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Comment by aphextim | Hacker News Reader

Still waiting on Elon Musk to make "WasteX" which will take vast amounts of garbage from landfills and fly it directly into the Sun.

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My friend and I were seriously thinking this was a good idea until we read an article [0] destroying it completely. Lol

0:"Here's Why We Can't Just Throw Our Garbage Into the Sun" https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a19666/we-cant-just-t...

Thank you for this link! I always assumed it would be ridiculous, and the fact someone broke it down is awesome!

Another explanation[1] that shows how it's not just the cost of escaping Earth gravity (which is high enough already) but the delta-v required to de-orbit. It's easier to throw the garbage out of the solar system than it is to descend into the Sun.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHvR1fRTW8g

It would be much less costly to just throw it all at Venus. b^)

The state of the art high tech proposal is to grind everything to a powder, put that in a high temperature plasma furnace for demolecularization, then extract raw materials for reuse. This kind of process would in theory result in waste dumps being seen as excellent competitive sources of materials such as gold and rare earth elements.

Turns out, it is very hard to get to the sun.

That idea reminds me of Patrick Star's solution to escape the terror of the Alaskan Bull Worm (Take X and push it somewhere else).

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