Hazardous Material Storing in Outer Space

I'm sure there are those who think there are, I however am against it. We, the earthlings created the mess, we don't have a right to infest outer space with it.

Things to keep in mind- the hazardous waste may be on a space station or another planet or even in an eternally orbiting vessel. However if an asteroid knocks into it, the materials we were looking to dispose of could conceivably be brought back to this planet.

If beings from another solar system/universe/galaxy were to be exploring and came in contact with our slop, how would affect them?

What if their travels brought them to our planet and they then returned our garbage (intentionally or not)?


Is the right decision to clutter up the spaces we currently aren't using? Again, I say no.

I am not advocating for it. Just want to learn if there is a feasible scenario that would keep us safe, but not scatter the material all over the galaxy.

You could always send hazardous material into the sun, but getting stuff of the earth is very expensive and at this point would likely consume more resources than just containing it (or better yet, not making it in the first place).

I think you are missing a sense of proportion Sturgis... and you are vastly exagerrating the importance of human beings.

Imagine that there were little microscopic sentient beings (unbekownst to you) that are living on a little barely visible speck of dust in your living room. They mine all the minerals on their little speck of dust, use energy from your ceiling lamp and build technology that ends up damaging their tiny little environment.

Then they take the sum total of all of their trash from thousands of their lifetime, trash that will include medical waste, and industrial waste and dangerous products and jettisoned them as far as they can toward your coffee table in a last ditch effort to save their own little ecosystem.

How much impact do you think this civilization on a little speck of dust jettisoning its trash would have on the cleanliness of your living room?

I would like to think that this is a good metaphor ... accept human beings are even smaller than that compared to space.

The idea that humans are capable of "infesting space" is laughable. We are far more insignificant than that... our trash would have zero impact in space.

In my opinion... if would be a great idea to jettison our insignificant of amount hazardous waste (and if we converted our entire planet in to hazardous waste, it would still be insignificant) with two conditions.

1. It would have to be cost effective (the cost of launching things into space probably makes this idea unfeasible).

2. It would have to be safe, meaning that the launch would have to have zero chance of exploding and spreading the waste over the Earth, and there would have to be zero chance of the waste returning to Earth in the next 10,000 years.

So you're advocating for letting the specks of dirt in future generations some 10,000 years from now (presuming that mankind survives that long) face the consequences of possibly returning hazardous materials.

I must ask, if we as people are so miniscule and insignificant in the present, then why not just let the crap we created destroy us? After all, you evidently find our existence to be rather minor,

My stance on this, is that we should never knowingly risk the well-being of our inheritors or the lives of others...even those we have not met.

I care about my children and my grand-children. That's it.

Ten thousand years is an awful long time from the perspective of a human. My ancestors from ten thousand years ago were hunting and gathering and living in caves and worshiping trees. They were worried about where they could find the next meal and what animals wanted to eat them. They weren't worried about what humans might be doing in 10,000 years.

The humans from ten thousand years ago did leave their garbage around. They defaced cave walls (with no regard to how we would feel about this), threw their animal bones on the ground for us to find them, marred the ground with fire pits, and left their tools lying around so that we are still finding them.

I don't begrudge them that. (And I really don't think we need to worry about what putative beings in 10,000 years will think of us.)

Oops!

The main problem with this approach so far has been the prohibitive costs, as engineer and max already mentioned.

You could EASILY launch the material in a fashion that would ensure that it never came back to Earth.

There is absolutely nothing to fear about launching hazardous material into space...space itself has more radiation from the solar wind than the insignificant amount we'd produce.

Explosions in the atmosphere and cost are the only concerns that humans should have with this idea. Cost is a problem now, but if ideas like the space elevator ever get worked out, those costs will come down a lot.

Do you know much about astronomy or the nature and size of our solar system?

Assuming the prohibitive costs could be overcome, it's a grand idea. Point it at the sun and if it misses our star, it will be a mote in the universe. We could easily include all sorts of warning to others.

That is making the assumption that whoever reads the message has a biology that is similar to ours.

To us it may be a horribly dangerous radioactive isotope. To them it may be dinner.

It'd be FAR cheaper to send it on the same path as Voyager 1 & 2 which will exit our solar system never to return.

Any 'others' that would possibly find what we send off would have the technology to read and understand it on their own.

It's not like radioactive isotopes are an uncommon thing in the universe.

in which case they will enjoy it.

Agreed

If this is about nuclear waste, most of that "waste" is actually valuable fuel that is only waste because the anti-nuke zealots will not let us reprocess it back into fuel.

Actual waste from nuclear reactors would be much less, and would only be hazardous for about a thousand years. (And who knows, even some of that could possibly be used for medical treatments if we didn't discard it as waste.)

Which isotopes are you talking about, Oralloy, that can be reprocessed back into fuel in a cost effective way?

(I didn't know you had a Nuclear Physics experience, where did you get your degree?)

So now we have to have a degree to post a comment?