Why don't we just round up all our garbage and throw it into the sun? Well, the BBC has an answer to this particular question of our time: Because the cost would be absolutely enormous. A new post there breaks it down and explains why we can't just adopt the Superman IV solution to our big trash problem.

To make their calculations, Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry at BBC Future start with the ballpark figure that it costs $200 million to launch an Ariane V rocket and get its 15,432 pounds of payload into a stable point in Earth orbit. A few years ago, The Atlantic estimated that the world makes 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage per year. By that math it would take more than 168 million Ariane V rockets to launch an entire year's worth of trash into space, at a cost of $33,696,200,000,000,000 ($33 quadrillion). Even if SpaceX succeeded in its goal to cut the price of launching rockets in half (and if it could build that many rockets, which it can't), the world still couldn't come anywhere close to affording that sum of money.

Plus, all you've got at this point is more than 168 million rockets full of trash in Earth orbit. To get them from there to the sun, you need to multiply the cost by at least 10. There you go, you've thrown a year's worth of trash into the sun... at a cost of just $330 quadrillion.

Maybe what the world really needs is to pool its resources (worldwide GDP: $77 trillion, not even close to a quadrillion) for a plan to put all our trash into a stable Lagrange point, creating an artificial satellite built of nothing but garbage. But what happens if an asteroid hits it, and how do we ensure that it gets enough hydrostatic equilibrium to mesh together? Let's just say there are a lot of complicating factors when it comes to turning our neighborhood of outer space into a trash dump.

Lastly, even if the world had the money, we don't have the launch capability. ESA's Kourou spaceport, for example, can handle 6 to 8 Ariane V rocket launches per year, not millions. There are other spaceports, but all of humanity's current space-faring capability isn't even close to what it'd take to launch all the rubbish we make off-planet. We're going to need a bigger spaceport, and a bigger rocket, and more resources than are in the world. So maybe we need another idea for our big trash pile.

Source: BBC Future

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