Space junk is on the rise, and no one is in charge of cleaning it up | There are at least 100 bags of human waste on the surface of the Moon.::There are at least 100 bags of human waste on the surface of the Moon.
Space junk is on the rise, and no one is in charge of cleaning it up | There are at least 100 bags of human waste on the surface of the Moon.::There are at least 100 bags of human waste on the surface of the Moon.
forgive me for not caring too much but 100 bags of waste on the moon is not only nothing, but there’s not even an environment to destroy there. i’ll worry about moon waste after we start taking care of all the waste here on earth that’s actually affecting us.
Yeah I’m not sure what the point about the moon waste is considering it’s likely inside the remainins of lunar landers. The real space junk to worry about is all the stuff in LEO that will cause problems with satellites and such in the near future
In all likelihood, it’s actually quite literally just in bags sitting on the moon as I am pretty sure that at least the early LM designs didn’t have external storage compartments where it could be stored in considering the ascent stages left the moon.
Still not something I would really be concerned about though.
I always try to think of these things at their greater extreme left unchecked, in order to evaluate if it’s worth caring about. How about when there are so many bags and abandoned transport equipment that it starts to become harder to land safely? What if we finally start to have a base on there, and the trash becomes unsightly and a nuisance?
For that to even remotely be an issue there would need to be millions of moon landings. If we reach that point we could probably easily yeet our fecal waste into deep space if we needed to.
Ah, the Earthling approach: “let’s worry about it later”
It’s worked out fine so far!
T-shirt gunning your poop bags out of moon’s orbit. Sounds rad.
Stuff ars publishes from other sources (especially wired) usually isn’t worth reading.
Unforgiven, the anti-space argument is always the same. “Let’s focus on earth first” Earth is always going to have problems, this mindset gets us nowhere. It’s not like the people thinking about the space poop problem would all be hard at work solving earth poop problems if they weren’t allowed to think about space waste. These things are so incredibly not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, it’s entirely possible that some out of box thinking about how to manage moon waste ends up making for a creative solution for earth waste management that has a huge impact. Perhaps we need little packets of genetically modified yeast placed in moon poop bags to eat up the waste, and it turns out that putting that in Portapotties helps with odor, decontamination and insect burden. Who knows. It’s never too soon to seriously start thinking about space problems.
You will know us by the trail of our rubbish.