| ▲ | dust42 4 hours ago |
| Just to mention one thing, helium -which is a necessity for chip production- is a byproduct of LNG production. And 20% of that is just gone (Qatar) and the question is how long it will take to get that back. So not only a chip shortage because of AI buying chips in huge volumes but also because production will be hampered. Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium. |
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| ▲ | Findecanor an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium. Whenever I read about fusion, I get reminded of a note in the sci-fi book trilogy The Night's Dawn.
In that story, the introduction of cheap fusion energy had not cured global warming on Earth but instead sped it up with all the excess heat from energy-wasting devices. What matters is not what we don't have, but how we manage that which we do have. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand |
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| ▲ | adrianN 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Fusion fuel is so energy dense that fusion plants will never produce industrially meaningful amounts of helium. |
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| ▲ | TeMPOraL 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, as long as they can make electricity too cheap to meter, we can get helium from somewhere. Mine it from LNG sources currently untapped due to EROI < 1, or ship it from the goddamn Moon - ultimately, every problem in life (except that of human heart) can be solved with cheap energy. | | |
| ▲ | kibwen 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The mere existence of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies means that it is impossible to ever have electricity that is "too cheap to meter". Any time electricity prices would fall below the price of mining, that creates a market opportunity that will be filled by more mining. Wasted electricity is the product. | | |
| ▲ | Arch485 an hour ago | parent [-] | | I think that's only because electricity is the bottleneck, though. If it was no longer the bottleneck, crypto miners would expand rapidly with more hardware, mining difficulty would increase, and eventually the bottleneck is storage space for all your GPUs, if not the GPUs themselves. |
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| ▲ | bitmasher9 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | With the trend of orbital launches becoming cheaper, it might be that mining helium off-Tera will be our long term supply. Especially if the alternative is adjusting the amount of protons in an atom. There are several challenges, not least of which is storage. We have considerable leakage in most of our current helium storage solutions on earth because it’s so light. Our national reserves are literally in underground caverns because it’s better than anything we can build. Space just means any containment system will need to work in a wider range of pressure/temperatures. | |
| ▲ | adrianN 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There is to my knowledge no reason to assume that complicated physics experiments that heat water to run a steam engine will be much cheaper than fission power plants, unfortunately. | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL an hour ago | parent [-] | | I can't say I agree with the conclusion, but I commend you for the concise and poetic description of what most power plants fundamentally are. |
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| ▲ | gobdovan 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think this is why he labelled the comment 'Tongue in cheek'. Thanks for pointing it out explicitly tho, was not aware of this. | |
| ▲ | numpad0 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can't they irradiate tanks of H2 or something with so much neutrons and electrons until morale improves and they become He? Or would that make radioactive He? | | |
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| ▲ | Arn_Thor 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Considering my helium-filled hard drives a strategic reserve now |
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| ▲ | TeMPOraL 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Gonna sit on my half-empty tank for party balloons from my daughter's birthday, maybe we'll be able to sell it to pay off mortgage quicker than the helium itself escapes the tank. | | | |
| ▲ | myself248 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's another lifetime-limited thing -- the helium leaks out, and you cannot (for practical purposes) stop it or even meaningfully slow it down. When it's gone, the drives are dead. And the helium leaks by calendar-days, it doesn't matter whether the drive is powered on or off. Non-helium hard drives are basically limited by their bearing spin hours. If one only spins a few hours a week, it'll probably run for decades. Not so with helium. | | |
| ▲ | adrianN 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | You just have to put your hard drive in a pressure vessel filled with helium. | | |
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