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.

  • lemonmelon@lemmy.world
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    6 minutes ago

    Gathering all the trash to launch it into the sun isn’t easy, as many comments have pointed out. Not only do you have to counteract the velocity of Earth, but I’d expect you’d need a way to keep them alive on the trip there as well. I mean, I’m assuming you want them to be cognizant until the end, yeah?

  • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    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.

  • pinkystew@reddthat.com
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    13 hours ago

    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.

  • mipadaitu@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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/43694

    Fourth - 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.

    • andrewta@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

    • Doombot1@lemmy.one
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      2 days ago

      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

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

        • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          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.

        • yesman@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          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.

        • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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          2 days ago

          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.

    • MTK@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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

    • Vilian@lemmy.ca
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      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

  • spittingimage@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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.

  • neidu2@feddit.nl
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      Plus, launching that sort of payload is going to be insanely costly.

      And causes its own additional air pollution as part of the launch.

  • Ledivin@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • Apepollo11@lemmy.world
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      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.

  • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

  • fubarx@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    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.

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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        1 day ago

        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

    • whaleross@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      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.

  • edric@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • LostXOR@fedia.io
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      2 days ago

      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.

    • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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      1 day ago

      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.