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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[–] mipadaitu@lemmy.world 86 points 2 weeks ago (17 children)

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.

[–] Doombot1@lemmy.one 21 points 2 weeks 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

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