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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

Helium floats away.

What you are saying is that helium is not gravitationally bound to Earth. That is correct.

But even if it were, it would not make any difference. Any gas that leaks in the atmosphere is economically lost. Take Neon. I just googled and found out that liquid neon is a cryogenic refrigerant (like liquid helium). Do you think the neon lost through leaks can be recovered any more than the helium lost through leaks?

Neon is condensed out of the air, any neon lost is just there in the atmosphere waiting to be re-condensed by someone else.

The difference is Neon stays in the atmosphere, while Helium floats to the top and is lost.

I wonder how fast neon is lost in the polar winds.

Why would it get lost? The winds don't put things into orbit, they just mix up the air - if anything they uniformly mix all the gasses keeping even Helium from floating away.

Neon is produced from (cryogenic) separation of air, so, yes?

Well, fun fact: there is more helium in atmosphere (5.2 ppm) than methane (1.8 ppm). And it's not much less than neon (18 ppm).

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-...

His point is that more of it floats away naturally or as a result of CH4 extraction than we care to collect primarily because its not economically viable to collect.

Party balloons is not what's causing Earth's He to go where no man has gone before (literally, the solar wind will blow it way past the moon).

Does it float away at a higher rate than it is produced by the aforementioned particle decay?

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