Thanks for the feedback. You are right getting an economy working will be hard and slow, and it will become quite heavily subsidised for some time. Sharing the infrastructure you build (space tourists...) could certainly work, and to some extent sending some raw materials to orbits, which is cheaper to do from the Moon than from Earth.
I understand your comment on the price point, this is a topic of endless debates, I aligned myself on the price of similar indie games for the genre. Maybe you are right, but you are the first person mentioning it is too expensive.
I am not sure how precious helium is. The fact we put it in party balloons would hint at helium being relatively cheap (though those party balloons are typically 10$ each in France).
On the other hand, I understand that it is a significant cost driver for industry.
The US maintained a strategic helium reserve for decades (originally for airships). Then people started producing helium as a by-product of natural gas drilling, and the government bought helium from private natural gas producers. The helium reserve became less important, and larger, and deeper in debt.
In the 90s, Congress ordered that the strategic helium reserve sell off most of its helium. That tanked the price, which meant it was affordable for party balloons. It also hurt the business of natural gas producers also producing helium.
But helium can also leak irrecoverably out the atmosphere. We should try to hold on to some of it.
It's much cheaper than it should be if we're considering hard limits on available supply and lack of interchangability of other resources. Honestly it shouldn't be cheap or expensive, in a perfect world it would be regulated, but here we are.
It's so cheap that it's commonly used as a welding cover gas as a way to reduce electricity cost and to squeeze more work out of cheaper, lower power equipment. Recycling in the form of capture of storage boil-off, or even collection/retention of helium that can be safely vented from legacy equipment costs substantially more than just throwing it away forever.
But it's useful in ways that nothing else is. MRI is the biggest example, and the largest consumer of helium. There's a whole niche of magnetics that needs helium until science comes up with better magnetics, if that's possible.
Something that doesn't get a lot of detailed attention is leak detection, because there's nothing else that leaks nearly as well (hydrogen molecules are larger than helium atoms!), not to mention safely, as helium. A leaking vacuum jacket means substantial loss of insulation and increased boil-off. Leaking storage of gases is always dangerous - either it's flammable, or poisonous, or an asphyxiant because it's not oxygen, or it is oxygen and everything else is on fire. The process of using helium used for leak detection involves introducing helium into a vessel and looking for helium on the other side. The leak detector itself is a portable mass spectrometer. Leak detection and repair is an extremely rare skill set at any meaningful level of quality, depends on extremely specialized equipment, and it's as expensive as it sounds. If there was a better option, this leak detection niche for helium would be an academic novelty.
Anyway, if this helium source is what it claims to be, it's significant - about 60 years of current production.
Why I enjoy frank opinions that challenge the current consensus, I think the post only concerns 'men with very important positions'.
More white collar positions are not very important. So while I would agree a CEO taking 6 months off is hard (some have to do it for health reason), a typical engineer or middle manager may very well do so.
I actually lost 20 pounds since the start of COVID. This is due to me eating a small home-prepared sandwich for lunch instead of a full meal on most week days.
I also eat a fruit every morning at breakfast.
At night, I have a full balanced meal but with no special restrictions. I sometimes enjoy fried stuff, good cakes.
In my experience, replacing a full meal by something small is a good way to lose weight.
I think a common mistake is to think civilization are wiped-off in a cinematic event like the Fall of Constantinople.
Actually, what happens often is that a civilization degrades slowly over decades and centuries. It was once a leading power, but it is now a medium power with far less relevance. One good example is Spain going through a long decline after being probably the leading world power.
In an era of nuclear weapons, you do not take cities anymore, but you could see countries that do not share the West ideology become more powerful, and progressively, develop all the new technology and have the most influence.
