this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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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.

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[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Launching stuff into the sun takes a shitton of delta-V. We should just launch it into the moon.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

But does it matter what speed the garbage is going at when it hits the sun?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 22 hours ago
         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!
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Nailed all the points.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

i always say this about nuclear waste and usually i get punched in the face.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I think it's a great idea, the rest of these commenters are being scaredy cats who love garbage and want to keep it close

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This is an incredibly stupid question.

OP:

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