Hey there!
Welcome to Life Noggin!
Oh is this one of those toy dogs that does a bunch of flips!?
Cool!
I hate having to throw the trash out.
I mean i gotta get up.
i gotta get the garbage.
I gotta throw it into the sun, and then i gotta go back inside my house.
Oh?
That's not how you guys do it?
Right, i forgot, it's different in your world than it is in my world.
Trash is a huge problem on earth.
And growing populations all over the planet are throwing away more garbage, every year.
Right now, humans throw away 3,500,000 tons of trash.
A DAY.
Researchers estimate by the end of the century, humans will be throwing away 11 million tons
of trash a day.
Human rockets today are more efficient than ever.
People have even sent a mannequin in a car into space, just for fun.
Like just cause they had so much money.
So why aren’t you humans using rockets to send your trash into the sun?
Well, it's probably because the trash problem is even bigger than you think.
One of the world’s most cost effective rockets is $90 million to launch. and can carry up
to 70 tons of material into space.
So, if we were to launch all of our trash into space using this type of rocket, we’d
be spending [ incoherent math mumbling] a lot of money.
In fact, for one year’s worth of trash, this could cost more than 6 times the world’s
current debt.
Also, you’d need 18.3 million rockets to do it.
And modeling after Kennedy Space Center’s 160 acre launchpad, for 18.3 million rockets,
you’d need a launching area bigger than China.
I would actually love to see that launch -- ooooh engineering, aren’t you amazing?
Oh!
Almost forgot, and if we send the rocket itself into the Sun, we also lose that too, which
is definitely not ideal.
It’s probably a better idea just to send the garbage out into low earth orbit.
But here’s the kicker: garbage in space is /already/ a problem.
Decades of defunct satellites, rocket boosters, and pieces of space crafts are creating a
cosmic landfill.
In 1996, a French satellite was damaged by space junk created a decade earlier.
A collision to one satellite may affect others, because some satellites only function in networks,
like GPS.
If one GPS satellite is struck, it affects basic navigation; airplane routing; and time
synchronization for banking and finance.
It can also affect guided missiles, drones, and intelligence operations.
Also, orbital debris has a significant risk to the International Space Station’s hardware,
and more importantly, its human life.
Losing the ISS would mean losing research on improved vaccines; cancer detection and
treatment systems; natural disaster monitoring, and robotic arms that makes unremovable tumors
removable.
And finally, what goes up, must come down: after some time, the garbage we send out will
begin falling back to the planet mostly burning up in the sky.
According to the EPA, the practice of burning trash can be very bad for both your health
and the environment.
This process can produce dioxins, which may cause cancer, heart disease, and other medical
issues.
While some countries, like Sweden, seem to have well-regulated trash burning processes,
it’s unlikely that we could do the same thing with trash falling from space.
And even though it’s burning pretty high up in the atmosphere and not in your backyard,
we should be on the safe side and try to avoid that.
In the near future we may have new tech, like, space elevators and railgun launchers shooting
trash deeper into space and having it be cheaper than ever, but until that day, people, we
may just have to recycle.
So what do you wanna launch into space?
How expensive do you think that would be?
Let me know in the comment section below or tell me, what should i talk about next?
Wanna watch more Life Noggin?
Check out the video we did on just how small you are compared to the galaxy?
On this scale, the milky way galaxy would be about as big as North America, and that's
just our galaxy!
The milky way is just one of the billions of galaxies that make up our universe.
As always, my name is Blocko, this has been Life Noggin, don't forget to keep on thinking!