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Comment by TwoBit | Hacker News Reader

I'm totally ignorant, but I thought helium atoms rose to the top of the atmosphere any flew away.

The atmosphere is not stratified into layers of different gasses. All gasses are mixed throughout the atmosphere, so you also find enough Helium at the bottom where we live. Indeed, all gasses in the atmosphere get less dense with increasing height, so helium has the highest pressure/density at the ground. [1]

At the same time, lighter gasses have vertical distributions that reach higher up into space, and some helium does get lost as it "boils off" from earth over time.

[1]: https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/a/61154/14998

no you're right, it's not economically feasible to "extract" helium from air and it does rise.

According to a quick Google, it's in the air at a concentration of 5ppm. For loose comparison sake, this is like pumping out an Olympic sized swimming pool to extract 10 litres of the good stuff. You certainly won't be doing that to fill children's balloons.

> this is like pumping out an Olympic sized swimming pool to extract 10 litres of the good stuff

Sounds line gold mining... I'm sure they'd do it if needed for scientific purposes... or if they discover some health benefits to heliumtalk

Note that the price of gold is much higher than the price of helium.

If helium prices rise high enough, then yes, we will extract it from the atmosphere. And scientists will be sad because the they won't be able to afford as much of it anymore.

It might be a lot cheaper to filter one cubic meter of air then it is one cubic meter of dirt... But either way, one day it could happen

Yeah this is completely misleading. How the fuck do you they think they got neon? The only way you can get it is from from the atmosphere. Helium occurs in similar concentrations and maintains the same level overtime due the radioactive decay. Actually it's probably increased due to natural gas extraction. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984GeCoA..48.1759O/abstra...

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