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Comment by obilgic | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: What would be the consequence of throwing the plastic garbage in to the space, assuming that It is affordable enough to do?

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If it were affordable you could just send it to the sun.

Actually hitting the Sun is hard. It's not as simple as dropping it off and letting gravity make it "fall" like blue ice from an airplane. There's not only the matter of making it escape the Earth's gravity (which is considerable), but also that the Earth and all the garbage on it is already moving in an orbit around the Sun that you'd have to decelerate from. More likely we'd end up with a chain of trash comets.

We're talking in hypothetical's. If we are sending trash into space (as the comment above me suggested) then why not send it to the Sun and incinerate it. Of course there is no way to make this economical, even with a space elevator it would probably be too costly.

Using current technology, we would most likely render the earth uninhabitable due to the carbon emissions required to get it there.

If we had fusion & a space elevator it might be survivable.

We can borrow the reasoning from: https://what-if.xkcd.com/7/

That thought exercise involves moving 455 megatons of human off-planet. Getting rid of all plastic waste would in some ways be harder than that. Because we'd need to move that mass every year.

Current plastic production is about 380 megatons per year.

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