Given its scarcity, helium should be more expensive, to the point where filling party balloons with it is decadent profligacy.
I mean it is expensive, it’s just the amount required for a balloon is insignificant and thus seems cheap.
As a diver who uses helium I can tell you it is, compared to air, so much more expensive they actually charge me for it (rather than just rolled into the cost of a dive) - to the sum of about $300 a dive - depending on depth.
What is helium used for when diving?
Reducing the amount of narcotic gases in your mix so you don’t act like a drunk idiot when in a life threatening situation.
Those narcotic gases are nitrogen and oxygen (although there’s only so little oxygen you can have…and also only so much!)
Edit: extra info: oxygen and nitrogen are narcotic at depth, nitrogen is better understood and so often we talk about nitrogen narcosis, which tends to start hitting people after about 30m, but each person reacts different and to different degrees at different deaths. I personally notice it at about 50m or so. If I was more relaxed while diving it’d probably hit me sooner.
There will absolutely still be a customer that takes a balloon from behind the sign and asks for it to be filled up in the store.
They will demand it or else poor Kayla’lin 'da Leeigh Lynn Lee’s princess party will be ruined.
Mylar balloons should be outlawed. They get sent free and land on power lines WAY too often. Over a thousand mylar balloon caused power outages are recorded in just Southern California alone in a typical year. The cost of repairing the damage might even exceed the revenue of mylar balloon sales.
We should go back to filling them with hydrogen.
When I was in school decades ago, my science teacher brought in a big balloon filled with hydrogen and lit the string on fire without telling us that it was filled with hydrogen.
I could feel the explosion in my bones. It was neat.
I’m not sure you could do that in schools today.
What could go wrong?
I mean other than that…
Am I missing a joke? Airships used hydrogen gas
Specific airships made by a specific country that had no access to helium…
Not exclusively, hydrogen being lighter and cheaper meant it was still sometimes used when helium could have been.
The alternative is to use extremely limited quantities of gas crucial for MRIs, chip making, metallurgy, and a few other high tech applications. But hey, pretty balloons.
wasn’t that just the flammable lining?
I really wonder what power plants will do with the helium once they get fusion working. Maybe a balloon business on the side isn’t such a bad idea.
I mean too much Helium isn’t a problem. It’s one of the few (only?) elements that will just disappear if you don’t do anything with it.
It’s light enough that it rises to the very tip top of the earth’s atmosphere and is then stripped away by solar radiation. That’s why is a depleting natural resource, not because it’s burned or used or anything, but because it just escapes.
Edit: seems I was wrong about the escape mechanism for helium, it seems the primary mechanism is polar wind escape.
Also, hydrogen can also apparently escape from the Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
http://faculty.washington.edu/dcatling/Catling2009_SciAm.pdf
In a perfect world stick it in a secondary reactor and make lithium. But that’s obviously even further off than hydrogen fusion.
why don’t we just bring a shitload back from saturn or something
Nobody’s stopping you!
