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Simply put, no. Right now, it takes around 36 pounds of fuel to get a single pound of trash into space. While it might be possible to reduce the amount of fuel, even cutting it in half would be difficult.
While I'm not sure of the current price of rocket fuel (it's not something you can buy at your local gas station), it's certainly much more expensive the gasoline. Sending a single pound of trash would cost thousands of dollars.
Sending the 468 billion pounds of garbage generated in 2000 would take trillions of pounds of fuel, and tens of trillions of dollars (and that's a conservative estimate). There's not enough fuel on the earth to send our garbage into space, and it would be far too costly to try. Almost anything is cheaper and more efficient that sending garbage into the sun, and this will continue in the future.
Source(s):
http://science.howstuffworks.com/rocket2.htm
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:btUOF7P3xpkJ:education.ti.com/education...
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nushka
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| March 19, 2009 04:55 AM | view on twitter |
While I'm not sure of the current price of rocket fuel (it's not something you can buy at your local gas station), it's certainly much more expensive the gasoline. Sending a single pound of trash would cost thousands of dollars.
Sending the 468 billion pounds of garbage generated in 2000 would take trillions of pounds of fuel, and tens of trillions of dollars (and that's a conservative estimate). There's not enough fuel on the earth to send our garbage into space, and it would be far too costly to try. Almost anything is cheaper and more efficient that sending garbage into the sun, and this will continue in the future.
Source(s):
http://science.howstuffworks.com/rocket2.htm
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:btUOF7P3xpkJ:education.ti.com/education...
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Other Answers (3)
March 19, 2009 03:49 AM
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Only if we can figure out how to more efficiently come up with the fuel required to get it there!
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nushka
March 19, 2009 04:04 AM
Maybe they should burn garbage.
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March 19, 2009 04:34 AM
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Nushka is right. Burning or recycling makes more sense. We have to create the technology and sense of purpose to safely sort materials in ways that allow us to use them over and over again. 'Trash' is a word that means a collection of things not being used. In a way, that is similar to the word 'data'. Just as data can be mined, so we must learn to safely mine trash.
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March 19, 2009 10:01 AM
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Bad idea. Trash now may be useful much later - like vegetation becoming coal. Keep it here.
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