Why don’t we shoot garbage into space. Perhaps it is currently a far too expensive proposition theoretically it does make sense doesn’t it? I know I’m not the first to come up with this idea. I’ve heard counter-arguments to the effect that we should not start polluting space. That sounds freakin ridiculous! First of all, we aren’t sending anything out there that doesn’t already exist right?? It’s just matter in another form and how can it harm space?? In space, there doesn’t seem to be much to pollute as we haven’t found any life that I’m aware of anywhere close by (within a few million light years or so). Moreover, the nice thing about space, is that there is alot of it!!! I think our garbage would probably cause a lot less pollution and have a much more diluted effect (probably no effect) floating out in space (perhaps to be gobbled up by a star - I hope our nuclear waste wouldn’t hurt the sun) than festering here on our beautiful planet. All living organisms produce waste which is toxic and if not expelled in some way will be harmful to the organism which produced it. We would never not go to the bathroom cuz we don’t wanna pollute earth with our fecal matter. Why should the earth itself be any different? Does anyone else think its time for the Earth to take a dump?
P.S. - does hot tap water boil faster than cold tap water??
Shooting things into space is actually a bit difficult. Consider that 90% of the mass of your typical rocket is fuel. That doesn’t leave much room for cargo. Rockets, and especially rocket fuel for that matter, are rather pricey, and the ammount of fuel you would need to blast even a single ton of garbage into space – well, it wouldn’t be economical.
Also, getting something out of earth orbit is orders of magnitude more difficult (and expensive) than mearly shooting something up there. There are already tens of thousands of man-made objects orbiting the earth, and NORAD spends billions of dollars keeping track of them all, making sure they don’t konk an astronaut in the head. Everything from long dead satellites to the occasional Wrench That Got Away. All this stuff is a temendous headache for NASA and the military (and other countries who like to shoot stuff up there) and sticking big black bags of garbage in orbit would merely add to the problem.
Add to this that all things in orbit fall down to earth eventually, and you’d need to add rocket boosters to the garbage bags, or send shuttle missions up to give them a boost.
Thanks Friedo, it definitely seems like a fiscally expensive, logistically difficult proposition. The obstacles you raise are no doubt great. Nevertheless, in time I would hope we could come up with an efficient and safe method. How much longer can we continue to pollute the planet with our toxic waste?? Even as we try and move toward more environmentally friendly means of production, we still produce an enourmous amount of waste. It just seems riduculous to keep piling it up in our backyards where it seeps into our water, soil and air. There is only so much room on our planet, we can’t keep doing this. It seems to me that eventually we must start dumping our trash off the planet (not in orbit, but shooting it far away) I know that this may not be possible with current technology but it was just an idea… Unless we learn to disintegrate trash using an antimatter laser, and that seems even less probable.
Well, just to give you an idea of the economic infeasibility of this idea, consider that I pay roughly $2.00 per BAG to have my garbage picked up. Figure that the average bag weighs 25 pounds. Currently, it costs about $10,000/lb to put something in orbit (much less get rid of it permanently). If my local garbageman started charging me $250,000 per bag of garbage, I’d be pretty annoyed. And the process of putting that pound of stuff in orbit generates a lot of pollution, so we’re not exactly talking an ecological breakeven here.
Now, consider the ecological implications of tossing garbage into space. That isn’t just garbage – it’s actually pretty useful stuff. Not just hydrocarbons and minerals in your coffee grounds and morning paper, but also rare metals (the gold in your discarded computer chips) and other hard to come by elements. People are actually talking about mining asteroids for, guess what, metals and other hard to come by elements. So why chuck it all into space?
Now invent antigravity and maybe we’ll discuss your concept some more…
The earth is pretty big and we are not near the point of burring it in trash yet. My thought on the subject it to use the resources of this planet to get off of it (and leave our trash behind). To find new homes somewhere in space - eventually. Now why would you want to put trash in our new home?
Also trash might have value and there are piolet studies (or at least there were) of landfill mining to find valuable material in landfills. why get rid of it?
Kinda related to Finagle’s point, but hopefully we’ll become advanced enough in nanotechonolgy this century to create a zero-pollution recycling plant… it will take a lot of energy to convert everything into useful objects though.
Actually, once nanotech gets into full swing it will be exactly as easy to create useful objects from the raw material as it is to convert the garbage into the raw material.
Assuming it is one day economically feasable, I think we’d start getting into trouble if we’d try to make all our messes and garbage disappear into thin air (or space) because we haven’t figured out how to properly dispose of or re-use the by-products of our technology yet. The planet did just fine recycling and breaking everything down for millions/billions of years before we started tinkering, and the roaches and bacteria never needed to launch their garbage into deep space. The idea is sort of like buying a new house every time it gets a little messy rather than just cleaning it up. Shooting general garabge into space would validate the idea that we don’t need to take responsability for all aspects of our activity… we can just sweep the ugly parts under the rug or into deep space where no one will ever see them. Industry and the general society could potentially become a lot more wasteful and abandon the headaches of pollution prevention and recycling since we could make all the nasty stuff just disappear. That is the mind set that created a lot of today’s pollution problems - “Just dump that sewage and antifreeze into the stream… it’ll be swept out to sea and disappear; and if not we’ll be dead and gone before anyone finds it anyways son”.
PS - yes, hot tap water boils faster than cold tap water.