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When you pop a balloon, the helium floats to space and is lost into the solar wind forever. Unlike every other element we could run out, and nobody cares. (Helium is important for a lot of serious things, too)
There’s more pressing issues, of course, but if you want one that’s very unknown compared to it’s long-term significance, there you go.
It’s abundant on the moon. It can be mined. There’s another space race going on. We don’t hear about it because the west isn’t winning. And we’re in the middle of another cold war where propaganda must control the narrative.
I have goodish news. We aren’t going to run out of helium any time soon.
Based on current rates of helium consumption the US alone has something like 250+ years of stored helium. We pumped a porous mountain full of all the helium we could back in the 60s and it’s been kept stable since.
We still have no alternative to helium in a few of its most important use cases, but there is price where the helium we haven’t bothered collecting will become cost effective to go get. Those untapped reserves are estimated 3-10 times what we have ever used.
I’m also fairly certain that we will have figured out a way to produce helium in the next hundred years. We know how it came to exist naturally it’s really just the matter of someone being crazy enough to try and replicate those underground conditions and spend the money on the project.
I have faith that helium is a solvable problem for the human race.
Because of how entirely permanent this is, it pays to look far - like millions of years. That’s what it took to accumulate.
How that works is just normal radioactive decay. The conditions aren’t actually important.
It’s probable we’ll be able to make a bit with fusion, but the amounts will be small. IIRC we also collect some from decaying radioactive things in manmade settings, but again, it’s hard to beat an chunk entire planet underneath a salt dome. Next options are harvesting it from space (but it’s really spread out) or a gas giant (but there’s stupid amounts of gravity).
The sun has shitloads, we could mine the sun!
Trans people will be murdered over bathroom laws. You want a masculine bearded guy in the women’s room? That’s exactly what anti-trans bathroom laws require. Those guys are gonna get shot.
I would like to pitch the idea that the obesity epidemic is a symptom of failed city infrastructure. Imagine if riding a bike was a no-friction activity; you walk out your door, you have a bike there and the bike lanes are treated as first-class infra instead of cars. Imagine how much more you would bike in this situation, and how much healthier you and everyone around you would be
As a lifelong bike commuter who’s fifty pounds overweight and prediabetic, this isn’t the cure-all you seem to think.
It’d be great, but it won’t be enough.
Or walking. I’ve been to a few US cities, and the common denominator for all of them is that walking anywhere isn’t really an option. Sure, you can’t always walk A to B in most cities, but at least European cities have public transit to cut down on the distance, necessitating only two short walks to and from a transit station.
Observation: Saudi Arabia is heading down a Houstonian path. There was one pedestrian bridge near me, and outside of that one, getting anywhere involved strategic jaywalking to cross freeways. At least they seem to have a decent bus network, though.
I’ve lived on the east coast, west coast and in Europe. Out here in the west coast (Vancouver) the cities are nice enough but anytime I leave my home I have to walk down a hill (and my partner struggles with that due to arthritis), walk along half a mile of four lane arterial roadway, squeeze through two blocks along the same roadway on an extremely narrow unprotected at grade sidewalk while semis barrel by leaning over my head… then I get to a shopping center and transit nexus and can go elsewhere.
While living in Southern Spain I’d walk two blocks on quiet pedestrian streets to a waterfront promenade which was littered with restaurants and provided a wide (like 20 meter) surface to stroll along to reach the city center - at one point before the city center you’d need to cross a two lane high traffic road but that road had protected crosswalks every 150 meters.
The contrast between these two places (and don’t even get me started on how pleasant Barcelona is to pedestrians) is stark.
I really prefer walking to cycling. I’m totally fine with bike infrastructure, but I’d really just like neighbourhoods to have amenities they can walk to.
You’re trying to find a problem for your solution.
The obesity epidemic actually due to the increased availability of ultra processed foods.
Is it? There’s primitive cultures that eat every kind of weird diet you can imagine, and they’re all thin and fit. It’s still kind of a mystery why exactly we can’t handle eating even a fraction like the historical Inuit, and just the processing itself shouldn’t change much.
Because ultra processed foods don’t fill us up but taste incredibly good. Technically the problem is overeating, but it’s a lot easier to overeat ultra processed foods.
I mean, which foods even count as ultraprocessed isn’t well defined. It’s not an ingredient, it’s not a technique. OP was trying to find a problem for their solution, you’re right, but lack of exercise is just as big of a suspect if not bigger.
They’re engineered to be very appealing for sure, but do you have a link for the not filling us up bit? That one’s new to me.
That might certainly be one factor, but my intuition is that the primary driver is still todays diet. Things like soda drinks that let you consume teaspoons of pure sugar in an instant without appropriate feedback simply didn’t exist in the past.
That the 105 male/100 female birth to young adult ratio needs a fix to get to 100/100 at least.
The distraction comes from me being not too kind to either of the duo-culture of the US empire on this issue.
By itself this is not that big of an issue. A much bigger issue is the gender imbalance that you find in certain localities due to local governments, universities and companies not taking this gender imbalance into account. But I’m glad that you brought up this issue.
I disagree. Even the discussion on gender imbalance gets warped because of this as sex ratio is never taken into account in the discussion. Even if it is, it’ll be forgotten or discarded.
I thought female birth ratio was higher than males
It isn’t. More males die during pregnancy and infancy, which used to result into more girls than boys by age 5 two-hundred years ago, but nowadays there are only more women at old age.
No, slightly more AMABs get born than AFABs. Over time the difference cancels out, as AMABs tend to die a bit more sooner.
The USA’s two-party system is a fucking farce and we’re not going to see major, widespread change under either party. But if I bring this up I get called a “Russian bot” and accused of telling people not to vote… even though I vote.
Don’t worry (/s), I think you’re down to one now.