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Topic starter
This was such an ordinarily humdrum week but I just read this...maybe now we can panic!?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36651048
I never realised how important the use of helium was (especially for astronomers!) and more shockingly to me, how very limited a resource it is on Earth as I pretty much thought we had this in abundance as it is in the universe. It nice they found new source areas of helium but still, its all going to run out in some of our lifetimes. So uh, can we mine the sun for more....?
Posted : 29/06/2016 12:27 am
Oh dear... another scare story with very little basis in facts. This came up a few years ago (big press story that we'd no longer have helium party balloons) and it was totally debunked then.
We are not "running out of Helium". The latest US geological survey makes this clear: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/helium/mcs-2016-heliu.pdf
As of December 31, 2006, the total helium reserves and resources of the United States were estimated to be 20.6 billion cubic meters (744 billion cubic feet).
...
Helium resources of the world, exclusive of the United States, were estimated to be about 31.3 billion cubic meters (1.13 trillion cubic feet).
Current global consumption is around 180 million cubic metres a year. So, just based on current known resources, we have about 288 years supply of helium left!
It's also a renewable resource (helium is produced by the radioactive decay of uranium, for example).
Yes, it's important when we find ways of extracting this important resource, but to say we are "running out" is total nonsense.
Posted : 29/06/2016 9:23 am
Topic starter
Ha, thanks again for the re-assurance.
Having said that, 300 years is still only "tomorrow" in humanity existence terms. So if helium is a renewable resource, can it be provided by other means (like your uranium radioactive decay example) for significantly longer time? Will helium be an important ingredient for far off space travel within the next millenium? Because going by the rapid progress we have made in just the last hundred years, the achievements to come is potentially unimaginably awesome...so would be a damn shame if that potential progress relies on helium 🙂
Posted : 01/07/2016 12:12 am
Well, this could be one potential answer:
Then we have Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that have vast quantities of deuterium and helium-3. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_mining
This is quite an interesting article: http://starsdestination.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/mining-gas-giants-for-helium-3.html
One would hope that our technology would advance to such a stage in the future where these things become possible.
The subject of a future Flamsteed lecture perhaps?
Posted : 01/07/2016 10:49 am
Topic starter
Gosh, I am a big fan of an RPG video game called Mass Effect and part of the role as a starship commander (aside from being a diplomat or shooting aliens) is to mine resources from planets to keep maintaining and upgrading the ship. Helium3 was one of the gases to mine. To think it could all become a reality and maybe I can qualify as a planetary resource space explorer 😀
Given all these various articles, we really dont have anything to worry about our future generation endeavours. political wrangles and ripples are fleeting moments but scientific progress and ambitions looks to be eternal, regardless.
Posted : 01/07/2016 4:19 pm
The subject of a future Flamsteed lecture perhaps?
Grey would of course be required to suck on a helium balloon when introducing the speaker, handling the Q&A, etc.
Posted : 28/07/2016 12:39 am
