Forget the dollars and cents tokens on wealth, they can and are manipulated but intentionally and unintentionally. How much energy and resources that gets us do we have? That is the real currency we have to work with.
All the debt in the world means nothing if we cannot produce the goods with the token we produced assuming the resources would be there.
I have to remind people all the time of a simple truth - there isn't a one to one relationship between money and stuff.
And money isn't real. It's largely an illusion. At best a social relation.
Money doesn't stop at its first use. And debt is nothing more than allowing you to spend the real thing without selling it first.
Millions of years worth..... Like really of course you get blank stares it's not an issue that exists.
This is just one of the many resource limits we’re facing as a species, and this is how we address it today.
Just how great is the risc of filling them with hidrogen? I know it's flamable and leaks through many materials. But in the context of party balloons just how great is that risc? The quantity is very small. And no ones life depends on it. And in the case of fire, that quantity would burn almost instantly. I doubt it would even have the time to ignite anything other than another flamable gas.
Apparently 8%. But all of these industries waste it unnecessarily, due to our failing to price in or consider the future scarcity.
Helium as a waste product of fusion reactors is such a pipe dream, and will produce such tiny volumes should that ever happen, that it is not a remotely realistic solution to the problem.
(*) I'm more or less convinced that such a miracle technology is the only hope we have of avoiding catastrophic change. I'm baffled why there's not massively more funding into researching potential geoengineering solutions, given the stakes. Even fossil fuel companies would benefit!
What we do use helium for today are things like MRI machines that are medically invaluable, and we do so wastefully potentially denying future generations this technology.
Even if we eventually find alternatives, it may be inferior or we may otherwise deny them technological advantages of similar importance that would be more accessible through access to helium.
The problem is that today Helium is cheap enough we’re happy to boil an MRI machine’s worth off into space for a child’s birthday party.
Climate change is simply another face of the same coin of indifference to the costs we confer on others.
Apparently there's plenty on the moon...
At current rates, fossil fuels will last a few centuries, nuclear a few millennia.
Although geothermal would last for geological timescales, the estimated maximum output only covers current electricity use (~2 TW, well short of the ~17 TW total power use, and ideally we'd increase the minimum power use per person to get closer to European or American levels rather than keeping our current distribution).
The kinetic rotational energy of the earth would last us 400 million years.
Sun will last a few billion, but then we're no longer talking about extractive technologies.