[_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.

[wizofaus]

But we do know that plenty of other current human activities, primarily around extracting stuff from deep underground and pumping it into the atmosphere, are going to cause huge issues for even just our kid's generation, with no realistic technology likely to be developed quickly enough to solve it(*). If we hypothetically needed to use up the earth's remaining helium to fix that I'd support doing so. Running out of helium isn't expected to introduce a risk of making the planet largely uninhabitable, as far as I'm aware.

(*) 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!

[_benedict]

I’m really not sure what point you’re making. Where has anyone proposed a climate solution by using all of the world’s helium?

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.