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I did the calculations once and the amount of fusion needed to produce the current rate of consumption of helium would more or less equal the energy received fr
by colechristensen 3y ago
I did the calculations once and the amount of fusion needed to produce the current rate of consumption of helium would more or less equal the energy received from the sun over the entire planet. In other words we'd need fusion plants producing enough energy to boil the oceans and kill us all.
Of course that's different than the energy economics of decay, but still the sense being that there are scales involved which don't necessarily mean that production would be even nearby by dozens of orders of magnitude.
- magicalhippo 3y agoSun is full of it, just shove a pipe into it and pump out what we need. And no need to mess with "blue hydrogen", this will give us virtually unlimited amounts of yellow hydrogen as a byproduct.
- thsksbd 3y agoWho said anything about fusion? Fusion's ridiculous. Fission too. My point is that even if we, the humans of the 21st century, can run out of He, the Earth can't. Even us humans can't run out of it - we'll boil off the atmosphere with CO2 before we run out of CH4 wells.