycle everything one day. America isn't running out of landfills. Space launches often go wrong, and that would cause it to rain garbage everywhere. It's just not worth it. Depleted nuclear materials are a bit more debatable.
Sorry if this is a double post but I don't like editing and *this* rather disturbed me.( I study astronomy way too much, forgive me.)
Launching crap into space is still a bad idea but it isn't going to cause the trash-pocalypse.
Silent Eagle said:
NO no no no no no. Unless you sent massive steel balls into space this would not happen. Most of our garbage that isn't easily and practically recycled is very light and would burn quickly if it entered our atmosphere. It also would not bundle together as Earth's tidal forces(effect of our gravity on objects orbiting us) would pull anything that started getting big enough to be a threat back into its component pieces.meepop said:
Launching crap into space is still a bad idea but it isn't going to cause the trash-pocalypse.