[NovaVeles]

This is something I have to remind people of all the time - usually I just get blank stares.

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.

[neilwilson]

If I have a debt of £50 and you have the corresponding £50 asset that you like to look at, then you don't need any material amount of energy to get to that state of happiness.

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.

[peteradio]

If I mortgage the singular life supporting planet we are aware of and don't pay back the debt...

[neilwilson]

Then whoever gave you the debt will be bankrupt, and whoever you paid the debt to will be rich.

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.

[tick_tock_tick]

> How much energy and resources that gets us do we have?

Millions of years worth..... Like really of course you get blank stares it's not an issue that exists.

[_benedict]

Millions of years of what? We have maybe a few hundred years of helium if we’re generous with our assumptions and we’re literally squirting that into balloons and letting it float away into the atmosphere and off into space. It’s literally an unrecoverable loss.

This is just one of the many resource limits we’re facing as a species, and this is how we address it today.

[alexvoda]

Since you brought helium into discussion, why do we fill party balloons with helium?

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.

[wizofaus]

Has anyone actually seriously worked out how much party balloons contribute to the loss of helium from the atmosphere? And isn't helium an expected waste product from fusion reactors? Not saying it's not an issue but I'm not convinced it's worth getting too upset over just yet.

[_benedict]

https://www.helium-one.com/helium-market/

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.

[ben_w]

Out of curiosity I put the numbers into Wolfram Alpha, and it suggests that even if 100% of our current power (all power not just electricity) needs came from fusing deuterium and tritium into helium, those reactors would make only about 5.3% of our current helium consumption.

[wizofaus]

That's all "lifting balloons" - I'd think the majority of which would be for weather balloons etc.? You're probably right about He from fusion reactors but if we have 100s of years to solve it who knows.

[_benedict]

Who knows is exactly the problem. Hand waving this away for future generations to deal with is exactly the problem. If we can’t imagine how we’ll solve it, we should probably strive not to create the mess.

[ben_w]

What do you have in mind as a "millions of years" power source?

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.

[mdemare]

While there is a vast amount of resources below us, the CO2 above us that's causing us so much trouble would form a layer of just 3.8mm (0.15 inch) of dry ice if it was all deposited on Earth's surface as a solid.