@mona you've heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumitomo_copper_affair, right?

@whitequark yes, and the Hunt Brothers silver scheme. This would be a bit different though, because whoever seized Jupiter's mining rights would be sitting on literally the only inexhaustible supply of helium within human scope

@mona what about solar wind?

@whitequark is collecting helium that way feasible?

@mona why not? you don't have a gravity well to escape from and you can use Earth's magnetosphere to assist you I think.

Also the other gas giants, Saturn has less helium but still a whole lot of it

@whitequark Still, I think you appreciate my point: given the Earth's limited supply of helium (it is essentially a by-product of natural gas mining) someone who established a mining output on Jupiter could control the world's supply of helium, at least for a time. There are of course other options but they would take longer to exploit...good for interjecting a note of competition into the tale, in fact.

@mona But wouldn't it be dominated by transport costs? Extracting natural gas, liquefying it (could even burn a little bit to power your refrigerator) and pumping it back down is really cheap

@whitequark I'm thinking of that. My guess is that, for the idea to be feasible, the expedition would have to collect a very large amount of helium and bring it back all at once.

@whitequark one could play the long game here. trade speed for time

@mona at current consumption rates world reserves will last *counts* forty one year? shit

@mona yeah I suppose by that point NG He will simply stop being relevant

@whitequark Helium will be very difficult to live without, which is why I think a canny corporate space explorer might see a chance for himself here

@mona You need to slow down the helium ions by something like 1 keV which is not too little but definitely not impossible. And the best part is no single party (well until you get to Kardashev II) can control it!