If we continue to send satellites and things out to space, wouldn't we lose a significant bit of Earth's mass and resources?
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answers:
JASON say: Not significantly. Besides, there is much more cosmic debris arriving on earth than leaving.
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John P say: Not in the foreseeable future!
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nineteenthly say: If everyone who had ever lived each went into space and took a million tons of stuff with them, it would be less than a thousandth of this planet's mass. So no.
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Ronald 7 say: A lot of the Materials that have gone into Sattelites has come from debris falling to Earth from Space
You could say, Space is getting back what it has given
Earth also receives debris all the time from space as Meteors
It evens itself up
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quantumclaustrophobe say: Nah. While we've launched tons into space - and many of those tons will never return - it's minuscule compared to the mass of Earth.
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ANDY say: All "satellites and things" we send to space will sooner or later fall back to Earth. And you would consider that, actually, they are not in outer space but only in the thermosphere that "belongs" to our planet. We can dutifully also state that the exosphere above that with little hydrogen, helium, and carbon dioxide, is also part of the planet.
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Climate Realist say: Perhaps over millions of years. The amount of matter that we send out to space in one year is insignificant.
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Morningfox say: Significant bit of Earth's mass? No, the amount we sent to space is trivial. The Earth is about 6x10^24 kg. We have sent less than 3x10^9 kg into space (much less). So that is 0.00000000000005%.
Even in terms of resources, I'm sure that one year's worth of using gasoline in cars is more than all the fuel ever used in rockets.
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say: Yeah, eventually they'll be digging up garbage dumps to salvage what they can. They might even clean the ocean of plastics when resources get really low.
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Jeffrey K say: No. Meteors are coming to earth. They bring in far more mass than we send out. Earth mass is increasing.
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Terry say: The Earth gains 12 metric tons from space every day. So, no,
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PhotonX say: Just a modestly-sized asteroid is going to provide more material than we could ever remove from Earth. Remember, it's outrageously expensive to put a kilo of anything into space.via Earth's gravity well. That pretty much assures that a minimum of mass ever leaves the planet. And every year we lose tons more hydrogen and helium mass than the space program could expend, while meteoric infall adds more mass.
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Dogden say: earths mass? no, humanity doesn't even have close to the resources to use up much of earths mass or send it to space. You would probably run out of usable fuel before you use up a regard able amount of earths mass. I would be more worried about the kessler syndrome than resources on earth, its a much more pressing problem
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say: Certain metals that are being sent out to space are only really found in larger quantities on Earth as far as we know, so we're basically just wasting all those metals with no way to replenish them.
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Susie say: They are definitely polluting space.
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