Submitted by PHealthy t3_124xb33 in askscience
Nyrin t1_je1p2vp wrote
Reply to comment by [deleted] in Is NaCl relatively common in the galaxy/universe? by PHealthy
The news you hear about helium supply is not (or shouldn't be) about extractable amounts on the planet — it's about what's commercially available.
Extraordinary amounts of helium are just discarded during things like natural gas extraction because helium isn't profitable enough for those companies to extract, store, and sell. That means commercial supply goes down and, with constant or increasing demand, price goes up. At some point, it becomes profitable to separate and sell it again, at which point supply increases, price goes down, and the cycle repeats.
This process is being intensified, especially in creating lower price floors, by long-standing selloffs of nationalized helium reserves that were created when we thought dirigibles were the future of warfare.
Helium is effectively a non-renewable resource (decay products are created very slowly and need to accumulate over millions of years to be harvestable, besides) and we will run out of it someday, but that day is still very far off and unlikely to happen in the lifetime of anyone alive barring major life extension advancements (yes, please!).
What we will see is continued boom/bust cycles as reserves are depleted and markets stabilize on current real extraction costs. And it'll likely be a steady increase over time as the long-term depressive effect of stockpile release dwindles.
Helium can be synthesized via nuclear reactions and, in a hypothetical situation where the Earth really "ran out," that's what we'd likely end up doing. It'd just be many orders of magnitude more expensive than today and probably make asteroid capture look very appealing. But that hypothetical day is very far off past much more prominent existential threats.
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