11–20 of 59 posts
There is a market shortage of helium but shouldn't be: There's also helium in methane, but unfortunately few places crack out the helium from natural gas. TIL Helium kills Kudzu and powers fusion power plants.
That right there is reason enough to try to synthesize it in massive quantities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
√(G × mass÷radius) [escape velocity] = v_e × ln(m_0 ÷ m_f) [Tsiolkovsky] Impossible to tell how much extra mass you need but it's exponential . Adding a unit of v_e [effective exhaust velocity] to escape velocity means you need 2.717 times as much fuel in an ideal rocket. Earth escape velocity is 11000m/s ignoring atmosphere (which is not ignorable). If the new planet is 6x mass and 2x radius then √3 times escape vel…
Don't these estimates assume launching from the surface, fully via rocket? On Earth, having air breathing stages to gradually build up speed, or using other launch mechanisms, isn't worthwhile because rockets are more cost effective here, but those tradeoffs change if you're on a planet with higher gravity and a denser atmosphere.
Unless you skip chemical rockets altogether there is a pretty hard cap on how much bigger a planet can be than earth before a space capable civilization becomes almost impossible.
Rocky, you say question?
There is a market shortage of helium but shouldn't be: There's also helium in methane, but unfortunately few places crack out the helium from natural gas. TIL Helium kills Kudzu and powers fusion power plants.
1. What is the total theoretical resource?
2. How much of it do we actually now the location of
3. How much is technically recoverable?
4. And most importantly, how much is economically viable?
The last one is really the crux of the problem nowadays, there is a lot of helium but most of it just isn't in a high enough quantity to make the investment to built processing for it. Thus most of it just float off into space.
There will come a point when the price hits high enough to justify the cost but that also means higher costs to the end user.
There is a market shortage of helium but shouldn't be: There's also helium in methane, but unfortunately few places crack out the helium from natural gas. TIL Helium kills Kudzu and powers fusion power plants.
> Helium kills Kudzu That right there is reason enough to try to synthesize it in massive quantities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Helium kills Kudzu That right there is reason enough to try to synthesize it in massive quantities.
When you're done with it can I borrow your particle collider capable of mass synthesis of helium
Only 880,000 years at our current average speed. Mind blowing, that.
There is a market shortage of helium but shouldn't be: There's also helium in methane, but unfortunately few places crack out the helium from natural gas. TIL Helium kills Kudzu and powers fusion power plants.