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Comment by rms | Hacker News Reader

If exponential progress of technology keeps up, 12 years until we are getting helium from the moon?

If exponential progress of technology had kept up, we would have been getting Helium and all sorts of minerals from the Moon since 12 years ago. Oh... And I would be flying my car to work.

Sadly, technology goes by leaps and bounds, subject to the winds of politics and economics.

It's not impossible that, 12 years from now, we will be living in a post-societal-collapse agrarian society and our achievements will be little more than legends.

No. Not that bad, but you get the idea.

It's not impossible that, 12 years from now, we will be living in a post-societal-collapse agrarian society and our achievements will be little more than legends.

Well, I guess that's one way to match the demand and supply of helium.

Sometimes the invisible hand slaps you very hard ;-)

But hey, at least we have social networks and the web .. and hundreds of new ways to sell products and advertise those products, so clearly technology is keeping up to society's needs!!!

sigh.

Estimated selling prices for lunar He3 are around $6-10 million per kg (with the commercial viability of even that figure being pretty optimistic), so I'm going to go with 'no'.

The moon has helium? It sounds like it comes from alpha-decay of radioactive elements and I don't think the moon has much of that given its size, no iron core and all. But I'm not a planetary scientist...

I recall that one of the reasons frequently given for returning to the moon is that it is "rich" in Helium-3 (the commonest isotope is Helium-4) and it can be used in nuclear fusion[1].

If wikipedia is to be believed "rich" is relative here and corresponds to 0.01 ppm. He-4 is slightly better at 28 ppm. However as He-4 is 5ppm [2] of the atmosphere here on Earth the Moon seems a long way to go to achieve just a 6-fold enrichment.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Composition

Helium-3 is also extremely useful when it comes to cryogenics. Since it is 25% lighter than Helium-4, it is easier to boil it off to reach temperatures below 1 degree K. In the systems that use Helium-3 it's usually a closed circuit system and loss of helium is considered to be a big deal since it's expensive.

Not only does the moon have a great deal of helium, It's got vast stores of the He3 isotope.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1550246/Russia-see...

Helium can be created by ions striking hydrogen.

Helium is also created by hydrogen fusing in the sun and being blown out on the solar wind.

Actually, the helium in the solar wind is not the helium the Sun has made, it's primordial. The helium made by the Sun is in the core and does not get to the surface, because the Sun's convective layer does not reach into the part where fusion is happening.

The moon has large amounts of He-3 compared to Earth, acquired as atoms of it were jammed into the rocks by the solar wind.

Good point. I can't believe there's that much mass arriving in the solar wind, though.

Give it several billion years and it adds up.

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