Can't we just be responsible and launch these into the oceans with the other satellites we yeet into the ocean?

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Can't wait to see how the corporate media spins the fix this particular environmental disaster to be "personal responsibility".

Im not surprised. We have pretty good waste management systems. Almost all of our trash ends up in landfills where it is compacted and covered each day. This prevents it from get into the ocean. However, many 3rd world countries have open dump sites instead of landfills. This allows the waste to wash into rivers and deposit into the ocean. Here is a video showing the magnitude of these open dump sites in some of these countries. From this it is easy to see just how much trash can wash into the ocean.

https://youtu.be/KHiHBuubsDE

Oh no don't worry. Society will collapse and will be incapable of launching anything into space long before this becomes a real problem.

Possibly. More than possible, the great filter can certainly be some entropy problem where exponential complexity is accompanied by more than exponential energy needs, which eventually cannot be sourced locally.

Certainly most civilizational collapses could be described in such a manner, because sufficiently directed energy could readily solve most problems.

Imagine being so upset about the word “has” while also being so wrong about it.

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If the universal income is anything less than infinite money, there will always be work you can do in order to acquire more currency.

The US outsources those trash to these top 10 countries. The Philippines, being 10% of China's population, produces 5 times more plastic waste according to these stats.

For every plastic bottle wasted a day by a Chinese citizen, a Filipino has to waste 50 bottles to reach those numbers.

That's unrealistic.

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Please. Another hoax to steal taxpayers money. Most of the sats are on helium balloons. Most signals are bounced off the firmament. How do you think AM radio signals were received from Chicago to London in the 1930s?

Yet another modern-world example of the good old tragedy of the commons.

The thing is, there were such products before rampant plastic production. It’s just been crafted to make single use plastics the cheapest type of packaging. Then the producers blame the consumers for where the waste ends up. Not to mention there’s a hefty lobbying sector fighting to keep single use plastic production high because it means more profits for petrochemical companies.

Wall-E is becoming more and more real Fuck humans, fuck capitalism…we are such a poison to this planet

But isn’t the space in our orbit much more finite? I’m thinking about a ring of debris around the place that makes travel impossible

I feel we have learned, albeit a bit late, and are putting into place mechanisms to reduce the pollution.

Let's start with all the starlink satellites. No one guy should control that much information.

As far as I understand, a long time, space is so very, very big. That doesn't mean we should disregard pollution, and it's great to see interest in it. The biggest risk right now is the loss of capital, we are a long way away from Kessler syndrome.

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The easiest way to dispose of orbiting bodies is to crash them into Earth. Most sats are quite small and unless you're dropping the ISS, they burn up in the atmosphere.

Future sats may use drag sails to slowly pull it down. https://www.space.com/esa-drag-sail-prototype-adeo-unfurls

And regulation is already happening, the FCC has introduced the 5-year plan. https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/sst-soa/deorbit-systems https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-new-5-year-rule-deorbiting-satellites

Removing existing debris will ultimately mean slowing them down, to drag them to earth. A likely candidate is using lasers. https://phys.org/news/2021-04-laser-sky-space-debris.html But other concepts are being developed. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/505020386/japan-sends-long-electric-whip-into-orbit-to-tame-space-junk https://www.npr.org/2021/03/21/979815691/new-effort-to-clean-up-space-junk-prepares-to-launch https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/30/business/space-debris-capture/index.html

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While not feasible now (what vorpal said) salvage operations are eventually going to be required in the future. I wonder how that will work.

Why do we keep measuring this, let's just not test and it can't be high, didn't we learn anything from covid!?

/s because I feel like I might need to

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