It contains the story of how Carl Sagan convinced the Voyager crew to turn its sensors towards earth so as to see if life could be detected using its quite minimal sensor suite --- I thought it had a link to the original published paper.

The fate of the Strategic Helium Reserve is a different issue and there are many articles and op. ed. pieces on it --- the Wikipedia article should cover this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve