Quote:
Originally Posted by Flyndaran
Helium has no high tech use, only medium and low tech use. For it to even have that, it must economically compete effectively with high tech imports.
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Helium has some uses that seem unlikely to go away at high tech levels. One is in gas mixtures for when humans need to breathe at high pressure, such as deep-sea diving (reducible by automation, but unlikely to go away completely). Another is as a pressuriser for reactive fluids, because of its low mass and inertness. A third is for testing gas seals, because if something is helium-tight, no other gas will escape.
However, none of these require a
lot of the stuff, and it may be cheaper to produce it on low-tech worlds with natural biospheres by extraction from natural gas than by scooping it out of gas giants.