Luxury Zeppelins or GTFO
It’s a good reminder that we mine and drill for an amazing quantity of diverse elements, none of which can be recreated on a human time scale when we run out.
The only “game changer” should be the that we stop putting it in friggin’ party balloons.
Agreed put hydrogen in instead watch your party go up with a bang.
Until now, the gas has been found in small amounts accidentally during oil and gas drilling.
Generally, the workers have realized these accidental findings when their voices all suddenly rose two octaves.
Good. Every year I am forced to get balloons for my kids birthday I feel guilty…
Although I found out one place puts oxygen instead of helium in the latex balloons. Though its a mix, not pure O2, to my disappointment when I tried to light one on fire…
Tanzania
Tarzan’ania
I’m hopeful that with an international source, it will be less vulnerable to the whims of shifting administrations. The management of the US helium strategic reserve has been shameful.
I finally convinced my spouse a few years ago that I didn’t need helium filled birthday balloons.
Yay! I love helium. He’s a gas!
I’ll show myself out now.
Oh no this is terrible news! When will scientists stop trying to destroy the world? If they suck all the helium out of the planet surely we will sink into the sun.
Today we all owe a debt to the brave and noble gas hunters of the Serengeti.
Oh thank god! My voice is much too deep!
Since the strategic helium reserve was originally created to keep our military dirigibles* afloat and the reserve had a billion dollars in debt when they decided to sell it off I can get my mind around why politicians thought ending it was a good idea.
*The Hindenberg had no choice but to use hydrogen as the only known source of helium at the time was Texas and we banned it’s export on the grounds of it being a strategic material.
If you burn pure oxygen, what are you expecting to get? Ozone?
Also, pure oxygen is ever so slightly denser than air. However, water vapour is quite a lot lighter than air. Water isn’t a gas at room temperature, but 2:1 mixture of hydrogen and oxygen should float. Yeah… can’t think of anything that could possibly go wrong with that.
If you tried to ignite a balloon full of pure oxygen, I believe the thing that would burn would be the balloon, fairly dramatically.
ETA: youtube suggests that I am wrong. I remembered a highschool chemistry prof lighting a rubber tube that had oxygen flowing out of it, so I thought a balloon would perform similarly, but apparently the baloon just bursts before anything more interesting happens
here’s a video of a tube with oxygen flowing through it, burning. this is what I had (wrongly) imagined for the oxygen balloon. Like a really mediocre thermal lance
When you can’t hear the canary any more, GET OUT!
Maybe it’s only me, but I’m falling off my chair laughing imagining the excited scientists squeaking their congratulations to each other when they hit the motherlode.
This should be a Funny or Die video immediately.
