I guess some people are scared that this is what will happen if we launch
garbage out into
space. That after we start doing it long enough, we'll realize that once again,
man has fucked around with the
natural balance in ways he shouldn't have, and that all our trash will harm some society in a distant galaxy, or perhaps come hurtling back towards the Earth and wipe out life like we suppose some comet did long ago (this happened on an episode of
Futurama, IIRC). I say, just launch the trash directly at the sun, where it will be burned up, unable to harm anyone. True, we don't know for sure what the long-term effects on the
sun will be, since it's never had anything fly into it before, but it seems like a pretty safe bet to me.
I guess the biggest problem with this is that it costs a lot of money to send ships into space, and we can't justify it without doing it in the name of scientific discovery. Joe Blow American doesn't want to hear that his hard-earned tax dollars are being spent to litter outer space. But when tough comes to shit, and 100 years from now garbage starts spewing out of the ground in the cities that are built on top of landfills a la that one episode of the Simpsons, trash in space may be our only option.