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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

If demand keeps growing (as it has been), we've got ~40-60 years of "cheap" reserves left. As helium prices start to increase, you've got price shocks down the supply chain.

There's about 40-70 billion cubic meters of economically recoverable (assuming future technology development + price increases). The complete total upper end of known geological reserves is ~60-100 billion cubic meters - that's about correct in terms of order of magnitude even if we find new deposits.

Current consumption is 180 million cubic meters/year. At a growth of 3%, you've got 80-140 years before we run out. At 5% growth it's 50-90 years.

Saying "I'm not worried about it" is true in the myopically selfish "I personally won't have to care about it". It's conceivable that your children will be dealing with it and definitely grandchildren in a very real existentially meaningful way.

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It's very hard if not impossible to do predictions over century timescales. How relevant are 1926 resource problems to today? If you wrote your comment in 1926 you would be talking about rubber, fertilizer, coal, wood or oil, and 4 out of those 5 are mostly solved today.

At those timescales, mining the moon or Jupiter for helium might be realistic, so the limits of earth are no longer upper bounds.

We're definitely not mining the moon for helium, but might well end up "mining" the gas giants.

I agree century timescales are tough, I'm not convinced 4 of 5 of your listed things have been solved.

Rubber has been replaced with oil.

Fertilizer has been replaced with Natural Gas that comes from the same place as oil.

Coal usage has been replaced/displaced primarily by natural gas, see above.

Wood, or deforestation, was a real problem in the 1920's, but many uses were replaced by plastics (oil) and natural gas. Sustainable forestry helped a ton here too once it hit the paper industry's bottom line.

Oil is certainly not solved, so we solved 4 out of 5 with the 5th.

Exactly -- that means that any analysis based on the current (as of 1926) 'reserves' or 'production capacity' for rubber/fertilizer/coal/wood would have been invalidated as soon as we switched to using oil instead. Imagine if instead of harvesting helium directly we find an economic way to split nitrogen (somehow, who knows). At that point, what you'd have to have forecasted would be the 'reserves' of nitrogen, which are functionally infinite.

That still amounts to magical thinking. And the point of the post that you’re replying to is that we didn’t actually make things better. We actually accelerated our exploitation of other resources to make up for the shortage of the others which had serious other negative side effects.

Since we’re dealing in magical hypotheticals, what if this new economical way to split nitrogen generated so much pollution that it poisoned natural water supplies? Also the “economic way” is misleading. If prices shoot up enough, then crazy things become economical like missions to other planets to retrieve it. But that’s an insane cost that has to be borne out by all humanity. Historically that worked because you increased how many people were on earth so it spread the cost out. However, it’s pretty clear the Earth is at carrying capacity for humans with our current technology which is why the population growth has slowed drastically. So increasing costs threaten to become a weight the next generation can’t lift resulting in societal collapse.

> Imagine if instead of harvesting helium directly we find an economic way to split nitrogen (somehow, who knows).

This is nonsense, from the physics point of view.

The reason why rubber/fertilizer were replaced by oil/gas products is that oil/gas has the energy needed for the (relatively simple) chemical transformations needed to obtain rubber/fertilizer from the feedstocks.

Splitting nitrogen into helium is a nuclear reaction that requires copious amounts of energy.

At least using fusion or collecting helium from Moon/Jupiter are physically sane, if economically insane.

Isn’t those calculations pretty unreliable? It’s like those predictions we only have 5 or 10 years of oil left. And then we find more oil or better extraction process and we got another 10 years and so on.

Ah, "The Iranian Nuclear Bomb Deadline" ploy.

> As helium prices start to increase, you've got price shocks down the supply chain.

No shock at all if the price is relative to what's left. Shouldn't boring market pressures guarantee this, unless the government gets involved?

No, if you hit a resource limit you’ve got exponentially increasing prices for the remainder which starts to make applications not even possible anymore. It’s not a shock in terms of months, but you could easily see MRI machines skyrocket in price over a few years as helium becomes inaccessible unless someone figures out a non-helium approach to MRIs.

High(er) temperature superconductors. Not as good as liquid helium ones, but should be good enough.

That's the point, it's NOT a resource limits so there shouldn't be some exponential. As stated elsewhere, petroleum/natural gas companies are bleeding processable helium into the atmosphere, but only because there were government reserves that broke the economics. The can start capturing it.

Just in time to start extracting helium on Mars

Maybe we will build chips in space in vacuum?

> myopically selfish

A standard western personality trait I’ve been confronted with repeatedly over the last… hmm. Well that got depressing real quick.

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