Friday, 12 May 2017

What If We Send All the Garbage From Earth To Space To Clean up Earth

It's certainly a great idea!  We can shoot all our garbage into the Sun, it will definitely never come back. Now let's make a quick calculation, with the information I quickly Googled.


  • Roughly 1.2 trillion kilograms of garbage is produced worldwide every year.


  • Best price I can find to bring something to Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO) is $16,600 USD/kg by the Russian heavy lift launch vehicle:  the Proton-M

This orbit (GTO) is not far enough to have the rocket continue towards the Sun, but let's say for now we're fine with the garbage being far away.  The yearly cost of this operation would be about 16,600 x 1,200,000,000,000 = 19,920,000,000,000,000 almost $ 20 quadrillion US Dollars.  Divide that by 6 billion, and we roughly get the cost per world-citizen per year:  $ 3.3 million dollars.

Where can I send you the bill for your garbage pick-up-service?

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