That’s the broken window fallacy. If everyone on the planet is employed in building, maintaining, and launching rockets, and the industries needed to support that, then nobody’s employed in producing food, or entertainment, or education, etc., so we’re all hungry, bored, and ignorant.
But we could offset that by making an orbital Garbage Parasol to shield us from direct sunlight, cooling the earth!
Heh. At the risk of a hijack…whenever someone asserts they are “not an environmentalist,” I ask them if they take out their trash, or just let it pile up in their house and live in it. Because if they do, they’re already an environmentalist, they just haven’t generalized the idea beyond the short term.
geez guys, I just wanted to create an hypothetical scenario where the earth would lose its weight! 
I don’t see much difference between that and the current state of affairs.
But currently we are producing all that and there are still millions of people unemployed.
Not necessary, watch:
How much mass would the earth need to lose to affect it’s current orbit?
If the mass just “poofed” into nothingness, it would have zero effect on the Earth’s orbit.
What would have an effect is if the mass is ejected from the Earth. Then the mass acts as a rocket–every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So sit in a canoe and start throwing rocks out the back. Your canoe travels forward. Throw rocks out the front and your canoe travels backwards. Throw them to the side and your canoe moves to the opposite side.
Every rocket launch effects the Earth’s orbit, but the total mass of all rockets launched into space throughout the history of space travel has been immeasurably tiny compared to the mass of the Earth. Even millions of tons of matter ejected every year would take a long long time to add up, and even then only if we consistently ejected it in one direction. If we fired the same amount of matter backwards in our orbit and forward in our orbit, our orbit would remain exactly the same.
According to information I just googled, the Earth masses 5.97 × 10^27 grams and is traveling at an average speed of 29000 meters per second, for a total energy of 1.77 * 10^32 newtons. How much mass and at what speed you would need to eject to change our orbit to any arbitrary new orbit is a simple matter of orbital mechanics. Where you get the energy to accelerate the mass is up to you.
Oh, you said rotation! You mean how fast the Earth spins? Again, ejecting matter from the Earth in a balanced manner won’t affect the Earth’s spin. If we just have one jet of garbage headed one way, and an equal jet of garbage headed the other way, there will be no effect no matter how much mass the Earth loses.
Generally, yes. The total angular momentum of the Earth-trash system is conserved (stays constant), so if you give more to the trash (by moving it further from the axis of rotation) you will take some from the Earth (slowing it down).
It is of course also possible to do the reverse, i.e. give the trash angular momentum in the opposite direction as the Earth, so the Earth speeds up. But that makes your launch unusually difficult (takes unusually large amounts of energy).
Since the Earth weighs quite a lot, it takes a very large change in angular momentum to produce any noticeable change in the rate at which the Earth revolves. (Angular momentum is proportional to mass times rate of rotation.) You would need to launch a lot of trash, or launch it with very high velocities.
The executive summary: Earth, and anything on it, already has a lot of energy from the fact it’s careering around the Sun at about 100,000 km/hr. It can’t fall into the Sun until you’ve cancelled all that out (as in: by accelerating it in the opposite direction), whereas the amount of energy you need to add to leave solar orbit is a lot smaller.
I should note launching your trash with very high velocities is implicit in your idea of throwing it into the Sun. For something launched from Earth to hit the Sun, its angular momentum about the Sun must be reduced to zero. If you do it immediately, i.e. not through some complicated orbital slingshot maneuver, then you must cancel the Earth’s 30 km/s orbital velocity by launching your rocket at local sunset, i.e. directly backwards from the Earth’s direction of travel, at something like 30 km/s + Earth’s escape velocity (11 km/s) = 41 km/s. There are no existing or easily forseeable rockets that can come anywhere near that kind of energy.
I’m completely out of my depth here so sorry if this is a stupid question but…
If you aimed your trash directly at the sun wouldn’t it eventually make it there? I realize it would still have a lot of the trajectory of earth but it should have some velocity toward the sun. I mean, if the sun’s gravity can pull on something as far away as Pluto surely it would pull in something shot at it from Earth’s comparatively close orbit, right?
Here’s a good explanation why its not that easy PlainJain
It appears its more economic to shoot a rocket out of the solar system than to hit the sun
And on the flip side, if you really could send all garbage into space or the Sun, you’d be breaking the cycle and slowly draining the Earth of important and useful resources. Bad idea.
PlainJain, all our garbage is going around the sun at 67,000+ miles per hour because it’s on Earth and that’s the speed Earth is going around the sun. To get the garbage to head towards the sun, we would have to use energy to slow the garbage’s 67,000 mph to 0 mph. That would take a huge amount of energy.
Nah, push a few asteroids towards earth, problem solved.
This is just a restating of Carl Pham’s post without explaining why. Reading manila’s link I am intrigued by this section:
So we have the ability to add/subtract 41% of the orbital velocity? What would happen to a rocket that rather than slowing it’s speed from 67,000 mph to 0 mph, slowed it from 67,000 mph to 41% less than 67,000 mph. My question essentially being, would a rocket stay in the earth’s orbit going roughly half the speed of the earth?
The rocket would acquire an elliptical orbit. If the thrust were applied in a short amount of time, the rocket trajectory’s highest point would be much the same as earth’s but the rocket trajectory’s lowest point would be much closer to the sun than the earth’s lowest point. At its lowest point, it would orbit the sun faster than the earth does.
First, get rid of the idea that things float in space. Thinking of them floating is good enough for some purposes but not for others. In a perfectly circular orbit, an orbiting object is pulled toward the celestial body by its gravity at the same rate as the orbiting body’s velocity is flinging it away from the celestial body.
A balance, yes. So why wouldn’t a rocket launched from Earth counter to Earth’s path of travel at 41% less than it’s velocity upset that balance?
BTW, no where did I state that I thought objects floated in space.
It’s enough to leave earth orbit, which only requires about 25000 mph. But it’s not enough to get to the sun.
One thing to realize is that we’re not just in one orbit. A satellite is in orbit around the earth. The earth (and the satellite and all of us) are in orbit around the sun.
So, even if the rocket leaves earth orbit, it hasn’t yet left orbit around the sun. The 41% is enough to leave the solar system entirely but it’s not enough to hit the sun.
Oh, and to more directly answer a different question - aiming a rocket at the sun would be one of the least efficient things to do. It’s counter-intuitive but it is seldom the case in orbit that pointing directly at something is the best way to get to it.
It also helps to not think of stars or black holes as giant gravitational vacuum cleaners. If the sun were replaced by a black hole of the same mass (ignoring the fact the sun is too small to become one), nothing changes about earth’s orbit. Nothing gets sucked up into the black hole. The mass is the same, so the gravity is the same, so earth’s orbit remains the same. We’d experience some difficulties from the drastic change in solar radiation, though.