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Comment by c1sc0 | Hacker News Reader

sure, but who's going to cash in on those contracts if my horizon is 500 years?

I think any action taken today is unlikely to preserve resources 500 years from now. You'd have to start some sort of monastery devoted to hoarding helium. (This is harder than it sounds. Helium diffuses through metal tanks.)

More importantly, I don't think future generations will benefit much from our conservation efforts. Resource needs and constraints change over time. As technology advances, we find new ways to create substitutes for rare materials, or find ways to use rare materials more efficiently. Someone in 1500 would be unlikely to correctly guess scarce resources 500 years in the future.

Yet in most of the middle ages it was common practise to plant oak when a new building in e.g. a monastery was completed, in order to enable the next generation to replace e.g. the roof structure.

I've never heard of this before and Google gives me nothing. Can you provide a link or something? I thought most medieval structures had thatch roofs made with straw.

I'm not sure what your anecdote has to do with my argument. The medieval times did not have the sort of growth we have today. Hoarding resources for future generations doesn't make sense in our economy. You could help the future a lot more by selling those resources and investing in index funds. A generation from now, that money will have compounded to be much more valuable than if you had preserved your original resources and tried to sell them 100 years later.

He did say 'roof structure', not 'roof covering'. A thatched roof needs a structure to support it, that straw does not stay up in the air by magic. All the gussets and beams were made of wood.

I seem to remember visiting an ancient English church, and being told by our guide that the original architect had caused a stand of trees to be planted near the city, of the same wood as the roof timbers. Centuries later, some of the roof timbers needed to be replaced; thanks to the architect's foresight, the necessary trees were there.

The one I had heard about had to do with Oxford.

http://atlasobscura.com/place/oak-beams-new-college-oxford

Kevin Kelly, I believe, in _The Clock of the Long Now_ mentions a funny story about the Swedish parliament putting aside an island to grow trees for the navy. A bishop argued against it, saying that a century hence ships may well be made of something besides wood. A century hence was the 1900s, where pretty much everything was made of steel or iron or another metal...

or find ways to use rare materials more efficiently

This won't necessarily have the effect of making the remaining Helium last longer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I do agree with you that worrying about the resource needs of society 500 years from now is unlikely to prove useful. Furthermore, it strikes me a bit odd that the lives of humans hundreds or thousands of years after we are dead is of such great importance to everyone. Unfortunately, this article seems to be discussing running out of Helium in our lifetimes, which probably is something we need to think about.

Okay, I godda ask.

How would you hoard helium for 500 years?

It sounds like a fun technical problem. Anyone know any solution?

you could buy a depleted gas field and fill it up.

It's been hoarded for tens of millions of years in existing salt domes. That's more or less how both the national helium reserve (being sold off) and the privately-owned BLM helium reserve are maintained. It's by no means a trivial problem (you have to know where the domes are and be able to drill through kilometers of solid rock to reach them, then repressurize the helium to a high enough pressure to make it go back underground) but it's not out of the reach of 1920s technology.

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