this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Ship goes down, brings ores. Ship goes up, takes trash with it. Two issues solved with one rocket.
I don't think you realize just how huge and dead space is. We can dump all the trash humanity will ever produce in space and it'd likely not even be noticeable for anyone looking in from the outside. There is no life we can potentially ruin by dumping trash in the asteroid belts, there is no environment that would be getting harmed. No water it can poison, no way to come back to us except by orbital intercept and we already have ways to avoid that as well.
Space is the ultimate solution to pretty much every single environmental problem. The only thing we need to pay attention to is what happens while we send stuff up and while it comes back down. Manufacturing, trash dumps, everything remotely environmentally harmful can just be relocated to space where it does 0 harm to anything.
Launching trash with rockets with our current primitive technology is pretty dangerous. If a rocket gets out of control while suborbital it's like tons of small meteors hitting us.
This is also why launching radioactive material into the sun is a bad idea. The way there is too dangerous.
We have to face the fact that we don't have sci Fi space ships.
Regardless, mining asteroids (and potentially other planets) would be an absolute win.
Launching anything into the sun is a very bad idea unless you very specifically need it to be in the sun, because it takes so much energy. It pretty much only makes sense to send probes and nothing else.
Can't believe I didn't think of that. I normally know better, you're right of course.