Hacker News Reader

Comment by gutnor | Hacker News Reader

The thing is if this is so rare and so precious, why is it cheap enough to put in balloon.

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.

View on HN

In the United States, we've had the National Helium Reserve since the 1960's. Unfortunately, the decision was made in 1996 to privatize the reserves, starting in the mid-2000's. That's much of the reason for the scarcity we face now.

The year is 2800; An alien spacecraft lands to survey the blasted and ashen ruin that was once home to over 7 billion sentient beings. The mission commander, with infinite sadness, reports their findings to his superiors: "They let the market decide".

But because of the helium, they presumably say it in a very high pitched voice.

Meanwhile, from Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, and Barnard's Star, the expeditionary fleets of the First Great and Bounteous Human Empire set forth once more to conquer.

(Hey, it's not any more or less plausible than what you said.)

Predicting the consumption of a scarce resource is extremely plausible, and there are many historical precedents. Predicting that interstellar travel will ever be in any way economically advantageous is probably unphysical. With travel time for messages taking decades and travel taking centuries, your "Human Empire" would be more along the lines of "Human-descended collection of exceptionally bad pen-pals". The speed of light and the tyrannies of the rocket equation don't really allow for anything else.

> Predicting that interstellar travel will ever be in any way economically advantageous is probably unphysical.

What's sauce for the sad alien is sauce for the human empire, say I.

Can you give me some of those historical precedents? They must have happened in a market society, otherwise its not valid as a comparison.

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.

I would cite any animal driven to extinction by a commercial market. If we agree that the criterion is where the good is no longer marketable, we can examine e.g. the markets for beaver or sea otter furs, the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks, and arguably the Tasmanian tiger. It's also not hard to find examples of mine or oil well exhaustion, which demonstrates the principle. I'm not going to insist that it's a common or inevitable phenomenon, my contention is merely that, as you say, there are circumstances which can promote it. Often these are market failures like a fixed price for a commodity, but perfect competition being something of a rarity, market failures abound. Either way, it's far more plausible, however unlikely, than interstellar trade or interstellar empires.

They ascend through the dark sky, breaking through the balloon layer that blocked out the sun. "I wonder what these glyphs mean," mutters the navigator, as he steers his ship around the formation of mylar Happy Birthday balloons.

Sad thing is, those balloons pop when they get too high. The density of air decreases, allowing the helium to push outward and pop the balloon. Had we made stronger balloons, we might have been able to just float up and collect them when we run out of light gases... Oh wait, that requires a balloon.

7 billion? We're going to be close to 11 billion by the end of the century. That's a lot more birthday parties, graduations, etc.

Don't forget the other effect on sea life when they're released near water:

http://balloonsblow.org/impacts-on-wildlife-and-environment/

I believe the implication is we are less than '5 minutes to midnight'

> We're going to be close to 11 billion by the end of the century.

Aren't you the optimist.

The real problem was the decision in 96 to fix the price artificially low, which discouraged both conservation and new entrants in the market.

What do you mean by 'fix'? Who set it? I understand the US privatized its reserve, but I don't understand how the market seems so out-of-step with reality. What about other markets? EU, SE Asia - are they seeing the same low prices?

It's a global market. When the US decided to sell off the Strategic Helium Reserve, it pushed the price of helium below the cost of extraction.

The US fixed its price below the cost to extract it for anyone, which has effectively kept the market there until their supply runs out.

I wonder why someone doesn't just buy the lot from them at their low prices, and scalps it?

Well, [1] says they sold it at 3.43 USD per m^3 to non-government customers in 2014, and if they have over a billion m^3, it would require over 3.43 billion USD to accomplish.

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-...

You could still make money at a larger scale (given a cheap enough storage facility): buy helium now, sell when more expensive. You'd have to wait. If you could buy the whole lot now, you could make the profit straight away.

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?

> The thing is if this is so rare and so precious, why is it cheap enough to put in balloon.

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.

> Because people need to have their birthday balloons.

It's in the Bible...

wait, seriously? or joking?

Joking, of course. Kind of a reference to gun control jokes.

Who are these people whose job it is to prepare for the next 100 years, and where do they work?

I really think there should be such people, but I didn't think there really were any.

The US helium reserve which supplies most of world helium was ordered to liquidate & shut down by 2010, so it is being sold way below cost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com