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Comment by hackermom | Hacker News Reader

Reading about Helium on Wikipedia, I get the impression that it's far from as rare - neither in natural occurance nor in natural or artificial production - as this article would like to suggest.

"In the Earth's heterosphere, a part of the upper atmosphere, helium and other lighter gases are the most abundant elements."

"In this way an estimated 3000 metric tons of helium are generated per year throughout the lithosphere."

And as both Wiki and the article points out, the biggest "reserve" is found in natural gas - which Europe, with Russia in particular, has vast abundances of. Not sure with what concentration our European gas deposits hold Helium, though.

I'm not sure which source to trust here on the topic of Helium being this rare.

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Well, "most abundant" in the heterosphere doesn't really say much given that the density at those altitudes is sufficiently low that the molecules have a large mean free path. We're basically talking satellite orbit altitudes here, so it would be seriously difficult to haul something large enough to gather enough mass to be useful. Certainly it wouldn't be cheap.

And 3000 tons per year is not that much given that Wikipedia says "2008 world helium total production of about 32 million kg helium", ie 32000 metric tons. In other words, demand exceeds production by a factor of 10, even if (and that's a big if) all of the He in the lithosphere could be captured.

No, I think the solution is to go to Jupiter and scoop up a huge load of it (gotta be Jupiter, Saturn's atmosphere is deficient in He). And given that we need it for spaceflight, better do it before we use it all up!

Most importantly, if (I agree, it's a big if) we ever manage to get nuclear fusion running, we'll have all the helium we need: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ug/hussainw/fusion.jpg

The problem with He is also why it's so useful--it doesn't react with anything. It's a bitch to filter because the only strategy you have is to get rid of everything else.

With regard to atmospheric helium, I don't believe that we know how to harvest that yet. So, it's out of our reach, at least for now.

I suppose if we had a space elevator, we could just run a pipeline alongside it. :)

Or send up a guy with a bucket.

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