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Old 29-April-2008, 06:00 AM
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Default Why Can't We Launch Trash Into Space?
Question: Why Can't We Launch our Trash Into Space?Answer: Now wouldn't that be a tidy solution to a big problem? Gather together all the garbage, bundle it up and fire it off into space. Maybe just dump it into the Sun. We could live in a world without trash.There are just two problems: humans produce [...]

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Old 29-April-2008, 08:57 AM
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I'm sure I've made some math errors here somewhere…
Math! (Neverfly, get the popcorn!)
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It's been estimated that launching material on the space shuttle costs about $10,000/pound ($22,000/kg). Even if engineers could bring down prices by a factor of 10, it would still be thousands of dollars to launch the garbage into space. Let's imagine a wonderful dream world, where launch costs could be brought down to $1,000/kg - a factor of 1/20th the cost to launch on the space shuttle.

It has also been estimated that the United States alone produces 208 million metric tonnes of garbage per day… per day! So, to launch all that trash into space would cost the United States $208 billion per day… per day!
Wouldn't that be $208 trillion per day?
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Old 29-April-2008, 10:41 AM
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Math! (Neverfly, get the popcorn!)
It's the trivial quirk threads that I find so wild.
Things like: What is infinity divided by zero squared?
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Old 30-April-2008, 01:17 AM
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Why launch trash into space when it makes a lot more sense (resource- and energy-wise) to recycle it?

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Old 30-April-2008, 01:40 AM
Hedgerow Hedgerow is offline
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Wouldn't that be $208 trillion per day?
like that will keep anyone here from thinking its a good idea
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Old 30-April-2008, 11:48 AM
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It's the trivial quirk threads that I find so wild.
Things like: What is infinity divided by zero squared?
The answer is 42....I couldn't resist sorry.
The real answer is, wait for it, infinity!!!.
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Old 30-April-2008, 11:56 PM
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The answer is 42....I couldn't resist sorry.
The real answer is, wait for it, infinity!!!.
You had me at 42.
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