>>11591984Changing the material in the flask will change the energy required to diffuse into and through the glass. Something like helium or hydrogen (very small, non-polarizable electron density) will diffuse quicker (consider party balloons), but it will still be an impractical amount of time before the pressure changes.
Water is sticky and would likely be harder to diffuse into and through the glass.
In fact, depending on the pressure, the glass may evaporate on its own. This would be very slow but probably faster than tunneling through the glass.
These differences in diffusivity are how people make gas separation membranes, and recently people have been designing materials (like MOFs) with well defined pores of the right size to selectively absorb and transport different molecules.
>>11591996Heating the material will make gases less soluble in it (if you boil water before freezing it, the ice will have fewer bubbles). However, the glass will also soften implying the Si and O atoms are easier to push out of the way. Diffusion through the glass may then be easier.
Even more, the glass may expand making the tunneling barrier wider, thus tunneling will be less probable. These phenomena convolute to make the problem too complicated to answer definitely.
