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.
Launching stuff into the sun takes a shitton of delta-V. We should just launch it into the moon.
sun gets rid of it tho
But then all the fumes won’t just pollute the earth they will pollute the solar system, think of the animals on mercury, have a heart
Even if you could do this, it would be more effective to just do the “collect all the garbage” part and then store it in a heavily lined container forever.
It’s not too expensive.
The defense budget of the USA is 840 billion dollars. That’s not too expensive.
The reason it’s not being done is there’s no money to be made.
Profit first, survival of the species second.
Prohibitively expensive.
First the cleanup is gonna take forever and cost billions.
Then building a rocket is gonna be even more billions and time.
And then actually shooting something into the sun is harder than just blasting it out of the solar system.
You could save a bit by shooting it into another star, and not our own. But you still gotta clean it up and make a rocket. I don’t think we have even launched a rocket that big or heavy ever. It may require multiple rockets. Planet Express barely was able to make it happen, and they are in the future, only needed to clean NYC, and is also from a cartoon.
And then actually shooting something into the sun is harder than just blasting it out of the solar system.
This is fun to play with: https://trinket.io/embed/glowscript/6642756b52?toggleCode=true&start=result
And then actually shooting something into the sun is harder than just blasting it out of the solar system.
Why is this true? Wouldn`t gravity do most of the work if we just kinda shove it in that direction?
Because if you launch something from Earth, you inherit the Earth’s orbital speed around the Sun. At that point, whatever you launched will just continue to orbit the Sun. It takes less energy to accelerate to a solar system exit trajectory than it does to scrub off all of the excess velocity and end up on a trajectory that intersects the Sun.
But does it matter what speed the garbage is going at when it hits the sun?
No, but it’s going too fast sideways. It would miss the sun. You need to slow it down by the same apeed that Earth is moving, stopping its sideways motion and letting it drop into the sun.
Edit: I like making diagrams. Red is the trajectory you’re expecting. Blue is the Earth’s motion, which adds to that red arrow. Purple is the resulting actual movement of the trash rocket.
But do you need to slow it down all the way? Can’t you just slow it down enough to get the ball in an elliptical orbit where the trash ball gets very close to the ball of plasma?
The problem is slowing it down to any speed that would end up with it dropping into the sun is going to take more effort and be more difficult than firing it out of the solar system. It isn’t practical.
Space is big. It’s so big that our tiny ape brains have a hard time conceiving of how big it is. The sun is actually (despite it’s size) a relatively small target and is very very far away. Now the more delta-V you burn to slow the trash down the smaller its orbit around the sun will be. But that orbit starts enormous. So to get that purple line near the sun you do need to slow down almost the whole way, just to get it close.
Yes and no. The gravity of the sun will attract the rocket, but there are other things out in space besides the sun.
The problem then is other planets will start whipping the garbage rocket around who knows where. Could even come back around and smash into earth. Same problem with the sun, actually. It’s quite hard to hit something that’s that big when we’re this far away. If you miss even a fraction of a decimal of a degree, the trash rocket will swing around and you’re back to planetary hot potato.
It’s easier to sling the rocket past the south or north pole at a right angle to the solar plane. Up or down it’ll either keep going till it’s another suns problem or it joins the Oort cloud, which is kinda like a giant trash dump for everything that didn’t make it into our solar system when the sun formed.
LEELA Should we really be celebrating? I mean, what if the second garbage ball returns to Earth like the first one did? FRY Who cares? That won't be for hundreds of years. FARNSWORTH Exactly! It's none of our concern. FRY That's the 20th century spirit!
Nailed all the points.
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.
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.
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
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.
A lot of ocean trash comes by river from poor countries.
Ocean trash comes from plastic manufacturers. Responsible wealthy countries ship their dutiful recyclables to garbage pits in poor countries.
Most poor people don’t even have the education or resources to polymerize crude into poly-vinyl, it’s harder than you’d think.
A lot of ocean trash comes by river from poor countries.
Also by river from wealthy countries, and has done so for centuries.
The scope of the task of removing it is far bigger than OP can imagine.
https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
Most of the plastic in our oceans comes from land-based sources: by weight, 70% to 80% is plastic that is transported from land to the sea via rivers or coastlines
Most of the world’s largest emitting rivers are in Asia, with some also in East Africa and the Caribbean
Seven of the top ten rivers are in the Philippines. Two are in India, and one in Malaysia. The Pasig River in the Philippines alone accounts for 6.4% of global river plastics
Rich countries tend to have better functioning waste collection and disposal services.
Rich countries tend to have better functioning waste collection and disposal services.
These days it is a lot better, but it wasn’t always that way.
It has been that way for many decades.
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
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.
How can earth have enough heavy metals for that?
:edit english is hard
You misread, I specifically said that Earth doesn’t have enough mass for that.
True, thanks
It costs about $10,000 US to get a kilo of payload as far as Low Earth Orbit. I’m not sure this is going to scale up.
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.
Orbital mechanics makes launching stuff at the sun extremely difficult.
The earth has a gigantic a molten layer under our feet, and we couldn’t even dump it down there. Too expensive and difficult.
Long term, my guess is engineered super bacteria and/or robotics may clean up the trash in the future, if we don’t extinct ourselves first.
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’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!
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.
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.
Gathering is the hard part but I’m afraid just making raw ore and water into rockets and fuel would use more energy than what we are using today, just to offset the current waste output
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.
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.
There is no such thing as “outside earth’s gravity pull”. You can compensate with “centrifugal” force but you’ll need to position the point of mass in geostationary orbit and hang the rest of the structure off it (idea known as space elevator). However, there is no material whose tensile strength will support its own weight at this length. Steel cables max out at a few hundred meters at surface gravity.
