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I really enjoyed this oddlots podcast episode that covered similar points and had a lot of "wat" moments for me, including the US selling off its strategic heli

I really enjoyed this oddlots podcast episode that covered similar points and had a lot of "wat" moments for me, including the US selling off its strategic helium reserves at a loss because politicians labeled it "party baloon reserve", and how long it takes to produce naturally and how hard it is to find, process and transport. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE

parineum 6mo ago
Part of the reason there's a shortage is because the US was the main supplier. There was no market incentive for anyone to invest into helium extraction. It'd be like if the US used it's strategic oil reserve to supply the US with oil at a low price at all times. A strategic reserve isn't supposed to be used as a supply. The existence of a strategic reserve shouldn't have an effect on the supply of helium except in an emergency. The fact that selling the helium reserve could create a shortage should tell you that it wasn't being used as a reserve but as a supply. The US was, essentially, artificial subsidizing the price of helium. What's happening now is that people are actually paying the real price of helium.
- actionfromafar 6mo ago
  Exactly right. We may yet find out what happens when someone sells the strategic oil reserve.
  - rootusrootus 6mo ago
    Despite all the online rhetoric, and the popularity of mis-naming political movements, sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.
    - senderista 6mo ago
      I think that's broadly true: both sides want America to fail when the other side is in power in order to prove they're right.
      - gcanyon 6mo ago
        I don't want "the other side" to fail, and I absolutely don't wan the U.S. to fail when they are in power. I want the U.S. to succeed, and for "the other side" to be competent and fair.
      - krsw 6mo ago
        Classic enlightened centrist take. One side yells when the other dismantles the institutions that let the country work, so both sides are equally bad.
        californical 6mo ago
        Both bad, and one is more bad than the other. They’re not equally bad but they are both very bad
        chipsrafferty 6mo ago
        Yes the US is more bad, agreed
        disillusioned 6mo ago
        This is a bit like saying a hangnail and a gangrenous amputation are "not equally bad but they are both very bad". One is literally chopping things off to permanently alter them. The other is, at times, uncomfortable and frustrating. The false equivalence of doing the "both bad!" song and dance serves to so radically under-emphasize the absolute wanton, orders-of-magnitude-worse levels of corruption and evisceration of norms of one side by reducing it to "more bad than the other but they're both very bad." It allows the window to shift to normalize the sort of destruction of systems we're seeing by hand waving away how "the other guys aren't great, either!" It's borderline discourse malpractice at this point, and should be called out as such.
        rootusrootus 6mo ago
        The enlightened centrist take is not entirely wrong, though. The left definitely has some blind spots, among them their purist dedication to perfect morals and a willingness to tell anyone who does not perfectly agree to piss off. While the right is comfortable holding their nose when white supremacists hang around because it gets them a bigger coalition, the left will excommunicate someone for saying out loud that they think trans women are not exactly equivalent to biological women. This shrinking of the coalition is how we ended up enduring another Trump presidency. Not to mention the complete fiasco that was the 2024 presidential race. We should have thrown out the entirety of DNC leadership several levels deep for letting that happen.
    - elzbardico 6mo ago
      It is not a matter of hate or love. But the fact that people in charge doesn't give a fuck at any other thing beyond their personal interests. But this problem is not exclusive to America.
    - ben_w 6mo ago
      Nah; last but one job I had an Iranian coworker, and I asked if the way the regime calls Israel and the US the "Great Satan and Little Satan" was serious or a quirk of translation. Apparently the regime is quite serious about the US being the actual devil.
      - drowsspa 6mo ago
        I think the issue is about our not believing what religious people themselves tell us about their reasoning
        actionfromafar 6mo ago
        Hegseth reasons? I don’t see it.
      - IAmBroom 6mo ago
        God's angels typically don't bomb your little girl's school. All I'm saying is, I could see how someone who believes Satan influences the world would come to that idea.
        robocat 6mo ago
        God is documented as being rather keen on genocidal smiting. That is part of the exact problem. I googled two relevant examples: 1: God commands King Saul: attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants 2: When the Israelites entered the Promised Land, they were often commanded to carry out total destruction against the Canaanite nations. "they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass" I'm not into religion, but it has had a massive influence on my culture (NZ) so I pay some attention to it.
        BobbyJo 6mo ago
        Holy books seem to be buffets that people just pick their favorite dishes from, for the most part. At least, in the western world. I can't speak to elsewhere.
    - mschuster91 6mo ago
      > sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves. That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that. At the same time, such a revamp is desperately needed - the issues with the status quo are reeking - and everyone knows that it is highly, highly unlikely to get that done by ordinary democratic means due to the sheer inertia of hundreds of years of fossilized bureaucracy and individual/party interests. And that is why so many people tend to vote for whoever shouts "destroy the country" the loudest - and not just in the US (MAGA) or UK ("Reform"), but also in Germany (AfD), Spain (Vox) or Italy (Salvini/Meloni), where economic inequality and perspectivelessness has hit absurd levels. Let it all burn to ashes, burn everything, even if one goes down with the fire, eat the rich, and try to build something more sane this time.
      - rootusrootus 6mo ago
        > That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that. I usually get downvoted when I make an observation along these lines, but I will go for it again -- IMO some of the reason Europe has pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy is because a couple world wars last century reduced much of it to rubble, including the systems of governance. The UK mostly escaped that, and the US escaped nearly all of it. Which is one reason we can still have a lot of old electrical infrastructure, for example, that is pushing 100 years old, and a Constitutional system 250 years old. I think a major problem with the system in the US is the difficulty changing it. There is a balance, and a lot of room for differing opinions on how flexible it really ought to be, but I suspect there is broad agreement that it is too inflexible. We rely too much on changing interpretations rather than changing the fundamentals. Perhaps we really do need to risk a second Constitutional Convention. Or we will end up with a worse alternative.
        nradov 6mo ago
        If Europe has "pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy" then why do they have nothing to show for it? They can't even protect their own sea lines of communication.
    - soulofmischief 6mo ago
      The American government is a psyop. I love my country quite literally to death. Death plays a strong role in the concept of freedom in American philosophy: Give me liberty, or give me death (yes, I know the real context of this quote), etc. And so when my government wants to destroy my country, its land and its people, divide us, commodify us and our life experiences, and also export this kind of systematic industrial exploitation across the world, through colonies and coups and political assassinations; yeah, I hate that government a lot. I hate it to death. The American government has been an enemy to America, and an enemy to Americans. Since the beginning, with our treatment of the natives. You'd do well to separate the land, people and government of a nation; confusing them only further serves State propaganda. We force children to say a pledge to our country in school, but it's really to our government. It's political brainwashing. I have refused to say the pledge since becoming politically aware enough around age 7. I cannot tersely express the amount of institutional abuse I suffered for this position. Teachers would ostracize me, bully me, punish me, attempt to physically force me to say it, write me up for detention, get my guardians to abuse me at home over it, etc. Like I said, the American government is a psyop.
      - Shitty-kitty 6mo ago
        The pledge is not to some painted cloth or the current government but the community of people you are part of and the decision of who leads them, made thru free and fair elections. I really thought about its meaning as someone that chose to come here and join this community out of my own free will. IDN, Perhaps people that are taught to memorize it as children simply regard as mantra and never think about its meaning. PS: There is no country on Earth that doesn't have some sort of pledge, most often to fatherland/motherland or even a King or Tyrant.
        soulofmischief 6mo ago
        I would love for you to explain how the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance is not a form of youth brainwashing. I've already discussed how I was personally targeted in my scholastic years as they only person in my schools refusing to participate, so you already knows what happens if you exercise your first amendment rights. > made thru free and fair elections Where? What does "free" or "fair" mean here? It is not a secret that the US is a failed democratic republic that looks more like an inverted totalitarian state today. It's hard for things to be "fair" when there exists a vast capital asymmetry between those writing the law and those "voting" for it. Lobbyists, state actors and NGOs deploy billions of dollars into brainwashing the public about the US's image and actions, both domestic and foreign. We are a neoliberal colonial state, that even in this exact moment are actively attempting to expand our colonial reach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Criticism > PS: There is no country on Earth that doesn't have some sort of pledge And my grandfather used to say, as he beat me viciously, "This is nothing, you should have seen what my father used to do to me." Historical presence does not justify anything, and never has.
    - tranceylc 6mo ago
      It might be hard to accurately tell if those who hold those opinions are Americans or not, just from online rhetoric. I’m Canadian for example.
  - dave78 6mo ago
    About half of the strategic petroleum reserve was sold off in 2022.
- marcosdumay 6mo ago
  The US government decided (maybe correctly, IDK) some years ago that their strategic helium reserves were too high (and thus expensive). There were several announcements, a lot of discussion, and a long process before they started selling it. It was also a temporary action, with a well known end-date (that TBH, I never looked at). It had a known and constant small pressure over investments, it wasn't something that destabilized a market.
  - j-bos 6mo ago
    Isn't it like underground? Why would it be expensive?
    - atombender 6mo ago
      It wasn't. It was injected into the porous rock at the Bush Dome Reservoir [1], which acted as a natural container of helium. The strategic helium reserve was "expensive" because buying helium for storage was funded by treasury debt, but it was expensive purely only on paper. [1] https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bush-dome-reservoir-and-cliffside-field-terminal https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bush-dome-reserv...
      - vel0city 6mo ago
        The Bush Dome Reservoir is a giant underground formation. So yes, it's being stored underground.
        atombender 6mo ago
        I was replying to the last question: "Why would it be expensive?"
        NetMageSCW 6mo ago
        The question wasn’t why filling it would be expensive, but why maintaining it once stored would be considered expensive.
- logifail 6mo ago
  > The existence of a strategic reserve shouldn't have an effect on the supply of helium except in an emergency. Is there a widely-accepted definition of "an emergency" in the context of strategic reserves? [Thinking of the SPR] "Oil/gas prices are currently higher due to geopolitical events, my [potential] voters are getting increasingly unhappy, and there is an election soon" would probably constitute an "an emergency" in the mind of a typical politician and his/her advisors. Whether eg the SPR was created to (indirectly) help politicians keep their jobs is debatable.
  - parineum 6mo ago
    An unexpected and/or temporary change in supply or price. The reserves are there to soften any quick price spikes or avoid them entirely, they aren't there to set the price in the long term. To my knowledge, the oil reserve has generally been used that way, even when the price change is self inflicted.
- Teever 6mo ago
  > What's happening now is that people are actually paying the real price of helium. If they're not paying for the negative externalities that come from the methane extraction that comes along with it they really aren't paying the real price at all.
amelius 6mo ago
I'm guessing you can find a supply of helium near the top of the atmosphere :)
- dmitrygr 6mo ago
  Turns out -- no, it permanently escapes to space with the help of the solar wind
  - stvltvs 6mo ago
    Even if it didn't, collecting it seems wildly expensive.
    - subscribed 6mo ago
      Or free if we managed to run solar powered sails (or so) skirting the very top and autonomously sending the harvest down.
      - krisoft 6mo ago
        If by “free” you mean “very very expensive” then i agree with you. It would cost a fortune to even just attempt a pilot project proving feasability. Then we would need to send up regular replacements to the “sending the harvest down” hardware at the minimum. Just imagining the cost of a tank which can be launched into space, autonomously dock with the collector sails, then deorbit and land makes my head spin. And then doing that at scale, paying people to launch it, paying people to operate the system. It could be free if we imagine some crazy advances in autonomous self-replicating spacecrafts. But by then we live in the post-scarcity diamond age probably.
        subscribed 6mo ago
        I meant some semi permanent harvesters (which would cost a fortune to build and deploy). Sending the harvest down could maybe happen inside plastic containers built in place, made with the abundant sunlight, some Co2 and water (not sure if there's CO2 this high though. In retrospect we'd need also some metals to print some sort of the antenna reflecting radar frequencies (for the ground stations tracking them on the approach)? And with the hundreds of small containers (carefully balanced so they don't smash in the ground but slowly rain onto the area) maybe it'd be easier. I don't know. I think it's hard sci-fi, achievable within our lifetimes :)
phendrenad2 6mo ago
To be fair, the decision to get sell off the strategic helium reserve wasn't a single point in time, it happened little by little, and the original idea came at a time when helium didn't really have a strategic purpose. The last major use for it was military spy balloons sent over western europe to keep tabs on the USSR... Yeah that USSR. They couldn't have anticipated that it would suddenly become ultra-useful for post-2010 semiconductor lithography.
- littlexsparkee 6mo ago
  That explains the origin but the auction took place in the 2020s - seems like there was enough time to realize it could be a mistake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve

parineum 6mo ago

Part of the reason there's a shortage is because the US was the main supplier. There was no market incentive for anyone to invest into helium extraction. It'd be like if the US used it's strategic oil reserve to supply the US with oil at a low price at all times. A strategic reserve isn't supposed to be used as a supply. The existence of a strategic reserve shouldn't have an effect on the supply of helium except in an emergency. The fact that selling the helium reserve could create a shortage should tell you that it wasn't being used as a reserve but as a supply. The US was, essentially, artificial subsidizing the price of helium. What's happening now is that people are actually paying the real price of helium.

actionfromafar 6mo ago
Exactly right. We may yet find out what happens when someone sells the strategic oil reserve.
- rootusrootus 6mo ago
  Despite all the online rhetoric, and the popularity of mis-naming political movements, sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.
  - senderista 6mo ago
    I think that's broadly true: both sides want America to fail when the other side is in power in order to prove they're right.
    - gcanyon 6mo ago
      I don't want "the other side" to fail, and I absolutely don't wan the U.S. to fail when they are in power. I want the U.S. to succeed, and for "the other side" to be competent and fair.
    - krsw 6mo ago
      Classic enlightened centrist take. One side yells when the other dismantles the institutions that let the country work, so both sides are equally bad.
      - californical 6mo ago
        Both bad, and one is more bad than the other. They’re not equally bad but they are both very bad
        chipsrafferty 6mo ago
        Yes the US is more bad, agreed
        disillusioned 6mo ago
        This is a bit like saying a hangnail and a gangrenous amputation are "not equally bad but they are both very bad". One is literally chopping things off to permanently alter them. The other is, at times, uncomfortable and frustrating. The false equivalence of doing the "both bad!" song and dance serves to so radically under-emphasize the absolute wanton, orders-of-magnitude-worse levels of corruption and evisceration of norms of one side by reducing it to "more bad than the other but they're both very bad." It allows the window to shift to normalize the sort of destruction of systems we're seeing by hand waving away how "the other guys aren't great, either!" It's borderline discourse malpractice at this point, and should be called out as such.
      - rootusrootus 6mo ago
        The enlightened centrist take is not entirely wrong, though. The left definitely has some blind spots, among them their purist dedication to perfect morals and a willingness to tell anyone who does not perfectly agree to piss off. While the right is comfortable holding their nose when white supremacists hang around because it gets them a bigger coalition, the left will excommunicate someone for saying out loud that they think trans women are not exactly equivalent to biological women. This shrinking of the coalition is how we ended up enduring another Trump presidency. Not to mention the complete fiasco that was the 2024 presidential race. We should have thrown out the entirety of DNC leadership several levels deep for letting that happen.
  - elzbardico 6mo ago
    It is not a matter of hate or love. But the fact that people in charge doesn't give a fuck at any other thing beyond their personal interests. But this problem is not exclusive to America.
  - ben_w 6mo ago
    Nah; last but one job I had an Iranian coworker, and I asked if the way the regime calls Israel and the US the "Great Satan and Little Satan" was serious or a quirk of translation. Apparently the regime is quite serious about the US being the actual devil.
    - drowsspa 6mo ago
      I think the issue is about our not believing what religious people themselves tell us about their reasoning
      - actionfromafar 6mo ago
        Hegseth reasons? I don’t see it.
    - IAmBroom 6mo ago
      God's angels typically don't bomb your little girl's school. All I'm saying is, I could see how someone who believes Satan influences the world would come to that idea.
      - robocat 6mo ago
        God is documented as being rather keen on genocidal smiting. That is part of the exact problem. I googled two relevant examples: 1: God commands King Saul: attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants 2: When the Israelites entered the Promised Land, they were often commanded to carry out total destruction against the Canaanite nations. "they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass" I'm not into religion, but it has had a massive influence on my culture (NZ) so I pay some attention to it.
        BobbyJo 6mo ago
        Holy books seem to be buffets that people just pick their favorite dishes from, for the most part. At least, in the western world. I can't speak to elsewhere.
  - mschuster91 6mo ago
    > sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves. That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that. At the same time, such a revamp is desperately needed - the issues with the status quo are reeking - and everyone knows that it is highly, highly unlikely to get that done by ordinary democratic means due to the sheer inertia of hundreds of years of fossilized bureaucracy and individual/party interests. And that is why so many people tend to vote for whoever shouts "destroy the country" the loudest - and not just in the US (MAGA) or UK ("Reform"), but also in Germany (AfD), Spain (Vox) or Italy (Salvini/Meloni), where economic inequality and perspectivelessness has hit absurd levels. Let it all burn to ashes, burn everything, even if one goes down with the fire, eat the rich, and try to build something more sane this time.
    - rootusrootus 6mo ago
      > That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that. I usually get downvoted when I make an observation along these lines, but I will go for it again -- IMO some of the reason Europe has pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy is because a couple world wars last century reduced much of it to rubble, including the systems of governance. The UK mostly escaped that, and the US escaped nearly all of it. Which is one reason we can still have a lot of old electrical infrastructure, for example, that is pushing 100 years old, and a Constitutional system 250 years old. I think a major problem with the system in the US is the difficulty changing it. There is a balance, and a lot of room for differing opinions on how flexible it really ought to be, but I suspect there is broad agreement that it is too inflexible. We rely too much on changing interpretations rather than changing the fundamentals. Perhaps we really do need to risk a second Constitutional Convention. Or we will end up with a worse alternative.
      - nradov 6mo ago
        If Europe has "pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy" then why do they have nothing to show for it? They can't even protect their own sea lines of communication.
  - soulofmischief 6mo ago
    The American government is a psyop. I love my country quite literally to death. Death plays a strong role in the concept of freedom in American philosophy: Give me liberty, or give me death (yes, I know the real context of this quote), etc. And so when my government wants to destroy my country, its land and its people, divide us, commodify us and our life experiences, and also export this kind of systematic industrial exploitation across the world, through colonies and coups and political assassinations; yeah, I hate that government a lot. I hate it to death. The American government has been an enemy to America, and an enemy to Americans. Since the beginning, with our treatment of the natives. You'd do well to separate the land, people and government of a nation; confusing them only further serves State propaganda. We force children to say a pledge to our country in school, but it's really to our government. It's political brainwashing. I have refused to say the pledge since becoming politically aware enough around age 7. I cannot tersely express the amount of institutional abuse I suffered for this position. Teachers would ostracize me, bully me, punish me, attempt to physically force me to say it, write me up for detention, get my guardians to abuse me at home over it, etc. Like I said, the American government is a psyop.
    - Shitty-kitty 6mo ago
      The pledge is not to some painted cloth or the current government but the community of people you are part of and the decision of who leads them, made thru free and fair elections. I really thought about its meaning as someone that chose to come here and join this community out of my own free will. IDN, Perhaps people that are taught to memorize it as children simply regard as mantra and never think about its meaning. PS: There is no country on Earth that doesn't have some sort of pledge, most often to fatherland/motherland or even a King or Tyrant.
      - soulofmischief 6mo ago
        I would love for you to explain how the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance is not a form of youth brainwashing. I've already discussed how I was personally targeted in my scholastic years as they only person in my schools refusing to participate, so you already knows what happens if you exercise your first amendment rights. > made thru free and fair elections Where? What does "free" or "fair" mean here? It is not a secret that the US is a failed democratic republic that looks more like an inverted totalitarian state today. It's hard for things to be "fair" when there exists a vast capital asymmetry between those writing the law and those "voting" for it. Lobbyists, state actors and NGOs deploy billions of dollars into brainwashing the public about the US's image and actions, both domestic and foreign. We are a neoliberal colonial state, that even in this exact moment are actively attempting to expand our colonial reach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Criticism > PS: There is no country on Earth that doesn't have some sort of pledge And my grandfather used to say, as he beat me viciously, "This is nothing, you should have seen what my father used to do to me." Historical presence does not justify anything, and never has.
  - tranceylc 6mo ago
    It might be hard to accurately tell if those who hold those opinions are Americans or not, just from online rhetoric. I’m Canadian for example.
- dave78 6mo ago
  About half of the strategic petroleum reserve was sold off in 2022.
marcosdumay 6mo ago
The US government decided (maybe correctly, IDK) some years ago that their strategic helium reserves were too high (and thus expensive). There were several announcements, a lot of discussion, and a long process before they started selling it. It was also a temporary action, with a well known end-date (that TBH, I never looked at). It had a known and constant small pressure over investments, it wasn't something that destabilized a market.
- j-bos 6mo ago
  Isn't it like underground? Why would it be expensive?
  - atombender 6mo ago
    It wasn't. It was injected into the porous rock at the Bush Dome Reservoir [1], which acted as a natural container of helium. The strategic helium reserve was "expensive" because buying helium for storage was funded by treasury debt, but it was expensive purely only on paper. [1] https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bush-dome-reservoir-and-cliffside-field-terminal https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bush-dome-reserv...
    - vel0city 6mo ago
      The Bush Dome Reservoir is a giant underground formation. So yes, it's being stored underground.
      - atombender 6mo ago
        I was replying to the last question: "Why would it be expensive?"
        NetMageSCW 6mo ago
        The question wasn’t why filling it would be expensive, but why maintaining it once stored would be considered expensive.
logifail 6mo ago
> The existence of a strategic reserve shouldn't have an effect on the supply of helium except in an emergency. Is there a widely-accepted definition of "an emergency" in the context of strategic reserves? [Thinking of the SPR] "Oil/gas prices are currently higher due to geopolitical events, my [potential] voters are getting increasingly unhappy, and there is an election soon" would probably constitute an "an emergency" in the mind of a typical politician and his/her advisors. Whether eg the SPR was created to (indirectly) help politicians keep their jobs is debatable.
- parineum 6mo ago
  An unexpected and/or temporary change in supply or price. The reserves are there to soften any quick price spikes or avoid them entirely, they aren't there to set the price in the long term. To my knowledge, the oil reserve has generally been used that way, even when the price change is self inflicted.
Teever 6mo ago
> What's happening now is that people are actually paying the real price of helium. If they're not paying for the negative externalities that come from the methane extraction that comes along with it they really aren't paying the real price at all.

amelius 6mo ago

I'm guessing you can find a supply of helium near the top of the atmosphere :)

dmitrygr 6mo ago
Turns out -- no, it permanently escapes to space with the help of the solar wind
- stvltvs 6mo ago
  Even if it didn't, collecting it seems wildly expensive.
  - subscribed 6mo ago
    Or free if we managed to run solar powered sails (or so) skirting the very top and autonomously sending the harvest down.
    - krisoft 6mo ago
      If by “free” you mean “very very expensive” then i agree with you. It would cost a fortune to even just attempt a pilot project proving feasability. Then we would need to send up regular replacements to the “sending the harvest down” hardware at the minimum. Just imagining the cost of a tank which can be launched into space, autonomously dock with the collector sails, then deorbit and land makes my head spin. And then doing that at scale, paying people to launch it, paying people to operate the system. It could be free if we imagine some crazy advances in autonomous self-replicating spacecrafts. But by then we live in the post-scarcity diamond age probably.
      - subscribed 6mo ago
        I meant some semi permanent harvesters (which would cost a fortune to build and deploy). Sending the harvest down could maybe happen inside plastic containers built in place, made with the abundant sunlight, some Co2 and water (not sure if there's CO2 this high though. In retrospect we'd need also some metals to print some sort of the antenna reflecting radar frequencies (for the ground stations tracking them on the approach)? And with the hundreds of small containers (carefully balanced so they don't smash in the ground but slowly rain onto the area) maybe it'd be easier. I don't know. I think it's hard sci-fi, achievable within our lifetimes :)

phendrenad2 6mo ago

To be fair, the decision to get sell off the strategic helium reserve wasn't a single point in time, it happened little by little, and the original idea came at a time when helium didn't really have a strategic purpose. The last major use for it was military spy balloons sent over western europe to keep tabs on the USSR... Yeah that USSR. They couldn't have anticipated that it would suddenly become ultra-useful for post-2010 semiconductor lithography.

littlexsparkee 6mo ago
That explains the origin but the auction took place in the 2020s - seems like there was enough time to realize it could be a mistake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve