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Comment by yummypaint | Hacker News Reader

We are still running out. All this claims is that we may have a little more in reserve than previously thought. Helium still floats up into space unrecoverably when released. The article contains this information, but the headline is wrong.

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According to the first source I found, helium escapes into space at about 50 grams per second, for the entire planet. It seems at least possible that it is being produced at a greater rate than that, by radioactive decay.

http://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/Catling2009_SciAm.pdf

As I have heard it, the cost of recovering helium from the upper atmosphere is daunting and nowhere near reasonable prices.

For now...until it becomes rare enough to be worth the cost.

How is that relevant? If the production is happening deep inside Earth, we can capture it before it makes it to the atmosphere.

The problem is that we stopped doing exactly this leading to the shortage

No, we've never been running out. The government liquidating the strategic reserve distorted the price, but it will adjust.

Helium is produced from natural gas wells but with the prices for the gas where they have been for so long no one bothers to capture it - it's not worth it, it's just vented to the atmosphere and escapes.

So "running out of helium" basically means "running out of cheap helium and the price will go up until it establishes a balance with the cost of producing it from the ground instead of a government storage tank".

For as long as we get natural gas out of the ground, we will have helium.

This squares nicely with my understanding of what "reserves" are when talking about extractive resources.

Namely, the known quantity of a resource that can be extracted in an economical viable manner using current technologies.

So there are a number of variables that can affect the size of a reserve that have nothing to do with how much of the resource is known to exist.

The helium reserve they're talking about is an actual facility that stores helium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve

So what ~50 years?

I often wonder what it will be like for the next intelligent species/civilization that develops on earth. With all the easily accessible resources already mined will get get stuck in the steampunk age? Sure there might still some left where we could find it with advanced equipment, but not if you're just starting out.

Do planets essentially get one shot at advanced civilization?

The 2nd shot is detailed in Dune.

What do you mean by that? I don't remember the specifics of their "second shot" other than they had some sort of AI revolution that was crushed.

I think that they are implying the civilisation of Dune is the second shot, and therefore the thought that there is only one shot is not correct.

Yes, this was essentially my thinking, although I meant it at least partially in jest since Dune is of course fictional.

I suppose I meant: what was the first shot that failed in Dune?

I think it's the exact opposite though - if we suddenly died out then whatever comes after us will have much easier, not harder time. We've already extracted so many natural resources that there is an abundance of them on the surface. You could build an entire civilization just using our leftovers, no need to dig iron out, just melt the hundreds of millions of automobile husks that will be everywhere. And there's still trillions of barrels of oil left in the ground, as well as loads of coal left.

> You could build an entire civilization just using our leftovers, no need to dig iron out, just melt the hundreds of millions of automobile husks that will be everywhere.

Not sure if this is practical. In contrast to ore which is basically rock and more-or-less pure iron (or other desired metal), automobiles are a wild mix of different alloys which would have to be extensively processed (if this is possible in the first place). With plastics, the situation is similar if not worse, given that not all plastics melt, and burned fuel is burned and cannot be recovered at all.

The only thing where our civilizational waste can be used is if someone invents a Star Trek replicator clone.

Well, we will leave a lot of concentrated radioactive material in dump pits. A bit like the dinos leaving oil in the ground just a lot harder to engineer easy ways of harvesting the energy....

Any usage of Helium could be described as "running out" as it's not renewable without expensive reclamation from the air.

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