According to the EPA, America produces about 250 million tonnes of garbage per year. An aircraft carrier weighs 100,000 tonnes. Now, admittedly, I haven't drilled down through all the logistics, but how much fucking fuel do you think it would take to launch the equivalent of 2,500 aircraft carriers into space every year? Alright, I think that's about enough of this thread for me... Have fun guys.
On launching garbage into space - it currently costs around $22,000 per kg to put something into orbit. That's $22,000 per kg and you haven't even properly got out of Earth's gravitational pull yet. At the moment, shooting garbage into space isn't an easy way out or a hard way out, it's not even a remotely plausible way out.
Just because I want to contribute absolutely nothing of value to whatever is left of this thread, launching garbage into space via rocket would be stupid. Railguns would be more cost-effective, and since the US Navy is already pissing away taxpayer money to develop them as a TLAM replacement, it wouldn't be much of an evolutionary step to make it bigger and aim it at space. And it's not like throwing up cheesecake just to eat more. It's closer to taking a shit in the Pacific Ocean and having a bunch of people on the internet debate whether or not your recently laid shit will wash ashore in Melbourne three decades from now, mutated and dragging innocent children into the depths while small chunks of it break off and float away to harass innocent ducks. Also, racist BMW-driving lawyer complaining about how useless the space program is...the myopia and idiocy expressed therein are far beyond the limits of human language to properly describe. The closest I can get, (and I'm still really, really far away here, think miles between Earth and Mars off) is pretty much that if there is, anywhere in the world, a poster supporting abortion, your face belongs on it. Oh, and Britain - thanks for hosting the televised entertainment for our NASA ladies and gents while they made history and kinda landed on fucking Mars.
Oh Jesus ... No excuses I suppose. But I had my left wisdom tooth out yesterday morning. So yesterday everything I posted seemed brilliant and well thought out. Today? Well ... not so much.
Remember how everyone used to say that commercial space flight was a stupid idea and couldn't be done and then the X Prize was granted to those guys who sold a space plane to Richard Branson that still isn't practical for commercial space flight? It's diverging from the point a bit, but one of the other X Prizes and the one that probably gets the most research focused on it is about building a space elevator to massively reduce the cost of putting stuff into space. Once it's in space, the problem is pretty easy - time it right and have a guy in a space suit give it a push and eventually, it'll end up in the sun. There are a bunch of projects about making that more practical once we have the space elevator and the space elevator itself is still a thing that only exists in fiction and unfinished ideas. But eventually, it'll just be a thing. Oh why didn't you stop there? For your sake, I hope it's incredibly relative to your post. All human waste is made from stuff that exists on the planet earth. You could push the entire fucking planet along with every single thing ever produced by a human, a red head, a dolphin or an alien visitor to earth into the sun and it would have fuck all appreciable impact. The fact that it's man made doesn't change the fact that every single thing that we call 'earth' and consequently every single thing ever produced by a human could fall into the fucking sun tomorrow, and the impact would barely be measurable. The earth is a bit less than 8000 miles in diameter. The Sun is more than 330,000 times the size of earth. Our solar system if we go out to say Neptune's orbit, is about 2.5 billion miles in diameter. Our solar system is more widely considered to be out to the Oort cloud - which makes it about 18.6 trillion miles in diameter. 18.6 trillion miles is about 3.2 light years. The Milky way, the galaxy that we live in, is about 100,000 light years, or 581 quadrillion miles in diameter. So you could fit the earth into it 70 trillion times over. There are 3,000 galaxies that current human technology has been able to detect and the current leading model is that there are 500 billion galaxies in the universe. Humans are a minor concern to our own solar system. We're utterly insignificant in terms of the nearest solar systems and we're utterly, utterly irrelevant on a galactic scale. In terms of the universe? We're not even the echo of a guppy farting in the ocean. The fastest space vessels we have EVER launched were the Helios probes, which went about 43 miles per second, or 157,000 miles an hour. Nobody has seriously tried to go faster since then and those were launched before most of the people reading this were born, but assuming you could travel at 200,000 miles an hour - and assuming you could carry enough fuel to do it, it would take 521 days to move from one side of our solar system to the other if we're going with the Neptune orbit as the boundary. Give or take a bit, it would take 5,308 years to reach the outer boundaries of the Oort cloud from earth. And that assumes we can go 43,000 miles an hour faster than any human vessel has ever traveled, and could some how carry enough fuel to maintain that speed for that long and assuming we could fabricate a vessel that would survive that g-load and not be ripped to shreds by dust and debris encountered during it's transit. Also, the Helios probes were headed toward the Sun. The fastest solar escape velocity recorded to date was the Voyager 1 which was traveling at less than a third of the speed of the Helios probes. ... Fuck. Note to self, read to end of thread before writing angry tirade. Second last post not close enough.
My biggest argument against sending our garbage into space is that we would get benefits from that garbage at some point in the future. We wouldn't have oil without there having been a whole lotta dinosaur corpses and plant matter. Limestone and marble needed a lot of empty shells to form. Using the vast amounts of titanium and gold and copper and aluminum and advanced alloys required for space flight and then using them just to fling our shit away from us seems pretty wasteful. Most shit can be recycled in some form or another. Let's do that.
updated high res images with audio . . . this version has music, too, which is kinda dumb. I swear at 1:48 it sounds like he says, "Stand by for vaginal separation." I know that can't be right, but I am totally planning on using that line.