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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

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

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.

$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).

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