Space Trash Barges in Our Future?

I just had a thought occur to me while I was reading a reply someone made to me in another post.

Currently we have trash barges that are all over the place here on Earth, will we wind up one day with sending our trash into space and have space trash barges, or could we wind up using one of our neighboring planets as a trash dump site?

Or just let it all pile up into big mountains like in the movie Idiocracy.


[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/47b7eb6df662.jpg[/atsimg]

reply to post by AlienCarnage


If we had the tech to do it I say we should send it to space and dump it near the sun... It will burn before it even gets close to the sun.. All earths trash and bio, chem, and nuke waste as well... What do you think?

reply to post by AlienCarnage


I thought that this was how we were going to clean it up?

The problem is, except for really bad nuclear and toxic waste, it's too expensive to shoot that stuff into orbit or into space unless we can figure out some kind of cheap space elevator or rail gun to do it.

It's much easier and cheaper just to haul it out into some unpopulated area and dump it, then wait for the landfill miners of the future to recycle it.

Sending mass away from the planet may have an impact unless there is also an equal amount of incoming material.

Most of our trash can be reduced and recycled. It simply isn't. This isn't a space trash issue. This is a bureaucratic and civilian mismanagement issue.

Thank you all for your input on this thread.

When I first thought of this idea, it wasn’t with the thought necessarily of just Earth’s trash, although that was the focus of my first post, but with us having a space station in orbit and with planning of bases on the moon of Mars and our own moon, where would they put their trash over time?

Over time the trash will accumulate from these places, what will they do with it? This is where the idea of the space trash barges originated in my mind.

[edit on 8/3/2009 by AlienCarnage]

reply to post by AlienCarnage


I think that sending everything to the sun is a great idea. I don't even have to explain why, because it doesn't need it. The only thing is depositing it there- I mean we'd need some sort of container to carry the rubbish, right? So, how would we do it? Go all futurama and send it there via rocket or fire it there from a cannnon like device? I vote astro-cannon, a shooter on a satellite or something. I don't know if this has been said, if so I apologise and can only say that great minds think alike. (nah, you're all brilliant, and the idea to send it all to the sun is great.) However, I don't mean to sound thick or like I'm getting technical, but mightn't that upset the sun's atmosphere or make it a bit unstable to a certain extent? But I don't know.
By the way, that video up there is a bit annoying, but strangley watchable.

Ramadwarf on the sun

reply to post by Ramadwarf Philes


How much could we send into our sun before we make it unstable? We do so much damage to the planet; do we really want to start messing with the sun?

reply to post by AlienCarnage


Exactly, that's what I'm thinking. I mean messing with the Earth is one thing, but to upset the sun would be to upset the whole solar system I would imagine. I mean, we might as well wait until Earth is under water before we destroy our lifeline, right? But seriously, I know the garbage will burn up, but the remnants of it must still exist in some form, and, if events in our species' history have taught us anything, what starts off as a small solution to a BIG problem, eventually turns into a bad solution for a problem that seems small to the new one.

Ramadwarf on learning from past mistakes.

Another thought has occurred to me, say we have this trash on the space station, and moon bases in the future, would there be decomposing microbes, bacteria, maggots, etc. too, and if we sent this trash to other planets, could this launch an eco system on these planets? Is it possible life on this planet was started because some ET shot his trash onto our planet? (that would be an interesting topic for a thread)

That's all we need, chucking our trash into space, is going to open up a whole new identity theft thing. Imagine aliens stealing your bank details and buying space ships on your cards.

Down with this sort of thing!!

reply to post by AlienCarnage


What a coincidence! I had an idea for a thread this morning that is similar to yours, only not as inventive. I uh, won't go into it because I still want to use it, but I like the idea of us all being spawned from a packet of astro-chips!

Ramadwarf on Out of this world products

Personally, I think the sun would make the perfect dumping ground for bio hazards and toxic waste. The insignicantly small amount of material compared to the size of the sun would not do anything. The sun is bombared by asteroids a heck of a lot bigger then anything we could possibly through at it and survived unscathed. The nuclear fusion going on would eliminate anything we through at it at the atomic level. It really would be an efficient cleaning system.

The sun could absorb the entire mass of the Earth without batting a solar eyelash. I am a little confused why people would think we would upset the balance of the sun? Mmm. Throw a few Jupiters at it and maybe... just maybe....

We could send the whole planet Earth into the sun and it would probably only let out a small fart. The sun is HUGE.

On another note, we already have technology in place and operational to take advantage of the mountains of trash we generate. Look up plasma gassification, or better yet, check out this wiki: Plasma arc waste disposal
. This disposal technique is incredibly efficient. It generates enough energy to power the plasma furnace with electricity to spare as well as providing lots and lots of relatively clean syngas for other uses.

I read about this about 5 years ago and as you can see in the article, there are several plants online now. Kind of stunning that this is not better known, though.

reply to post by rogerstigers


I have heard of these plants, but was not aware that they were being used; I thought it was just an idea.
This is very interesting and a great idea for the bases that we plan on setting up in the future on different moons and such. Question is whether they would build these with each base or if there would be on location that everything would be sent to, like have one set up on our moon, where the trash from mars moon base would be sent via space barge? I would think they would keep them set up on each base moon, so they could use these for a power source.

reply to post by TLomon


Have you thought about the fact that meteorites and such like are all natural? Most of our rubbish is 'artificial' (though the ingredients are all natural in origin) so the sun wouldn't be used to having all this odd stuff thrown at it. Anyway, no one thought the Earth would eventually run out of steam once, so what's to stop the sun doing the same if we take it for granted as we did the Earth?

Ramadwarf on the sun and it's limits

Sounds like a tv show I think I remember from my childhood.

The ship was like a space "garbage truck" and they would fly around picking up space junk. It had these arms that would secure the junk, and pull it into it's "mouth".

Anybody else remember this show, or did I just dream it up?