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An engineer breaking down the systems behind tech and business | Building ➡️

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1/10
🧊 Liquid helium loses up to 0.6% of its volume every single day.
No container on Earth can hold it for more than six weeks.
And 30% of the world's supply just went offline.
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10/10
Helium is the first real test of a non-substitutable input with extreme supply concentration. Gallium, neon, and refined tungsten share the exact same profile.

The question isn't whether this happens again. It's which one is next.

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9/10
📉 gasworld's Helium Confidence Index dropped from 32% in October 2025 to 18% in March 2026. Distributors project inventory depletion between May and July on current draw rates. The buffer is finite and the math is straightforward.
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8/10
⚙️ ASML's EUV lithography tools need helium to cool their optics. These are the bottleneck machines for anything at 3nm and below. A helium shortage is a direct cut to advanced chip production capacity worldwide.
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1/10
🧊 Liquid helium loses up to 0.6% of its volume every single day.
No container on Earth can hold it for more than six weeks.
And 30% of the world's supply just went offline.
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[Project Schema @projectschema]

7/10
Every vacuum system in a fab uses helium for leak detection. It's the smallest atom that exists. A single undetected leak destroys the entire wafer batch in process. Tens of thousands of dollars per chamber, per cycle.
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6/10
Helium cools silicon wafers during plasma etching.
Without it, thermal uniformity collapses and you lose nanometer-scale precision. Hydrogen has better conductivity but nobody uses it in production. Ignition risk under chamber conditions.
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5/10
🔬 Here's what most people miss: helium isn't just party balloons.
Every advanced chip factory depends on it for four separate processes, and none of them have a working substitute.
I made a full breakdown: https://t.co/wvEHLqZLQm
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4/10
Qatar accounts for roughly 30% of global helium supply.
Russia's Amur plant has been unreliable since a fire in 2021.
There is no strategic helium reserve anywhere. The physics won't allow it.
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3/10
💥 On March 2, Iranian drones hit Ras Laffan. Qatar suspended LNG production. Sixteen days later, missiles caused heavy structural damage. QatarEnergy declared long-term force majeure. Minister Al-Kaabi put losses at $20-26 billion per year, with up to five years of repairs

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2/10
Helium boils at minus 269°C.
It's the coldest industrial liquid in use.
The atoms are so small they slip through seals that hold every other gas.
Once released, helium is light enough to escape Earth's gravity entirely.
You can't get it back.
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Full breakdown: https://t.co/ApAugbzXBB

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Pokemon Go's Secret: The Robot Economy's Foundation #ai #robots #future

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Full breakdown: https://t.co/ApAugbzXBB

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Every Pokémon Go player spent a decade mapping the physical world

Niantic sold that map to the robotics industry

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10/10
I made a short video on how GPS jamming and spoofing actually work, the physics, who's doing it, and why the infrastructure problem is harder to fix than it looks.

▶️ https://t.co/IfDtZljE3O

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1/10
GPS was built for military navigation in the 1970s.

We've since handed it control of autonomous vehicles, drone delivery, air traffic, and power grids.

Nobody asked if it was ready for that responsibility 🧵

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9/10
The question isn't whether GPS can be disrupted.

It can. It has been. It will be again.

The question is how many critical systems we're willing to build on top of a signal with no fallback before we treat this seriously.