Commercialism, Or How The World Was Lost

A quietly unadvertised truth is that there are resources on this planet that are being exhausted that don't involve your car or your wallet. We hear all the time about "peak oil" or "peak coal" or the depopulation of various fish species.
Less often we hear about the increasing rarity of "rare earth metals" specifically neodymium.

One resource we are rapidly depleting but you never hear about is helium. It turns out that there's not a lot of helium on Earth. Most of what we have is trapped in natural gas pockets and has to by extracted in a fairly expensive process. The good news last century was that in the early 1900's America thought the future belonged to blimps and dirigibles, so we stockpiled billions and billions of liters of helium. Then, when planes won the air, the U.S. released its reserves of helium, the gas became a commodity, and children's birthday parties featured cheap, fun balloons for decades.

Those decades are over. Most of the U.S. reserve of helium has been exhausted, and modern technology increasingly uses helium as a cold source. For example: liquid helium reaches an incredibly low -454 degrees, which supercools - and allows superconduction of - the magnets used in MRI scanners. No helium: no MRIs. Another use for helium is to cool the magnets in the CERN particle accelerator. Another use for helium is in TIG welding. There are tons of other uses, mostly in scientific research where no alternative element exists.

So yesterday, when I saw that Red Bull had sponsored Felix Baumgartner's 128,000 sky dive, I was a little incensed. Most people talked about the incredible technology used, like his pressurized suit, or the ultra-thin balloon. Others talked about how he'd gone 1.24 Mach, being the first skydiver to break the sound barrier. Still others talked about how he'd reached a height greater than that reached by jet aircraft.

What no one talked about is that his balloon was filled with 30 million cubic feet of helium. After the successful jump, the balloon is emptied - into space.

Thanks, Red Bull. Hope this stunt helped sell your product.


By the way: helium is currently impossible to synthesize. When Earth's supply runs out, the nearest available alternative will be strip-mining the moon.
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