Nah fam. I need my balloons. /s
But really, how do we deal with a public who feels that they are entitled the stuff, and companies willing to sell it to them because it's more profitable?
But really, how do we deal with a public who feels that they are entitled the stuff, and companies willing to sell it to them because it's more profitable?
Now obviously I get that it is not currently rare, but that once it gets rare that's going to be a big issue.
But there are people whose job is to prepare for the next 100 years. Those are governments. Shouldn't they just buy the whole lot of it while it is cheap, that's good use of public money if you know your country is going to need the stuff. The newfound scarcity should push the price of helium outside of regular human entertainment budget.
Don't forget the other effect on sea life when they're released near water:
http://balloonsblow.org/impacts-on-wildlife-and-environment/
Aren't you the optimist.
(Hey, it's not any more or less plausible than what you said.)
What's sauce for the sad alien is sauce for the human empire, say I.
For most resources it seem that they dont run out and the prices dont skyrocket in the apocalyptical. I have seen books from pre-1900 that were warning of the eminent "peak coal".
Their is an issue if their are no useful property rights like you can see in whales and you race to the bottum.
In addition to that, they'd then need to have a helium storage facility that could accommodate such an enormous reserve, the construction and maintenance of which might eat all of the profit from resale which might ensue.
All of this presuming the government would sell a sole bidder their entire reserve in one fell swoop.
[1] - http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/helium/mcs-...
If storing the helium plus interest rates actually costs more than the expected price increase over time warrants----then the US government _should_ sell off the reserve now, and the whole thing about them selling too cheaply is nonsense.
Though it might be that the US government can store helium cheaper than anyone else. In that case, perhaps they should sell the helium with the storage facilities? After all, what good are the storage facilities to them, when they've sold all the helium?
I really think there should be such people, but I didn't think there really were any.
The price is literally held down by law (at least in the United States). Because people need to have their birthday balloons. Which is stupid as hell.
It's in the Bible...
Also, why should we accept that?
This mechanism has a tremendously better track record than the other ones proposed in this thread. No mechanism are perfect, but we should try to improve the working mechanism rather than use the broken one. And there don't seem to be any fundamental barriers in the way.
> Also, why should we accept that?
For the same reason we should accept other Pareto improvements: if you're doing otherwise, you're letting value go to waste.
Because at least entertaining that outcome is the only rational thing to do if you believe in attaching values to things and doing math on them?
Right now people forecast about a 4% real (inflation-adjusted) rate of return on long-term investments. If the helium isn't going to be worth ~5 times as much 100 years from now, then it's more valuable to the world at large if we use it now than to wait 100 years, and we can make up the difference later.
If you've got good reasons to attach particular values to the helium in 100 years, or the helium now, or the value of anything else investable in 100 years, then by all means do share, and tell us why everyone else in the market has it wrong (externalities the market participants are inflicting on others, perhaps? that's the classic reason). Then we can look at the math, and challenge each others' assumptions, like rational people in a rational argument. Otherwise, you're just attaching an irrational, spiritual value to the idea of conservation itself, and indicting everyone who doesn't share these values as heretics. While this may be a useful heuristic, it isn't always the best way to discuss a matter.
* The person around 100 years in the future is likely dead, so any utility is gained from using it before they die.
* Perfect capital markets which price in the future, for example, financial intermediaries paying you to work rather than the employer itself, ceteris paribus more efficient than current compensation schemes, on the condition you get paid 100% of the payroll if becomming CEO and pay back the bank, do not exist.
* Tragedy of the Commons - gain political/property rights to an unequal share of common property, then profit from this 'capital' right.
* Or an example close to my home, of a port and railway constructed on Tsar bonds with maturities of 100+ years which spurred the development, and chaos, in Northeast China, and turned pretty worthless with revolution and occupation. At the time, one of the most certain investments in the world.
What is 'value'? In the short term dictionary definition it is the price someone is willing to pay. Perhaps a tulip, or a cotton, or fur, jacket - the 'value' of these has varied far more than discount factors could determine. Much debate has gone into this for millennia.
We simply don't know the future. In retrospect, the long term return on capital is the long tern discount factor. But we do know it isn't priced-in efficiently, as we know we don't know what the future will be. Future value is a dependent variable. Though I am a fan of long term trends for short term things, outside of a couple of centuries, long term trends tend to fail, and 'this time it's different' even if drawn over the past half century doesn't work unless not a lot else is changing.
We simply don't know the future. That's valid for both directions.
> If you've got good reasons to attach particular values to the helium in 100 years, or the helium now, or the value of anything else investable in 100 years, then by all means do share, and tell us why everyone else in the market has it wrong
Of course the market today is wrong about the value of things 100 years from now. If it were possible to predict the value of things 100 years from now, we would not need a market to allocate resources.
Markets beat central planning not because they are superior at predicting the future, but because they are superior at adapting to the surprising future as it arrives.
Markets are quite bad at predicting the future. Market prices capture today's collective thinking about the future, but that's not the same thing as actually predicting the future--and sometimes it is the opposite, as in a bubble.
Markets walk randomly to price things, but there might be no-return boundaries lurking in our future. If we run out of helium, it doesn't matter if the market corrects to a proper scarcity valuation. Raising the price of something does not physically create more of it.
I'm not necessarily going to claim the market will perfectly allocate this (for one thing there's a lot of moral decisions and time preferences tied up into one's belief about what perfect allocation is), but just waving government at the problem won't fix it either, because that's what we have now. That's the problem. If that was the solution, we wouldn't be talking about this, because it wouldn't be a problem.
However ignorant you may think it is to just wave "market" at the problem, at least it would be a change and might have a different result.
Okay, there's a data point I missed. The price should be appropriate, and in this case too high is better than too low. I agree in general that when the market can do something, it should. However, I don't think the market is capable of seeing into the far future (see petrol prices, which are way too low in the US and only more-or-less appropriate in Europe due to taxes).
This is not mere wordplay. It's a vital component to understanding how the world works.
After all, remember what article this is that we're commenting on; a discovery of a potentially new significant source of helium. After you've fiddled with the market because you know it's making helium too cheap, how are you going to feel after something like this comes up five years later, having made medical treatments and other such things more expensive only for it to turn out that your sure and certain knowledge of the situation was wrong?
The "time value of money" is actually directly related to the fact that uncertainty compounds exponentially. Future money is worth less because you're that much less certain that you'll even have the money, or what you can spend it on. But the point about uncertainty goes beyond just money. There's a reason why "five year plan" is a joke for people educated in history.
Nevertheless, I hold to the precautionary principle in environmental issues. If such a helium source were never found, we'd be in some trouble. (We've lived for millennia without using helium, so we'll manage, but there are probably several things we can't do at all without it.) Now we know that there are likely more sources, we can relax and maybe leave it to the market.
This is similar to, although not as bad as, how we haven't been able to prevent global warming; there may be a point at which no amount of money or work is going to fix that. Governments may not be much better at preventing things like that, but at least they have a chance.
Helium is different, their is no clear market failure of any kind. As government provided helium will start to run out, future prices will rise. Potential gain from increasing production will raise as well. When prices rise many people will move to alternatives softening the rise in price.
Once the prices are higher, their will be a huge insentive to figure out a way to produce it economically.
The equillibrium price will probebly be higher then now, but currently we are living in an artefical low, so setting the goal of continuing this current low price is simply unrealistic even if government manages it, to keep the price this low they would have to subsidise it eventually and I don't think that is a worthwhile thibg for governemnt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator
However, regular helium (whether truly pure helium 4 or the naturally occurring mixture which is 99.9998% helium 4) is still an extraordinarily useful cryogenic liquid for less advanced cooling, having nothing to do with dilution fridges, in a wide range of scientific and industrial contexts. It also has other niche uses like arc welding, inert gas environment, helium-neon lasers, etc.
Firstly - BOTH isotopes of helium are important. Both are relatively rare, though He3 is much rarer. Both are needed for cryogenic research, though for MRI's He4 is generally sufficient (used for cooling the magnets, though a specialised lung imaging technique can use some He3). Both are byproducts of natural gas formation, and both will eventually escape Earth if released to atmosphere. (At earth surface temperasure these particles are so light that a significant fraction of the Maxwell Boltzmann velocity distribution is above escape velocity). Though I'm not sure what macroscopic time scale atmospheric helium will escape at.
He4 evaporation temp is 4.2K so cooling down to that level is quite easy, just get a dewar of liquid He4 and dunk something into it.
Realistically it's more complicated, you use carefully designed vacuum dewars with super insulation and usually a liquid nitrogen shroud (at 77K) to reduce heat transfer by radiation (which scales as T^4, meaning the LN2 shroud is roughly 1/4th room temp, and reduces radiative transfer by 250 times). You have carefully designed "dunker stick" with wires and frame carefully chosen to minimise heat transfer.
Secondly, you can cool LHe4 a bit further to about 1K by evaporating the surface of the dewar. This evaporative cooling basically pumps away the more energetic gas particles in the upper tail of the velocity distribution, leaving the slower and cooler ones. This works but is very inefficient and would pump away most of your helium. To be more efficient you can use a "1K pot" to pump and cool only a small volume.
Interesting things happen when you cool below the lambda point at 2.2K at which point the LHe4 becomes a superfluid. The pump noticeably gets quieter. Superfluous are cool but can also be a nuisance for cooling because they creep around and can form thermal bridges connecting parts of your system you wanted isolated and prevent further cooling.
At this point you can get colder by using the MUCH rarer form of helium, He3 which has a lower boiling temp. You can evaporatively pump LHe3 and get down to about 200 mK. Since this isotope is so rare it's usually done in a tightly controlled closed fork system, the 'pump' can be a sealed can of activated charcoal IIRC.
Things start getting interesting when you want to go colder. A mixture of both LHe3 and LHe4 becomes unstable in the right temp/pressure region and wants to form two distinct phases : a He3 rich and He3 dilute phase. A dilution refrigerator is a clever apparatus that uses hear two phases to run a closed-cycle refrigerator very much conceptually like your kitchen refrigerator. Evaporate He3 out of the rich phase, which cools, transfer heat away, compress back into the rich phase. A dilution refrigerator can get down to about 10 mK, maybe lower for ideal conditions. Though it's a beast. Can take all day to old and cool a sample, takes up half a room and just cools down a sample not much bigger than your thumb. Has several loud heavy vacuum pumps and huge dewar of LHe4, carefully controlled "mash" of He3/He4, etc.
He3 can also form a superfluid at low enough temperature, and is interesting because in this case it's like Type I superconductivity where two fermions pair up and form a boson carrier. He4 atoms are bosons already but He3 are fermions.
We increase the price. By taxing it for example. Capitalism deals with the rest.