Hey. Not sure if this is the place to post this, but it seems the closest... anyway on with my idea.

Well, I realise there are probably many thousands of flaws with this idea, but I thought I'd share it anyway!

I had the idea that perhaps rather than disposing of waste here on earth we could let space deal with it. I don't mean throw it all out the earths atmosphere and let it drift about freely! Wot I am on about is as follows:

We load all our rubbish onto spaceships, either as 'cargo' on human manned ships, or specifically designed 'garbage' ships. Then we launch them into space.

Then either one of two things happen:
1) once in space the ship is directed towards the sun, and a short burst of power is released proppelling th craft towards the sun where it will burn up disposing of our rubbish in a non polluting way.
2) cargo can be unloaded and propelled towards the sun. As the ships will not need to stop only a small ammount of fuell will be needed to get them going on their journy to the sun.

So what do you think? I haven't thought it through properly, but I recon it could work! The crafts wouldn't need to be complex in design as they would never need to re-enter the earths atmosphere or carry large ammounts of fuel, so they wouldn't be as expensive!

It costs 10000$ to get one pound into space.

They city of LA produces more than 40,000 tons of trash a day

2000(40K)*10000=800billion a day, just for the city of LA.

And thats just the money problem.

it's ok, I wasn't taking my idea too seriously, but just putting forward a possibility. I'm sure these costs will go down in the future anyway!

But in principle what is wrong with this, I know money is the major factor, but putting that aside...

A lot of products we use today have limited natural sources. Wood, for example, come from trees. Vegetables come from plants. Meat comes from animals which in turn eat plants. Plastic comes from oil. Those resources are often limited. Most would probably assume that plants can regenerate forever if you keep harvesting them. However, that is not the case. The soil has something called the organic matter content, which is basically the nutrients required for plants to survive. That is actually quite limited, and farms face the problem of losing organic matter content as crops are harvested and transported away. Normally dead plants and animals within a properly functioning ecosystem returns that organic matter content right back into the soil after they die, but farms do not work like this. Farms often require re-fertilising to keep their soil working.

The material on Earth is limited. Remember, it's a spaceship. A big one, but it's a spaceship. We can't transport matter out of it and expect new products to grow back forever. That itself violates the law of conservation of mass (unless we're using nuclear energy then E=mc^2 and mass goes to energy (but then we're still losing mass))

[edit on 12-5-2005 by Taishyou]

Ahhh, I see what you're saying, we would lose weight and therefore our orbit would change, so we could move further away, or closer to the sun??

Hmmm, better not carry out my idea then!!

Well, mass is not really that big of a concern. The Earth is massive enough. It's the organic stuff that we can't artificially replicate, such as complex organic molecules that exist in organic matter content, that we cannot afford to lose too much. Maybe some time in the future, we will be able to replicate ecosystems using more abundant substances on Earth and get virtually unlimited natural resources, but that probably won't happen for centuries. Ecosystems are extremely complicated, even today we do not fully understand their mechanisms.

btw the Earth's orbit probably won't change by much if it decreases in mass. The sun is just too massive. A change in mass on a tiny planet like Earth won't matter much.

...but if enough mass was to be transported then the gravity between the two would change, therefore affecting the shape of the Earths orbit...

Yup, I second that, you don't want things going up into space that actually should be recycled or composted here.

Troy

not only that but i think there are spacific rules about useing space as a trash heap . besides some stuff does need to be recycled. if only they actualy recicled the stuff.