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Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

As a point of comparison, the total amount of nickel in the Earth's oceans is approximately 1 billion tons.

OK thats a big number, but we are talking about spreading heavy elements around the atmosphere, some portion of which will end up in the soil, then in us.

Let's examine a reductio ad absurdum of a medium term future where we have 1000x more space vehicles all taking space dumps into the atmosphere. Would that be best practice? Is there a better norm we could establish today?

If de-orbiting is your concern, then I would suggest taking a step back and considering the impact on our atmosphere of increasing the number of launches.

This isn't a theoretical question. There's growing awareness among researchers that there's a need to research how the gasses and particles produced by rocket launches at scale could have an impact on the atmosphere.

https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/features/2023/rocket-polluti...

Thanks for the link. Nice use of web tech to illustrate an issue.

Scrolling on that link doesn’t work on FF, Safari or Brave on iOS.

Are you scrolling up? That caught me out for a moment.

I have JS disabled so I can scroll, but the page is long and blank. There's some text if I view source at least.

This is 2 1/2 tons, not all of it nickel. Approximately 48.5 tons of meteorites hit the earth every day https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/ and those are around 1-1.8% nickel https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/items/metal-iron-nicke...

So, there's about 1/2 a ton of nickel falling into the atmosphere every day anyway, 180 tons a year, already in the ballpark of your thousand ships.

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