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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Helium is a non-renewable [1] resource. Once it's gone, it's gone forever, and we are running out.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/helium-shortage-why-the-worl...

[1] Earth's helium supply comes from decaying uranium, so it is kinda-sorta renewable, but the renewal time scale is millions of years.

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No we are not running out. There's a lot, its just not profitable to mine.

Just like there is almost infinite gold in the earth

There isn't infinite anything on earth. Earth is finite. And running out of resources that are economically viable to access is effectively the same as running out. (Also, helium is a by-product of crude oil production, and so its production has some rather dramatic externalities.)

Your parent obviously knows the definition of "infinite", pedantry isn't helpful.

We ran out of $15 oil quite some time ago. That was not the same as running out of oil. "Economically viable" is not a static target.

The earth is very deep. We are only mining the very tip of it. There are thousands of miles of unmined resources down there. That’s not infinite but a lot. And sure, we can’t get to it today, but who knows what 100 or 200 years will bring.

I heard a line once that was if the earth was an apple we are yet to mine past the skin.

So a heap of exploration potential plus the off planet side.

Barely scratching the surface, so to speak. There's a lot of earth under our feet!

$15 might still be the extraction price in Saudi Arabia.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/03/19/you-wont-believe-w...

Oil at that price can't supply the entire market, though (unless they're just being really prudent).

No.

But oil at that cost provides a huge land-rent income to the Saudis when world (market) oil prices top $50, $100, $150, $200, ... bbl.

KSA's extraction price remains $15. The rest is pure profit to them.

(Discounting the hundreds of millions of years of geological accumulation and transformation which created the resource in the first place. See "Burning Buried Sunshine" by Jeffrey S. Dukes, 2003. https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.... (PDF).)

What is economically viable to access is constantly shifting, either due to technology improvements or increased demand (hence prices).

Yes, you are correct. Contrary to gold, however, which is largely useless and ornamental (aside from some marginal use in microelectronics), helium is necessary for a large amount of critical medical infrastructure, as well as research at cryogenic temperatures, superconductors, etc. To see helium steeply rise in price according to supply and demand would spell disaster for many of these applications.

The meme that gold is useless is not true. It is not used nearly as much as it could be due to price, but it has plenty of medical uses:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187395981...

If gold were as cheap as iron, it would be ubiquitous in society.

Also, gold doesn't spontaneously escape into space if it's not contained.

That all depends on the temperature ;-)

If that ever becomes a factor, helium (and gold for the matter) will be the least of our worries.

On the bright side, there would probably be no worries.

But it might get robbed if not properly secured..

Unless it's robbed by space aliens, that doesn't diminish the recoverable supply.

I guess cryptocurrency hate is spilling over into precious metals now.

Moot. With natural resources, it's entirely about the cost of recovery. Nothing else matters. Who cares the core of the Earth is all iron, if it's eternally unavailable? What matters is $/ton.

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