Ok i'm going to sound like an airhead but answer the question :P?

Question

Alright...how come we cant just take our garbage from Earth, and just like send it to space? and aren't there black holes that could just suck up the garbage?

Answer 1

Believe it or not, it's expensive to travel to space. Then, rockets can explode. Do we want a rocket full of nuclear waste to blow up and contaminate our air. That would be devastating. Plus, I think it's ignorant to pollute our planet and then send our c**p to space too. It will probably come back down eventually too. Space junk like old satellites frequently fall into our atmosphere.

Answer 2

The nearest black holes are a long ways from here--many light years--and the cost of putting anything in orbit is prohibitive.

But it might be a way to get rid of the nuclear waste--if there was a way to guarantee it wouldn't just come back and hit us in a few years.

It would still be pretty expensive.

Answer 3

We don't have enough energy to do that with any significant fraction of our garbage.  The nearest black hole is hundreds of lightyears away (we hope).

The one exception is high-level radioactive waste.  The energy required to, e.g. put a nuclear fuel rod on the Moon using Saturn V technology, is a small fraction of the energy that the fuel rod can produce in a nuclear power plant.

Answer 4

Great idea.  You can pay for the rockets.

Answer 5

At one time NASA estimated that it cost $20,000 per pound just to get in orbit.

Answer 6

The idea is good, but we have not yet discovered ways of getting to black holes.

One, just building a satellite to hold all the garbage would be very costly, seeing as the black hole would obliterate it. Secondly, even the most distant satellites that are in communication, the Voyager probes, took decades to get to where they were, which is merely the edge of the solar system. To voyage to a black hole would take even longer. Third, if anything happened to the satellite on the way, we'd be guilty not only of polluting Earth, but space as well.

Answer 7

There are no black holes anywhere nearby.  And it costs so much money to get anything into space in the first place, especially something heavy, that it's much more cost-effective to deal with it here on Earth.

Answer 8

The closest black hole is several dozen light years away. The unmanned probe that was presently furthest from the sun is only 15 light HOURS from us, that after over 20 years.

Second, and perhaps more to the point, sending 1 lb in orbit (that is only in orbit, where something will eventually fall back) requires over 10 lb of fuel, and making fuel and rocket does create a lot of garbage (that can be recycled, mind you).

Getting rid of refuse is not best done by dumping it, but by recovering and recycling it.

Answer 9

It costs something like $5,000 per pound to send something into space.  

If we could just shoot everything off towards the sun to burn up easily, we would but we just cant afford it.

Answer 10

their arent any blackholes nearby or it would have suched up all the planets and the sun.also the garbage may not make orbit and would fall back to the earth.

also we already have garbage in space just out of out orbit . we have old broken satellitles, peices of rockets, some failed experipments and lots more.

space is so big you wouldnt see this when in space unless you looked for it.

maybe one day they will have a mission to clean up some of the space debris

Answer 11

First, it costs a huge amount of money to send things into space. Currently, you can have stuff launched into space for around $4000 per kilogram. The United States produces about 200 billion kilograms of garbage every year. This would cost about 800 trillion dollars to launch into space. This is approximately 60 times as much as the United States's entire GDP. In other words, in order to launch all the United States's garbage into space, everyone in the country would have to earn 60 times as much money as they currently do, and spend every cent on launching garbage. This is of course an economic impossibility. We can therefore safely say that with current technology, this idea- along with the garbage- isn't going anywhere.

Second, there are no black holes close enough to suck up our garbage. The closest black holes are literally many thousands of times farther away than our furthest space probes. The cost calculation above is assuming we're putting the garbage in relatively low Earth orbit. Once there, it would simply go around the Earth for a more or less indefinite period of time. Some of it would eventually slow down and fall towards the Earth, burning up in our atmosphere in the process. This wouldn't really get the garbage off our hands, all it would do would be to turn it into dispersed dust drifting through our atmosphere. We can already do this right on the ground if we want to by burning the garbage, we don't have to take the long way around through low Earth orbit first. The garbage that DIDN'T come back down would remain up there; eventually some pieces of garbage would collide with others, which at orbital speeds would blow small pieces of garbage all over low Earth orbit. Although some of these pieces would then reenter the Earth's atmosphere, the remaining ones would form a sort of dense cloud of garbage particles around the Earth, posing a huge risk for any space vehicles trying to operate in that area. At 40000 kilometers per hour, there is very little practical difference between a piece of soggy cereal and a rifle bullet, so spacecraft would start experiencing the equivalent of rifle bullets impacting their hulls on a routine basis. In fact, space agencies are already making serious attempts to reduce the amount of litter we're already throwing into orbit around the Earth. At the rate at which we produce garbage (more garbage every day than the total mass we have EVER launched into space in all of human history), the problem would grow so incredibly quickly that space travel would become essentially unfeasible; all spacecraft would either have to carry heavy armor, or be armed with lasers to vaporize all incoming pieces of garbage, or just try to blast through the danger zone as quickly as possible in the hopes of avoiding too many impacts (or any combination of those three).

Answer 12

cost, and the environmental consequences of a failed launch.

Answer 13

to lift the vast amount of waste that we create would require a huge fleet of rockets using more reserves of energy than we could ever hope to find.even using say a space elevater would still require tecnology and cost well beyond what the earth could hope to aford.

then if we get it into space the nearest black hole is probable dozens of light years away. its a lot cheeper and more resonable to deal with it on earth .

I would not call you an airhead but : I

Answer 14

Sending stuff in space is expensive.

People already have problems paying sufficient taxes to have their garbage properly collected and disposed of.  Imagine if your taxes were suddenly multiplied by around 500 times... (it would probably be a lot more than that, but let's assume that we could get into economy of scale after the initial experiments).

Then there is the problem of where do we send it.  There are no black hole that we know of in our immediate neighborhood.

We already know that (in terms of energy) it costs more to send rockets directly into the Sun than to send them outside the solar system (and even that is very expensive).

Also, contrary to popular belief, black holes do not "suck up" everything round them.  From that point of view, they only have the gravitational pull of any object with the same mass.  If we were to replace our Sun with a black hole of exactly the same mass as the Sun, the orbits of the planets would remain unchanged (but it would get cold in a hurry).

And black hole are (relatively speaking) very small.  It would be very difficult to aim directly at it.  That is why many black holes have accretion disks around them, where the matter orbits the black hole and emits harsh radiation (X-rays and gamma rays) before eventually falling into the event horizon.

I can't imagine my old running shoes orbiting a black hole for thousands of years while emitting harmful radiation (they already emit a harmful smell).

Answer 15

Closer to home, we could send our garbage to the Sun.  However, just getting it to low Earth orbit costs about $10,000 per pound.  That's more expensive than buying platinum.

Recycling is cheaper.  Even recycling nuclear waste is cheaper.

Answer 16

Because it costs a huge amount to get anything off the ground. In order to escape the Earth's gravity, you need to accelerate up to 40,270km/h (25,022 mph). This not only requires a huge and powerful rocket, but also a lot of fuel (ultimately producing a lot of pollution). To get a ton of something off the ground and up to escape velocity, it takes over 100 tons of rocket fuel. This is fine for space missions, there's no other choice, but not for disposing of millions of tons of waste!