The odds of our trash ever reaching another planet before the end of the universe is so small that writing it out would probably take up all the hard drives d2jsp owns just to write the zeros. (0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.....1%)

It's a ridiculously small chance.



See my above post. Truly insignificant compared to the energy output of 1kg of nuclear fuel.

Ow it already is in Mega Joule. Fair enough, if most of that energy can be used than it's possible.... Technically ^

This post was edited by Knoppie on Feb 8 2021 04:01pm

Yeah its fine. People use fat bikes at those temps. Very common above the 60th parallel.

Doesn't even need "most". We could cut it down by a factor of 100 and it would still only take 8% of the usable energy.

I don't know what "the end of the universe" means. There are an estimated 125 Billion galaxies, each containing in excess of 100 billion solar systems, each containing planets that have a gravitational pull.

It's more likely than not that the waste WOULD eventually hit a planet, sun, moon, asteroid, or comet. The only question is, would it be harmful to whatever it hit, or would it simply burn up in whatever atmosphere (if applicable), would it poison that atmosphere when it burned up, etc. etc.

I'm more just against the idea that the solution to littering is just to change where you litter.

We should just send all of the nuclear waste to Sudan and Ethiopia. Fuck 'em.

Do some research on the immense distances between galaxies, then compare it to the speed of a space object we send up.

The distance to our next nearest star (in the same galaxy!) is 4.37 light years, or 4.13x10^ 13 km. Going at 100 km/s (about 5 times faster than Voyager 1) it would take 314,000 years to get there. Going to the next nearest galaxy would take 7.6 billion years.

Needless to say, by the time we ever have interaction with that trash again it would have decimated the life on whatever other planet it landed on, caused a mass extinction, then the life would have grown back, and had several thousand more mass extinctions before we could even dream of interacting with it again.

Where did I indicate "we" would ever have interaction with that trash again? Why are you attempting to excuse irresponsible littering that may have a negative impact on other life? Isn't that the basic excuse for why "Nah, just litter, somebody else'll take care of it" is a justifiable position?

It truly doesn't matter how much time it would take for the trash to hit something. Randomly launching trash into space is simply irresponsible. Imagine if some other society somewhere else in the Universe did the same thing 20 million years ago, and their trash randomly impacted with us tomorrow and turned our atmosphere toxic. Would that be okay?

Oh, I assumed you could do the math on likelihood to hit something by yourself. Go ahead and take the volume on our galaxy and then divide it by the number of stars in that Galaxy. This is going to be another number that would require dozens of zeros to express how tiny it is. That's basically the odds that our trash ever hits anything. The odds of any planet ever interacting with our trash is so unfathomably tiny that it's not even worth considering, then you consider the absolutely enormous timescales we are working with and it becomes even less of a concern for us or any other life

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Feb 8 2021 04:56pm

You are attempting to excuse irresponsible littering because "it won't have an impact until later, if it does at all." This is the same excuse people make when they throw their beer cans and the plastic pack rings into the river they're fishing in. It's the same excuse people use when tossing tires on the side of the road, or pouring their used motor oil or coolant down a storm drain.

You simply don't care because it'll have no direct impact on YOU. All of your pretense about caring about anything outside of yourself is simply that, pretense. It doesn't matter that our "space trash" could at some point cause massive harm to another civilization, and the odds that at some point it WILL impact SOMETHING are so close to 100% as to be almost certain doesn't bother you in the slightest.

I don't care if it happens tomorrow or in 200 trillion years. I'm not religious. I've seen no evidence that the Universe will ever "end". I've never even seen anyone make a meaningful case of such an event occurring. Most scientists agree that far from "ending" the Universe is still in it's early stages and is actively expanding.