Trash ships to hell

[Whirligig Girl]

Instead of storing all of our trash stuff on Earth, let's just throw it all away onto Venus with warp drives! Over the next few thousand years, usable resources on Earth dwindle to nothingness.

Just an idea for a sci-fi story.

[Tommygun]

It was done already: "Soldier" movie 1998.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120157/

[RainDreamer]

Why not throw it to the Sun?

[Whirligig Girl]

Why not throw it to the Sun?

Because it's harder to get a collision course with a warp drive?

[lajoswinkler]

Why not throw it to the Sun?

In order to fall on the Sun, you'd have to change your speed of revolution around it by almost 30 km/s. That's far from feasible.

[Accelerando]

And if warp drives were unavailable, we could build a wormhole between Earth-Moon L1 and Venus orbital space. Then we could launch our trash up in a compacted, spherical form, held together by a skin of carbon nano-stuff, to be driven through the wormhole by a massive booster.

We can build it in the shape of a man, and we will call it The Barkley.

I'm sorry

[peadar1987]

Just recycle, so much easier and cheaper.

[Camacha]

There is no trash. Trash is an ageing 20^th century concept with strangely open ended material and production cycles. Waste is a resource, one we will use more and more efficiently for economic and environmental reasons while also adjusting our production process to produce more useful waste. In a little while there will even be bacteria that feed off our now uncompostable refuse, either naturally evolved to fill a niche or artificially to clean up. There is no trash.

Edited January 16, 2015 by Camacha

[Greenfire32]

Too much trash in your face? There's plenty of space out in space!

[Whirligig Girl]

Too much garbage in your face? There's plenty of space out in space!

Fixed that for you. I have practically memorized all of the lines from WALL-E. I know when something's wrong with a quote.

[Nuke]

you are better off recycling it. have a feeling at some point in the future we will be mining long covered landfill sites.

[Tommygun]

you are better off recycling it. have a feeling at some point in the future we will be mining long covered landfill sites.

Yes, if nothing else to keep it from contaminating harder to find ground water.

[Louella]

you are better off recycling it. have a feeling at some point in the future we will be mining long covered landfill sites.

I seem to remember reading something that says currently, rocks that contain 3% copper are economic to mine for copper.

Makes you wonder about the copper content of the spoil heaps of old 18th and 19th century mines.

And yeah, metal content of landfill sites.

Was also something about how it'd be economic to gather dust from road junctions, and sift it for gold, platinum and other metals, deposited there by exhaust gases from vehicles with catalytic converters.

Or that guy does that thing with space mining asteroids for more gold than has ever existed on earth.

[Nuke]

actually i was thinking more for its raw resources. but if you get the nasty stuff out of there it helps the environment. mining usually processes a lot of rock to get at things that only make up a fraction of a percent of the material. i have a feeling that the landfill is much more rich in materials but the diversity of compounds makes separating them into marketable materials a serious engineering challenge. older landfills, the ones that were covered up before recycling became big buisness, are going to be the most rich in resources. right now i think its still cheaper to get new resources, and so no point in recovery of stuff we have buried. eventually this will change though.

[Newt]

This thread does not seem to be about asteroid/Mars/other extraterrestrial mining; rather it is about the disposal of goods via launching them to space, especially Venus.

I agree with the skepticism of using it for general waste. Just dumping spent cans and rotten meat on Venus, or anywhere off the earth, seems a serious waste of resources, as it takes a lot to get it there, and it still has generally use to provide. I believe that there was a suggestion that slugs of spent nuclear fuel be launched away from the Earth, this seems more practical in that the material is far more dangerous, and far less useful. It still would be preferable to not generate waste, though.

[peadar1987]

Spent nuclear fuel is actually still potentially pretty useful for generating power, we just don't have the reactors to do it at the moment. That will probably change in the future, with subcritical reactors or certain designs on molten salt reactor. In any case, I'd feel safer with it locked away in a secure repository than launched into space on top of what is essentially a huge explosion.

[Nibb31]

We produce 20000 tons of nuclear waste per year. That represents approximately 200 SLS launches every year, or 400Falcon Heavy launches, just to get the stuff to LEO. The cost would be prohibitive.

[lajoswinkler]

Spent nuclear fuel is actually still potentially pretty useful for generating power, we just don't have the reactors to do it at the moment. That will probably change in the future, with subcritical reactors or certain designs on molten salt reactor. In any case, I'd feel safer with it locked away in a secure repository than launched into space on top of what is essentially a huge explosion.

Actually, we do. Spent fuel has only a fragment of its fuel actually spent, and has fissible plutonium. After chemical refining, MOX fuel can be made and used again. And it is used. Getting rid of spent nuclear fuel is an absurd stupidity. All that effort to collect the scarce uranium and then throwing >90% away... awful.

[Whirligig Girl]

If anything radioactive, and dangerous because of that, exists on Earth in dangerous portions, people will try to make a reactor that can use it.

Of course throwing away trash into space is a stupid idea. But civilizations have made really dumb decisions to try and do what's easiest at the time rather than what's best.

The scenario I was proposing was more of a thing where after civilization has almost failed due to lack of resources, humans have to go to Venus and reclaim all of that old trash. Hundreds of crews of, say, 7 people each would have to go to Venus and constantly fling trash back into orbit.

Note that "fling" is literally the most opposite of merely throwing something into orbit that you can get from the surface of any planet in the solar system.

Edited January 17, 2015 by GregroxMun

[smartech]

A very good solution to waste is to throw it into a mini black hole. It will be converted to gamma radiation as the small black hole evaporates.

[MircoMars]

A very good solution to waste is to throw it into a mini black hole. It will be converted to gamma radiation as the small black hole evaporates.

until now I though mankind's role was to produce plastics for future lifeforms and then die out. but shoveling the (reachable) mass of the universe into blackholes sounds equally valid.

since capitalistic economies expand by definition, some time in the future the resources will get scarce. recycling can only compensate a little and the natural mines (of any kind) will get more and more difficult (read expensive) to get to.

I don't think anyone will throw thrash away into space. I rather think that garbage will be a tradegood.

[problemecium]

^ It already is in Eve Online. I made millions once just buying garbage and selling it in other systems.

[ScriptKitt3h]

Actually, we do. Spent fuel has only a fragment of its fuel actually spent, and has fissible plutonium. After chemical refining, MOX fuel can be made and used again. And it is used. Getting rid of spent nuclear fuel is an absurd stupidity. All that effort to collect the scarce uranium and then throwing >90% away... awful.

Cool, someone else actually cares about MOX fuel tech... Shame the U.S. govt. keeps trying to shut down the one project they're doing...

[Pds314]

I'm pretty sure that if we can afford to use warp drives, we can probably just E=MC^2 our trash into vast amounts of energy.

[Nuke]

yea its 2015, wheres my mr fusion.