Bye Bye, Party Balloons

What is the staple of many parties, besides cake? If you said balloons, you're right.

Sometimes there's simply a lot of people who blow up some balloons. Other times, there will be a helium container and the balloons will be filled with helium, a fun thing to play with when you want to have a funny voice. But these floating balloons and high-pitched voices could become a thing of the past, at least to those who aren't willing to dish out a high amount of cash for it. Yes, we are running out of helium. An article on popsci.com outlines this.

Helium is going to be a lot more expensive soon. Before now, and even now, it's been really cheap. You can buy a whole tank of it at a party store for not too high of a cost, given the circumstances. Needless to say, this is going to change. In 1996, Congress passed an act to have all of our helium supply gone by 2015. This means that we're selling it crazy cheap right now, just to get rid of it. The government just wants the market to control the price. It'll be insanely high prices, but apparently that's worth it.
We have 80% of the helium supply in the world. 80%! That means once we're out, there's not going to be a whole lot left. A tank of helium, which at the moment costs about $50, could have the price jacked up to possibly even $1000, depending on the demand!* And helium does indeed have a demand, not just for parties. Helium is the substance with the lowest boiling point, and it is a great cooling source. It chills the giant magnets in MRI machines, it's used in fiber optics, and LCD, otherwise known as Liquid Crystal Display, which I'm you're familiar with. It's also used in a lot of other things, and is a big help when it comes to quantum computing. Overall, life with little to no helium is going to be difficult.


The only way to get more helium is through tritium. Tritium is a radioisotope of hydrogen, meaning it has too many neutrons to be stable, so it's radioactive. It was used in nuclear warheads during the Cold War, when we were stocking up massive amounts of supplies for nuclear warfare, just in case. The problem is, the US stopped making tritium in 1988. The current helium we're able to get is coming from radioactive material in rocks, a non-surprisingly low amount. If we run out of helium completely, we'll have to salvage it from the air. This will make it 10,000 times more expensive, enough to make the hope of having party balloons a simple dream to all but those with a massive amount of money they're willing to waste.

This could affect our lives in so many ways it's not even amusing. Running out of helium could spell the end, or rocketing prices, of LCD, MRI, squeaky helium volices, and a multitude of other things. I myself have never been able to use helium to make my voice squeaky, and if the price skyrockets very soon I might never get a chance, along with many others. If we had the technology to get it back out of the air easier, this might not be an issue, and I hope one day we will end up with this technology. If the helium keeps going for as cheap as it is now, then in a few years we're going to have to resort to getting it out of the air or from anywhere we can get it. New technology could make this more readily available, but it's still a long way away.

*estimation

Bibliography:
Boyle, Rebecca. "In The Future, This Balloon Will Cost $100." Popular Science. Bonnier     
          Corporation, 20 Aug. 2010. Web. 01 Mar. 2013.

N.d. Photograph. Science for Kids. Web. 04 Mar. 2013.

N.d. Photograph. Wordpress. Web. 04 Mar. 2013.