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.
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.