Elon Musk Starlink

[BAYLOR]

We need to stop using single use plastic and Helium, so I'm not a fan of the balloons. We need to keep the limited Helium for medical uses and plastic from balloons litters the countryside, the oceans and kills wildlife who try to eat it. That is before you even consider any privacy issues.

We can't artificially produce helium can we?

 

[Dave]

It is an element, if that is what you meant. It is present at 5ppm by volume in the Earth's atmosphere, but being inert and second lightest of all the elements means it escapes, and is then lost forever. It is also produced by the radioactive decay of Thorium and Uranium deep underground. That can then collect in natural gas reserves, or is released by volcanic activity. Those are the reserves we are using up. They will have taken hundreds of thousands of years to collect.

 

[BAYLOR]

It is an element, if that is what you meant. It is present at 5ppm by volume in the Earth's atmosphere, but being inert and second lightest of all the elements means it escapes, and is then lost forever. It is also produced by the radioactive decay of Thorium and Uranium deep underground. That can then collect in natural gas reserves, or is released by volcanic activity. Those are the reserves we are using up. They will have taken hundreds of thousands of years to collect.

We can't replicate that.

If we exhaust the Helium , that could be world of trouble for our civilization.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

There is probably a lot of things of unlimited quantity below the surface we could be mining if we could get there. There must be a lot of helium that hasn't bubbled up to the surface yet. All together we are probably spending trillions to travel many millions of miles into space with just a a handful of vehicles. Everyone except India which already had launched 104 satellites from a single rocket for a tenth of the typical cost before Starlink came along. I wonder how much it would cost to mine resources that are 10 miles or more underground. Could it be that much harder to tunnel underground than to travel into the dangerous cold vacuum of space. Many years ago tunneling used to be a big feature in movies but pretty much dropped off the radar and out of sight.

 

[Harpo]

Starlink is clearly doomed