It would be neat if it were a steampunk-style civilization traveling around their atmosphere in helium airships. But probably just helium escaping from rocks...
The transport elevator wouldn't be located in a light house now it?
Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone
51–59 of 59 posts
Re: Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
anything going out there for those long journeys would/should be big, so there would be enough walls, storage of supplies, reaction mass tanks, etc. to provide significant protection.
Not really. Galaxy is 100k ly across, you can make the journey end to end in 1mil years at 10% light speed. Obviously talking about probes/tech, not "biologicals". 1mil years is really short in the grand scheme of things.
>Obviously talking about probes/tech, not "biologicals".
human brain has 100T synaptic connections. We already have 2 trillion parameter AI models. Parameter count grows more 3x per year. It means that in 4 years we'll have 100T model. My point here is that by the time we have probes to send even to the closest star, the biological brain would be the inferior option, and most probably we'd even be able to upload, just as fun small companions-observers, a bunch of people brains into what by the time would be a superintelligent 100000T+ parameter AI brain of the probe.
Re: Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. This makes me wonder if it'd be worthwhile starting a company to capture it now, and just stockpile it until it's rare enough to be able to use my stockpile to control the price. The DeBeers diamonds playbook applied to helium, or maybe the Peter Thiel build-a-monopoly-to-win approach.
A teal Hydrogen company that splits Methane (CH4) into Hydrogen (H) and Oxidized Carbon Nanotubes (O-CNT) would be significantly more profitable than one that splits into Hydrogen and Carbon Black. (Because after production costs, O-CNT have a significantly higher market price than carbon black.) But do our communities want fracking wastewater in our aquifer groundwater or on our farm fields? When is the break-even p…
teal hydrogen: electrolytic catalysis, renewable feedstocks
turquoise hydrogen: high-temp pyrolysis of methane
So e.g. [1] is turquoise hydrogen.
[1] "Production of hydrogen and carbon nanotubes from methane using a multi-pass floating catalyst chemical vapour deposition reactor with process gas recycling" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-025-01925-3
A renewable feedstock process that yields Hydrogen and O-CNT would be yielding teal hydrogen.
A natural gas process that yields Hydrogen and O-CNT would be yielding turquoise hydrogen.
Re: Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 4. And most importantly, how much is economically viable? But literally the least important factor beyond “should we have started yesterday”. The amount of waste humanity has perpetuated in just the last 100 years because something wasn’t “economically viable” this fiscal quarter makes my head hurt.
Doing economically inviable things is waste. It's pumping resources into something worth less than the sum of its inputs. Apropos of nothing, see one trillion dollars into datacenters.
Which is why they pumped fracking waste water into deep aquifers, because it wasn’t “economically viable” to pull that water out of the ground. Fast forward a decade and people are up in arms that those fresh water aquifers are no longer viable sources of drinking water, wondering how anyone could have been so short sighted.
Just because something isn’t economically viable today doesn’t mean it never will be. That short term thinking is exactly why China is absolutely decimating the US in renewable energy.
Re: Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doing economically inviable things is waste. It's pumping resources into something worth less than the sum of its inputs. Apropos of nothing, see one trillion dollars into datacenters.
Which is why they pumped fracking waste water into deep aquifers, because it wasn’t “economically viable” to pull that water out of the ground. Fast forward a decade and people are up in arms that those fresh water aquifers are no longer viable sources of drinking water, wondering how anyone could have been so short sighted. Just because something isn’t economically viable today doesn’t mean it never will be. That sh…
That's a different matter, that's an unpriced externality, were the oil company required to pay to sort the water out didn't choose because they weren't forced to.
So the oil should be economically unviable but due to poor regulation, they were able to extract it.
Re: Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is why they pumped fracking waste water into deep aquifers, because it wasn’t “economically viable” to pull that water out of the ground. Fast forward a decade and people are up in arms that those fresh water aquifers are no longer viable sources of drinking water, wondering how anyone could have been so short sighted. Just because something isn’t economically viable today doesn’t mean it never will be. That sh…
That's a different matter, that's an unpriced externality, were the oil company required to pay to sort the water out didn't choose because they weren't forced to. So the oil should be economically unviable but due to poor regulation, they were able to extract it.
That’s just a cop out. There are externalities to everything and they are never completely accounted for. So by definition only looking at “economic viability” is a failed experiment as I posited from the get go.
We make decisions based on objective reality, not a perfect theory in a lab.
Re: Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s still a few times older than our species.
Species is a rather arbitrary line here. Humans split from Neanderthal ~500k-800k years ago but could still interbreed 40k years ago. We’re likely more closely related to our common ancestors at that point of divergence than Neanderthal suggesting given the opportunity modern humans could interbreed with our ancestors ~500k-1m years ago. Of course that’s just genetic compatibility, there’s plenty of other ways to def…
Homo Neanderthalensis is not Homo sapiens [sapiens].
Re: Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. Galaxy is 100k ly across, you can make the journey end to end in 1mil years at 10% light speed. Obviously talking about probes/tech, not "biologicals". 1mil years is really short in the grand scheme of things.
>Obviously talking about probes/tech, not "biologicals". human brain has 100T synaptic connections. We already have 2 trillion parameter AI models. Parameter count grows more 3x per year. It means that in 4 years we'll have 100T model. My point here is that by the time we have probes to send even to the closest star, the biological brain would be the inferior option, and most probably we'd even be able to upload, jus…
Yeah I never really believed in biological aliens here. But some kind of alien AI thing/tech...quite probable after all this time.
Still not sure as there's still a lot of things that can stop it, but it's possible some kind of synthetic thing could replace biology, eventually, everywhere where there's intelligent life.
Re: Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Species is a rather arbitrary line here. Humans split from Neanderthal ~500k-800k years ago but could still interbreed 40k years ago. We’re likely more closely related to our common ancestors at that point of divergence than Neanderthal suggesting given the opportunity modern humans could interbreed with our ancestors ~500k-1m years ago. Of course that’s just genetic compatibility, there’s plenty of other ways to def…
Homo Neanderthalensis is not Homo sapiens [sapiens].
> Homo Neanderthalensis is not Homo sapiens [sapiens].
Not the same species, but still capable of occasionally producing viable offspring.
Thus the common ancestor as essentially a midpoint between each population would be more compatible genetically. It’s essentially a ring species through time rather than space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species