That music really got me all worked up for some high tech trash removal! Now, if we could only figure out a way to do this in the ocean.
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Ooh, I read that one! Hmmm, Amazing Stories somewhere around 1930ish, maybe?
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Patience?
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No idea if it will work, but this dude’s trying…
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And a lot of the chunks are pretty tiny. If only someone could build a giant vacuum cleaner that actually worked in a vacuum.
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I suspect that that’s in the “plausible but diplomatically problematic” pile.
Anything that can target space debris accurately enough, and with enough energy, to nudge it into a terminal orbit(presumably by ablating a small amount of it to act as thrust) could at least toast the optics on anything with it in the field of view; and might we’ll be able to disable functional satellites as well.
It’s not a secret that several people have antisatellite weapons; but “we’re gonna launch the directed energy killsat ‘for peaceful purposes only’, really” is still going to spoil the mood.
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Nature abhors a dirty vacuum.
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Excellent, I can tap their designs for Project Damocles.
My micro-satellite network will collect space junk and agglomerate it into a single large mass, which can then be given an impetus to strike any target point on the surface of the world. ALL WILL TREMBLE AND OBEY!
…what’s that you say, space junk is all really low density and I could never construct an impactor that wouldn’t burn up on reentry? Uh…
Let me just get started on this project to shoot all our nuclear waste into orbit. Uranium’s dense, right?
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I know we’re not made of money, but this really isn’t a case of “We should take the money on this, and spend it on this other thing instead.” Both are important. Space junk poses a very real threat of completely, and potentially permanently, blocking access to space if it’s not dealt with. Given a lot of our infrastructure is in space… that would be bad.
Doesn’t make space more important than the oceans, mind, but I think the only sane decision here is to fix both of them.
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Time for an update, Randall!
Has nobody read Exo? I’d like to have us solve the teleporting issue and just jump to the space junk to gather it.
There’s also the fact that, while as a somewhat amorphous aggregate “we” can have objectives and priorities, the more specific entities handling various pieces of work tend not to.
I’d be pretty surprised if the answer to “we just decided to skip the satellite and go after ocean plastics instead” would be “great, good for you!”(except in the sense of “we wish you the best in pursuing opportunities outside our organization in the future…” sense reserved for anodyne employee exit announcements)
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