Garbage time

 I have a demonstrated record of saving the world. I gave you all my sage advice here and I stand by it. But I'm no one trick pony. I am willing to trick ponies many times! So here is my new way to save the world.

If I recall correctly, we have a space station. We keep it up in space somewhere and from it, you can see my house. We are also hoping to be able to build more space stations and maybe a staging area for travel to other places, like space and stuff.

Also, and here's a fact you can take to the bank, the sun is large and has a strong gravitational pull. The bank doesn't care, but you do you. I would assume that science types could figure out how to move space stuff into a trajectory that will eventually have it crash into the sun -- or to be more precise, burn up as it nears the sun. And because space has no speed limits, we can develop a slingshot or some sort of cannon that shoots stuff towards the sun at really high speeds for fairly low cost because we don't care about safety and such.

So here's the plan -- we make a stripped down space hauler and load it up with trash, then we send it up to the space station which then takes the trash and fires it into the sun. Bam. No more garbage problem. The sun won't mind because it is a mass of incandescent gas a gigantic nuclear furnace and has no feelings that matter.

But, you say, it is prohibitively expensive to fire stuff into space. What if we compressed our trash so much that a lot fit on the spaceship? Then we wouldn't have to make that many trips. And what if we found a way to turn some of that trash into a fuel that would serve the propulsion needs. How tough can that be? Lots of stuff burns, so just burn lots of stuff. The ride doesn't need to be smooth as the rocket can be unmanned and remotely piloted and reused.

So basically, we can get rid of our garbage (and the pollution that incinerating it would create on earth), energize our space program and save humanity.

You're welcome.