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Comment by aardvarkr | Hacker News Reader

That’s a nontrivial amount of a resource that is a limiting factor to scientific research and other ambitions that aim for loftier goals than temporary amusement.

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If I'm willing to pay as much for helium as someone trying to pursue some lofty science goal, then either you have vastly underestimated the importance of amusement or science vastly overestimates the importance of the lofty goal.

Honestly, if my niece's quinceanera balloons stop the world from being saved, there's something deeply wrong beyond my scope of helping.

Or society vastly underfunds science even though it's important.

Our helium supplies mainly come from oil drilling, which makes them a non-renewable resource. Once it is lost to the atmosphere it basically disperses into space. The problem here is that the US government built up a huge reserve of helium in the 20th century and then began selling it off at below-replacement prices, leading to vast amounts of the stuff being wasted. Meanwhile the oil and gas industry stopped capturing helium and let huge amounts of it go to waste. We got cheap helium balloons at our parties in exchange for major losses that will be difficult to make up (particularly as we wind down the fossil fuel industry in this century.)

The current known helium reserves are estimated to last (at current consumption rates) for 100-200 more years. Fwiw, all this non-renewable talk is only true in a world without space exploration or fusion (two things that will hopefully be more common 100 years from now).

The noise about a shortage is because the US gov't decided to stop subsidizing storage and delivery of helium, and scientists untrained in economics see "losing a subsidy" as similar to "a shortage" since the net effect is the same - prices are rising.

Culling recreational use would add 10-20 years of supply, which is unlikely to be the 'make or break' bridge to fusion or space mining.

Let people have fun, it's arguably the meaning of life.

Hope is hardly a strategy. Long term technological progress depends on social stability and economic prosperity and those are all but certain.

Humans had thousands of years experience having fun w/o wasting non-renewable resources.

> Humans had thousands of years experience having fun w/o wasting non-renewable resources.

Genuinely curious, are you speaking of pre-Bronze Age civilizations?

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