We won't run out of helium, it will just become much more expensive, like neon. You can distill helium out of the atmosphere, but it's a few orders of magnitude more expensive than separating from natural gas, which will remain a source for a very long time.
Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, wherever it is to be found, we'll find it.
It just won't be very affordable for birthday parties.
I agree that it's unaffordable for birthday parties, but the side effect of littering rubber waste for birds to choke on is arguably a more serious reason to forego party balloons.
What I'm more worried about is a replacement for liquid helium in cooling. CERN depends on cryogenics for keeping superconducting magnets cold. Helium's a lot safer than hydrogen. What other alternatives will there be for supercooling when there's no helium?
"CERN depends on cryogenics for keeping superconducting magnets cold. Helium's a lot safer than hydrogen. What other alternatives will there be for supercooling when there's no helium?"
I'd be more concerned about running out of affordable helium to use in MRI machines.
There has been a massive push in scientific communities to recycle helium used in cryogenics. It’s happened in the past ten years from market forces. In truth, if we’re frugal, we don’t need very much helium.
> What I'm more worried about is a replacement for liquid helium in cooling. CERN depends on cryogenics for keeping superconducting magnets cold. Helium's a lot safer than hydrogen. What other alternatives will there be for supercooling when there's no helium?
Is that really a big concern? What's expected to come out of CERN that will help humanity face the challenges of the next 1000 years? It's an honest question, perhaps I'm missing something.
Nothing specific is expected (that's the point of basic research), but even ignoring the question of whether "facing challenges" is the only worthwhile goal of humanity, it's categorically erroneous to think that basic physics can't become extremely important to our lives.
Nobody in the world thought there was any practical use of the knowledge that time dilated at high speed - the speeds were so ridiculously high that we'd never reach them.
That part was right - nothing we build moves fast enough for time dilation to be relevant at a human level. But none of our navigational systems, to pick a single case, would work without an understanding of it.
Like, I said, it was an honest question. The answer, according to, you is: Nothing. Fair enough.
I'm aware that there's an off-chance that basic research can become useful for something. Of course people always point to GPS as an example.
You can say that about pretty much any research, however. Since resources are finite, should we not focus on basic research that has the most promise of practical usefulness?
As far as I can tell, particle accelerators are used to prove hypotheses whose truth/falsehood are not practically meaningful to pretty much any human being alive, now or in the future. It's an expensive hobby for physicists, as far as I can see.
Again, I'd love to hear a better argument than the old "basic research is good because GPS".
GPS is always used as an example because it's a clear demonstration that discoveries don't have to have effects at the human scale to be useful, not because it's the only example of basic research that's paid off.
All electricity, all chemistry, started out as expensive hobbies for rich people. Go back to the Greeks and steam power and automation were seen as expensive hobbies for rich people. None of these things were thought to be practically meaningful to pretty much any human being alive.
There is only a small chance that any given piece of research is useful, to be sure. Basic research is fundamentally about long-shots. But without basic research, you never get to the stage of directed research. You can't work out the best way to increase transistor density if you don't first work out what electricity is. But in the nineteenth century, it would have been wiser to have directed all that research into electricity into practical things like hydraulics. Where would we be now if we'd taken that path?
If you think there's nothing else to be found in physics, sure, we can stop. But plenty of people in the ancient world thought there was nothing left, too. All of those detractors have been wrong right up until the last century. The question is, how sure are you that you're the first generation in two thousand years to be right?
> If you think there's nothing else to be found in physics, sure, we can stop. But plenty of people in the ancient world thought there was nothing left, too.
To the contrary, I think there's an infinite amount of things to be found out, across all sciences. However, for all I can tell, CERN is out to prove hypotheses for which no one today can conceive of any use whatsoever.
By contrast, there are many relatively low-hanging fruits in science and engineering that aren't long shots at all.
I'm not gonna say the billion-dollar budget of CERN should be re-appropriated, but it does seem overblown.
In any event, I'm not at all worried about CERN shutting down because helium gets to expensive.
I expect that it will help gain a deeper understanding of physics which in turn will enable the development of new technologies. These new technologies could in turn help us greatly in facing our biggest challenges.
Some engineer at CERN wanted to easily share documents with its colleagues and came up with the World Wide Web.
It's not a direct result of CERN, but a byproduct. They have special requirements for cooling, data processing, engineering, etc. It helps to push for improvements in these fields.
Thank you. I can see that medical imaging technologies in particular would show up as side-effects to what CERN is doing. That may not have happened otherwise.
Perhaps I'm undervaluing the merits of taking a shower to solve a problem unrelated to cleaning my body, metaphorically speaking.
> The reason we will not run out is that hydrogen forms bonds with other atoms besides itself
And hydrogen is the single most common element in the universe (three times the Helium quantity, by mass despite being the lightest, according to [1]). Oxygen is the third one, and is 24 times less common than helium. No wonder our gas giants (and sun) are so big.
Still according to [1],
> Hydrogen and helium are estimated to make up roughly 74% and 24% of all baryonic matter in the universe respectively.
Devils advocate but if all natural gas use was made obsolete by nuclear or some magic renewable... we’re still going to mine natural gas for the helium then as the primary product.
Just like imo we’re going to use every drop of oil for plastics, lubricants, composites, military and legacy applications.
> Just like imo we’re going to use every drop of oil for plastics, lubricants, composites, military and legacy applications.
Still a pretty open question. Those uses are powerfully subsidized by the fuel applications- aside from military use, all the things you listed add up to <2% of all oil. There is a massive oversupply.
Oil processing involves reforming molecules catalytically into other forms of hydrocarbons. It's not just separation. If fossil prices increased substantially, it would be very difficult to predict if natural hydrocarbon sources would be cheaper. Natural oils are quite cheap but narrowly distributed, unlike crude oil, and form different mixes when reformed by various processes.
The bottom line you should take away is that we absolutely don't need oil. We could replace it totally with natural sources using essentially our current product chain (eg steam cracking facilities) at a very reasonable cost. It's far and away the smallest problem with not using oil. To put that in context, it's a smaller problem than making steel without coal/coke, which is a solved problem. India makes nearly all their steel with natural gas.
I'll also point out that silicones are much better products for most lubricant and plastic/rubber uses. Oil is cheap and usually inferior, except for most engineering plastics.
> I’ll also point out that silicones are much better products for most lubricant and plastic/rubber uses. Oil is cheap and usually inferior, except for most engineering plastics.
Oh? What industry are you in and do you have a source for that statement?
Because you see car oil synthetics are preferred over mineral maybe?
Because 20 years in automotive and composites says that’s full fantasy.
Just ONE example off the top of my head, carbon fiber, is almost entirely oil. It’s a oil derived plastic that’s burnt and spun and burnt again while being treated with more oil. It’s non-recyclable and pretty damn dirty, I’ve yet to see a carbon that was oil free, but please let me know when you have found one!
Oil is used in the transmission and engine. The bearings and most sealed gearboxes use silicone grease. Lots of dampers use silicone oils. In consumer products and anything sealed, silicones are far more common and heavily preferred. PDMS for instance has rheological properties that make it almost flat out better; it spreads and covers surfaces extremely well. As a bonus it has better thermal and chemical resistance.
Silicone rubbers are well known to have far superior mechanical and chemical properties than carbon-based rubbers. 99.9% of the time the only factor is cost. N-butyl and urethane have some advantages for certain chemicals, which is almost never relevant. Silicone plastics are at least as good as common plastics like PVC, ABS, HDPE etc. Fancier stuff like flouropolymers, definitely not.
> Because you see car oil synthetics are preferred over mineral maybe?
Is this some kind of gotcha you're trying to set up? Synthetic oils are not silicones.
> Just ONE example off the top of my head, carbon fiber, is almost entirely oil.
NB that I was specific- lubricants, plastic, and rubber. There is a composite made from silicon... Fiberglass. It's orders of magnitude more common than CFRP and in many applications s-glass is both stronger and lighter. Still bonded with carbon, of course.
Overall you're responding to an argument that I am not making.
>Just ONE example off the top of my head, carbon fiber, is almost entirely oil.
Context friend.
Carbon as in carbon the topic of carbon fiber. OR - please share your process of taking charcoal and getting carbon FIBER from it, we'll be billionaires!
> "we’re still going to mine natural gas for the helium then as the primary product"
I don't see why. The US has for quite some time been trying to get rid of its helium reserve. Helium has plenty of interesting uses, but it's not valuable enough to justify mining natural gas just for the helium.
The price of helium will rise as the supply is used up. Does helium/natural gas mining simply cost too much to make up for any reasonable change in price?
Helium is a by-product of fission, but the product of fusion. The formation from alpha-particles around fission reactions (and the amount being like 100g/year?) makes it not very worthwhile to collect.
What's the distinction between product and by-product then?
I called it a 'by-product' because it's not the product we're actually aiming for, not the point of the exercise - if oxygen were produced instead (by whatever science-ignoring magic) we wouldn't mind.
So in the North Sea, where flaring gas at high volumes (as another poster mentioned) is banned, this is actually done a lot. Typically you have a field producing lots of oil and some gas ("associated gas"). Building infrastructure and pipelines to process and ship out the gas is too expensive given the small volumes, so the natural gas is reinjected into the reservoir, only the oil is produced and exported. Then after the oil production becomes depleted after many years, one can switch to producing the (now more concentrated) natural gas.
Apart from reducing CO2 emissions and giving potential for future profits from gas production, the reinjection strategy also maintains higher reservoir pressure thus boosting oil production. The fact that gas is flared at some fields speaks volumes of how crazy the oil industry is.
The Statfjord field is a prime example of a field with reinjection and subsequent gas production.
It’s discarded today. Natural gas itself is a byproduct of drilling for oil, and there are places where, due to a lack of convenient pipelines for transporting it, huge quantities of natural gas are just burned as waste.
I appreciate your optimism but unless you're talking about harvesting the fallout of fission bombs fusion probably won't be a practical source of helium for quite some time.
As for harvesting gas giants imagine the costs involved to send a ship close enough to one of these monsters to harvest a significant amount of helium, then manage to escape the gravity well and make it back to us. That would probably be end up being the most expensive substance on earth.
ITER would produce 150kg of helium a year in steady state operation. It’s not clear how close to that’s it’s going to be, but it’s going to be producing some helium unlike those other methods mentioned.
Of course that’s currently only worth ~6,000$ so it’s not being collected. But, if that’s the only option at 100,000x current prices it might be used.
Hypothetically, if 30% of the world’s electricity was generated by fusion they would be producing ~350,000 kg of helium per year. Still well below current production, but also not an insignificant amount.
> manage to escape the gravity well and make it back to us.
A more efficient design would probably be to have a miner full-time there, sending payloads in higher orbit, and a transport ship that approaches on a parabolic orbit, so it only needs engines to accelerate the payload, counteract friction and adjust trajectory
Regardless of how many complications you had you still need to get the mass of "mined" helium out of the gravity well, you can't avoid that. That means that you'll also have to lift whatever type of canister used to contain the gas and the propellant to reach your transport ship.
I suppose that the good news is that wherever you're getting your helium from you'll probably also have copious quantities of hydrogen available so you won't have to carry that over. Managing to oxidize it however is left as an exercise to the reader (apparently there's a tiny amount of water in Jupiter, but of course then you'd need some other energy source to electrolize it).
> That means that you'll also have to lift whatever type of canister used to contain the gas and the propellant to reach your transport ship.
Or you just push it through a pipe, space-elevator style, exactly how many hard science fiction authors do it for mining gas giants for reaction mass/other fuel.
Should be considerably cheaper from an energy standpoint.
If you're to a point where you can create such a station and manage regular transport between two bodies, you're going to be able to build some sort of pipe that should be able to contain the helium enough to pump it far enough out to considerably reduce the cost of leaving orbit.
To make it even more cost effective we could have a clone of a miner work there in a 3 year contract, unaware that he is a clone. As the contact approaches he would be replaced with a new clone and things would start all over again.
Although it would take a lot of energy to escape the gravity well of a gas giant, all of the gas giants are also far away from the sun. In the case of Uranus, this means that there is more energy to be gained from dropping towards the Sun to Earth than would be lost by escaping Uranus' gravity well.
So, one could imagine a siphon which would take helium from Uranus to Earth. A normal siphon moves a liquid out of a gravity well by relying on a deeper gravity well. Of course, there a limits to the height that siphons can handle, based upon the vapor pressure of the fluid, and the idea of running a really long tube from one planet to another is kind of ridiculous. However, the same energy differences could be used in principle to power a more realistic scale system, like a recirculating ship which gains kinetic energy on the Uranus-Earth run and loses it on the pick-up-helium-at-Uranus run. Such a system would need to dump angular momentum around the Sun at one of the planets, because this doesn't balance when you move mass from one planet to another.
My inner five-year-old loves the idea of mining gas from Uranus. :)
Cost depends on quantity. If it returned a few kilograms or grams, it'd probably be extremely expensive (although rare isotopes would be more expensive, they're measured in nanograms).
If you managed to produce ten thousand tons per year (out of a market of about 25,000-30,000 tons per year currently, although perhaps set to grow along with the global economy), the cost could be manageable.
It depends on launch costs and cost per kg of the material. Market price of refined helium is what, around $40-100/kg? Maybe up to $400/kg in the case of supply crunches and in refined liquid form?
And it probably depends on development of nuclear thermal rockets/ramjets to enable you to reach orbital velocity of Uranus in one or two reusable stages. As well as improved thermal protection systems (TPS) to enable reusable TPS at the higher velocities of reentry for Uranus. Currently, with chemical rockets, we can probably get costs down to $10/kg for bulk liquids to LEO (see here: https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/making_life_multip... slide 41, do the math and the tanker costs per kg of propellant to LEO is less than $10/kg to LEO).
It's not impossible for nuclear thermal rockets to get prices down low enough. Even assuming fairly low efficiency (say, 1000s Isp with about 20 kg of propellant needing to be expelled for each kg of payload to escape velocity... taking into account dry mass ratio of about 20 due to the exponential rocket equation and Uranus's 21.5km/s escape velocity) and non-breeder reactors (where the fuel cost is about $0.15/MWh), the energy cost of the uranium to push a kilogram of material from the cloud layer of Uranus to escape velocity is still on the order of cents per kg. Of course, it then requires years in transit, so it'd only be feasible if financial/market conditions were exceedingly stable.
So in principle, it's possible to imagine that in 100 years hence, it could be feasible to mine Uranus for helium and meet near-current market prices. But the current ~$2 billion/year market for helium is probably much too small. But when it's a more-lucrative $20 billion/year market? More realistic.
But helium-3 for low(ish) neutron fusion may be a larger market by then, and THAT could be a significant market as well, with less challenge for getting price per kg to orbit reasonable (say, on the order of $10,000/kg or more for energy purposes, and it may be feasible to use expendable rockets for such small amounts of material, thus avoiding the more extreme performance requirements for the TPS and structure). Perhaps helium-4 mining would be an off-shoot of helium-3 mining, then.
The only one remotely feasible is the solar windcatcher, of these.
But you forgot a few: mining asteroids, catching comets, processing huge amounts of lunar regolith and prospecting for Earth sources.
Which are almost possible and economical, compared to the rest. In fact the latter is being done.
mining the gas giants. The amount of matter in fusion, or created by fission byproducts is minuscule. unless we do so much fusion that the absolute amounts become close to the amount of natural gas.
Also if rates of production and consumption aren't the same (not saying this is the case).
If we consume 0.1 lbs of helium for every 1.0 lb of natural gas, but only produce 0.05lbs of helium for every 1.0 lb of natural gas then the helium byproduct from natural gas is not sufficient to meet demand.
But that might also price out plenty of much better uses for helium as well if they are less funded than those with recreational demand. A market is not always a good way to allocate resources, especially in cases like this where the use cases are so wildly different in utility
You can't speak about Supply (running out) without factoring in Demand & Price. They are all linked together. Especially when the resource has recreational uses.
Not this one. The answer is yes, we will run out of helium, it is one of the few truly non-renewable resources. You can use chemical processes to make methane or petroleum-equivalents, and coal can be replaced with charcoal, but once all the helium atoms have drifted off into space, they're gone forever.
Though I agree that it is a resource we need to conserve, this article only uses data from before the discovery of the Tanzania helium deposits. Leaving them out makes me wonder why they wrote this article.
This most certainly is not fear mongering. Helium is a non renewable resource. We used to discuss this all the time in the laboratory I used to work at.
There have been smart asses talking about Peak Caol for 250 years. We are going towards going on 70 years of Peak Oil. There were widespread scares in the 70s about all kinds of metals running out because of 'Overpopulation' (another nonsense concept that people repeatly dig out. In the 60s there was a believe that fission materials was incredibly limited. In the 90s and 2000s there was an actual beleive that there were not enough 'rare earth' materials.
And we had for a long time a clear economic explaition why this happens. Its well understood but somehow the same ideas are repeated all the time.
And your example is horrifingly bad, because if we were talking about humans there would be a mountain of evidence that in fact humans are not important.
However in the whole history of the modern world we have never actually run out of a non-renewable resource. Even when supposedly the smartest people predicted it over and over and over and over again.
At some point this is just idiological bable unsupported by even the slightest amount of evidence and should be treated as such.
So what's your argument here? That it's impossible to run out of resources? Or that we don't need to worry because human's always have and always will innovate their way out of every problem?
It seems extremely intellectually dishonest to go "just because something has never happened means it'll never happen and we don't need to worry about it" - do you think it's possible that we need these fears to innovate our ways out of things?
The only reason the ozone layer is getting better is because people were made aware of the problem and did something about it - if we hadn't become aware of the issue it wouldn't have reversed by magic. We need to be aware of these things and work towards a solution - which means acknowledging they could happen.
Human innovation is just one kind of response, to the general trend. The real argument here is about the price, a finite resources that everybody understand to be running out would already raise in price long before any actual real limit is hit. The price system response to both on the supply and the demand side and importantly it doesn't respond in real time rather its actually predictive.
So if somebody says that something that is now available for essentially free, ie used to fill up balloons and children birthday parties you immediately know that it is nonsense.
With all of these arguments going back 200-300 years the people who make them never take a general higher level trend into account to make their argument.
> It seems extremely intellectually dishonest to go "just because something has never happened means it'll never happen and we don't need to worry about it" - do you think it's possible that we need these fears to innovate our ways out of things?
What I'm saying is that we should be intellectually honest and look at the actual trends and data we have historically for such claims and consult our models that we as humanity have developed to understand how these dynamic works.
This is what we do in basically every single situation but somehow when arguing about 'resources running out' we throw this out and are just willing to believe the same old nonsense arguments over and over again.
> The only reason the ozone layer is getting better is because people were made aware of the problem and did something about it - if we hadn't become aware of the issue it wouldn't have reversed by magic. We need to be aware of these things and work towards a solution - which means acknowledging they could happen.
That is a totally different problem. The Ozone was a externalize problem. Focusing on those kind of problems makes actual sense. That's my exact point, instead of inventing nonsense scaremongering problems about Peak-Whatever.
> "Why would such a valuable resource be squandered? Basically, it's because the price of helium does not reflect its value. Most of the world's supply of helium is held by the United States National Helium Reserve, which was mandated to sell off all of its stockpile by 2015, regardless of price"
This doesn't make sense to me. If the market price doesn't reflect its value, why wouldn't somebody just buy up all the artificially cheap helium and stockpile it, to sell it at its "true" market value later?
We're still putting Helium in party balloons, after all. Why aren't all the "high value" users of Helium hedging for a time when Helium becomes more scarce? Is this really a market failure, or is there something missing from this narrative?
It's expensive to store, and it may not be worth building the storage facilities if you only get to use them once. So the market is not perfectly efficient here.
But yes, this argument explains why the "running out of helium" narrative is overblown.
The market has vehicles for this, e.g. purchasing rights to the helium while leaving it underground. Perhaps that's not what the law allows for, however.
> Why would such a valuable resource be squandered? Basically, it's because the price of helium does not reflect its value.
The whole paragraph doesn't make sense to me.
The article doesn't answer the question asked in the title.
I am not really sure about the message of the article, perhaps it was about the US helium reserve being decommissioned but not actually ?
By that logic the consumption of any nonrenewable resource at all imposes the same externality. We can't know what the future value of helium will be, but our best guess is incorporated into the current price.
I should admit that the concept of externality is subtle, and I don't know that I've ever seen a precise definition. A taxi driver should not consider the existence of a competing driver an externality, for instance, but a definition that avoids such implications is not obvious.
IANAP but I imagine this for a worst case: we are forced to find a way to painstakingly harvest it from vast arrays of solar-powered Hirsch-Farnsworth fusors. Then later on the question will be, "Will we run out of deuterium?"
Are you thinking of a tube made of nanofibers dangling from the moon into the atmosphere, through which helium will be pumped? Sounds intriguing. Jeff Bezos, are you listening?
I did some numbers a while ago you may be interested in:
If all power generated right now was from D+T fusion, it would generate about 8.2% of the current helium consumption.
We consume 153,596 TWh of thermal energy per year [1].
Each D+T reaction releases 17.59 MeV [2].
Multiply by the atomic mass of He4 and divide by Avogadro's number to get the mass of He4 produced per energy produced.
Divide by the density of He4 at STP to get volume of He4 produced per second [3].
Divide by the consumption of He4 to get the ratio of He4 produced to He4 consumed [4].
An argument for advancing fusion energy tech...maybe? Helium producing reactors can fill the gap. Between space travel and MRIs and everything in between, we might be running out of helium which is non renewable.
It's not the kind of tech which people are largely interested in when they say fusion energy. But fusors are already built and used commercially, consuming energy to produce something else. Helium could just be another derived product, along with fast neutrons, radioactive isotopes, etc. You could "renew" all you needed, if you had no choice... it wouldn't be cheap, or as cheap, just like he says in the video about dwindling supplies. You don't really run out, it just gets really expensive.
I'm curious to see how much helium is being used for "recreational" purposes (e.g. party balloons) vs. medical/industrial uses. Has anyone attempted to quantify/estimate this breakdown? I haven't found anything online on this topic.
As far as I'm aware the stuff used recreationally is impure enough that it's not really useful for much else so it's not terribly important to curb it's use like it might seem at first. The stuff used for Scientific, Medical, or even Industrial uses needs to be much more pure from other gasses and contaminants to work properly.
For the most part, if you need something a lot lighter than air, Hydrogen works. If you need something inert, there are better and more commonly available noble gases (including neon which is lighter than air, but only slightly). I can't imagine any sort of application where you would need something significantly lighter than air and inert. I'm curious as to which uses actually require helium and only helium.
One of the other reasons helium is used besides being inert and lightweight is its use in cryocooling. That it is why it is used in MRI machines to cool the superconducting magnets. The melting point of helium is 0.95 Kelvin (-458 Farenheit), and is used to cool the superconducting magnets to below 10 K [1].
The other most commonly used liquid for crycooling is liquid nitrogen. But Nitrogen freezes at 63 K (-320 F) so you can not get it cold enough for all applications.
Liquid helium is also used in the Aerospace industry for testing or running spacecraft hardware that will be at those extremely cold temperatures. For example the optics of the James Webb Space Telescope need to be that cold in order to measure the weak infrared signals, else the thermal noise from the instrument itself would overwhelm the signal [2]
A lot of helium use is for machines that need to have parts around 0 Kelvin for superconductivity. It is the only liquid at those temperatures besides Hydrogen and Hydrogen is much more dangerous and reactive.
sometimes its used as a mix in welding shielding gas (because its inert and lighter than air), typically argon is used but its much heavier than air and certain situations you need to mix with helium
Now stockpiling an extra 50 tanks as a buffer for a half-tank-a-day habit.
Sadly I did not build the lab I'm at now or we could be getting more done with less than 10 percent of what we use presently, and we're quite a bit better than average already.
Lots of technical debt for helium users consists of old systems which were built when helium was way less expensive and leaked a lot but was not significant dollars compared to other commonly known corporate waste so nobody cared.
It may be surprising to some, but there are many high-tech organizations you would expect to be able to handle their helium as tightly as possible, but that capability is truly not in house nor within reach even from contractors who appear to have the capability because they have actual satisfied customers.
Not everybody can do it the NASA way and that's what you need.
Otherwise continued helium reduction efforts do not reduce expenditures like they do at first, once you get far enough below the overall leak rate.
As to whether the Earth or maybe just gas users will run out or have to give up, Kornbluth probably knows as much as anybody:
So, if helium is light enough to escape Earth's gravity, why don't we use helium balloons to go to space? I mean, these guys [0] are trying to take a rocket to the edge of space using a helium balloon, but there's still a good old-fashioned rocket involved.
"Going to space" is a lot more than merely getting out of the atmosphere. You need to get orbital velocity, and a balloon isn't going to do that.
For an individual helium atom it's possible to pick up enough velocity to escape Earth's gravity. When they're all tied together in a balloon, that's not going to happen.
You pretty much can take a balloon to space. You'll pretty soon fall back to Earth though, as you'll be nowhere near orbital velocity.
Getting to space is easy. Staying there is hard.
For example, if the ISS passed directly overhead of you, it's only 250 miles away. I've driven three times that in a day. The trick of the whole thing is that while it's only 250 miles away vertically, it's moving at 4.7 miles per second laterally. It goes around the Earth (roughly 25,000 miles) in 90 minutes. It's going to be hard to get your balloon to those kinds of speeds.
When you say humans "goto space", you're probably talking about going to orbit. As such, the problem isn't that space is "up high", it's that fast is "very fast".
This "XKCD What If?"[0] explains this concept pretty clearly.
Lifting anything out of the gravity well of a gas giant is pretty much impossible. We struggle to lift anything off Earth because our gravity well is so deep, and those of gas giants are more than an order of magnitude worse.
Has the math been done on that? Gravity falls off quickly, wouldn't there be a relatively small amount of Helium at the edge, where gravity is just about strong enough to keep it from escaping? If so, would it be impossible to withstand that pull?
Thing is, you don't have. All you need is to harvest its atmosphere. You only go on the edge of the well. And IIRC we already have built probes that used atmospheric braking in Jupiter?
Isn't the main problem causing the shortage of helium that it doesn't struggle to be lifted off the Earth, in fact it floats away quite effectively on its own?
A significant problem is that you also have to lift out all your fuel. If you want to mine gases from the atmosphere you could imagine a device plunging into the atmosphere, collecting gases and getting out of the atmosphere while only needing to replace energy lost to friction with the atmosphere and lifting the collected gases out. That seems like a much easier task, because you can get a lot of your kinetic energy from going down the gravity well first.
Most of the helium on the moon is a different isotope than terrestrial helium, are Helium-3 and Helium-4 interchangeable for the various industrial uses?
This comes up again and again. No we want. Humans don't run out of non-renewable resources, the price just goes up. At worse we stop using if for party ballons.
Humans actually are far better at using up renewable resources, like whales.
Humanity has hunted all kinds of megafauna (wooly mammoth and co.) to extinction. Also the ongoing mass extinction [0]. The problem is that what is useful to us in second or farther removed degree, we don't value much.
No we can't. To match the yearly consumption of helium we would create so much energy that the Earth wouldn't be habitable. Just the waste heat would be about the same as the heat we get from the sun.
We won't run out of helium, it will just become much more expensive, like neon. You can distill helium out of the atmosphere, but it's a few orders of magnitude more expensive than separating from natural gas, which will remain a source for a very long time.
Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, wherever it is to be found, we'll find it.
It just won't be very affordable for birthday parties.