Chris Ray Gun posted a video of a “debate” he had live during a video game stream with his friend Todd where they discussed what to do with all the Earth’s trash. “Shoot it into the sun” was the suggestion raised. Now, on one hand as an aerospace engineer with an understanding of orbital mechanics, I can assure you that this is a *bad* idea. On the other hand, as someone who was once *not* an aerospace engineer with an understanding of orbital mechanics, I can remember when this sort of idea seemed like it might be worth doing. Hell, I remember a junior high exercise where I was on a team that argued in favor of shooting nuclear waste into a black hole to be rid of it (ah, to be young and incredibly naive again…). So, some regular non-aerospace people debating shooting trash into the sun? I have no cause to jump up and down and point and holler.
But there is some other incredible ignorance shown here, such as a complete lack of knowledge not only of what space probes we’ve actually launched, but also a complete lack of understanding of the scale of the solar system. Our boy Chris is not terribly knowledgeable, but Todd is just dead wrong. And he’s so wrong that Chris’s over the top visceral reaction to his wrongness just struck a whole lot of chords.
When the other guy is so wrong that you have no choice but to run around the room and hurl a chair…
This is an urge I can empathize with. Whenever confronted with astrologers and anti-vaxxers and socialists and gun grabbers and young-Earth creationists and faith healers 9/11 truthers and televangelists and politicians who worry about Guam tipping over, the urge to turn into a human-scale Brownian motion demonstrator complete with ballistic furniture is very, very high.
“The Space Debate” is eight and a half minutes. Chris starts to freak out at about 3:40.
Note: Earth’s orbital speed around the sun is about 30 kilometers per second. If you want to dump trash into the Sun, you need to impart a velocity change you your garbage-package of at least that much. Think of it this way: you’re nonchalantly floating in Earths orbit around the sun, when all of a sudden you are slowed a little bit in your orbit. Do you plummet into the sun? No, your orbit simply changes a little bit, becoming more elliptical. If you want to get all the way to the sun, you basically have to cancel *all* of your orbital velocity. And to do that from the surface of the Earth you also have to factor in Earths escape velocity (~11 km/sec): if you don’t exceed that, then you’ll either stay in orbit around Earth, or fall back to Earth. So if you want to shot garbage (or anything else) to the Sun, you’ll need to shoot it at about 41 km/sec. Getting from the Earth to the moon, in contrast, takes ~16 km/sec. so it would be a whole lot easier to launch garbage at the moon. Not to mention that on the moon, garbage would be *awesome.* Lunar inhabitants would fight over the latest batch of untreated sewage from Bangladesh.