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.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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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.
Yes, we should shoot all the trash directly ay the moon. It would be better than what we're doing now....
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.
Many eons from now, some future species will find our shit on the moon and conclude that earth bacteria created their own space program.
Not far off, ey? (ZING!)
Scientist bacteria, 600 million years ago:
“So it looks like the most efficient way to reach the moon is to train our pet eucaryotes to assemble themselves into meat robots that will do most of the heavy lifting, while we ride along inside them.”
I need this premise expanded into a book or movie.
Out of all types of space junk, I'd be least worried about stuff on the surface of the moon. If anything, these piles of human waste contain the gut bacteria of the astronauts and was exposed to decades of radiation, temperatures and extreme conditions. It will be an interesting thing to study once they'll be able to create a research lunar base.
Now when they go back, there are going to be poo-based life forms that claim sovereignity over the moon.
Still less shit than the sidewalks in my street
I'm not too worried about junk on the Moon, it's not going anywhere. Space junk is an issue though, but it's the objects in orbit that are the problem.
Build a moon trebuchet, and fling that shit into the sun
Okay, how is there that many bags on the moon? Were the astronaut shitting dozens of times, or did they use the poop knife and divide it up?
12 men have visited the surface of the moon, so each would have to shit, piss or puke in a bag fewer than 10 times per visit to make 100.
They were lazy dog walkers who left them behind for someone else
So what if in like 1000 years, a mound builds, and we decide we need to get rid of that mound and just launch a rocket or something at it to send it into space. Then the poo collects in space and forms a satellite around the moon so we can have a poo moon for the moon.
we are already the poo moon
- aaand we enter the lands of the three body problem.
That's future fertilizer to be used on the upcoming moon farms.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
With more countries landing on the Moon, people back on Earth will have to think about what happens to all the landers, waste, and miscellaneous debris left on the lunar surface and in orbit.
“It’s going to be like an interstate highway, at rush hour in a snowstorm, with everyone driving much too fast,” space launch expert Johnathan McDowell told Space.com.
The clutter in Earth’s orbit includes defunct spacecraft, spent rocket boosters, and items discarded by astronauts, such as a glove, a wrench, and a toothbrush.
The United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967 says that no country can “own” the Moon or any part of it and that celestial bodies should only be used for peaceful purposes.
However, the United States, Russia, and China never signed it, and in 2016 the US Congress created a law that unleashed the American commercial space industry with very few restrictions.
The lead author of a Nature article arguing for a global commons filed an amicus brief—a type of outside comment offering support or expertise—on a case that went to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in late 2021.
The original article contains 968 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
If space has one thing it is lots of space.
100 Republican politicians on the moon, you say? I guess it's a start 🤷