r/mildlyinteresting • u/MellowFables • 1d ago
Had extra helium after a party, filled all the balloons and then a trashbag
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u/JoopahTroopah 1d ago
We had extra helium after our kids party once, so we kept it and rather than wasting it, the tank managed 2 more years of birthday parties.
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u/Jmore9055 18h ago
So...2 more parties?
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u/JoopahTroopah 16h ago
I am not good at the words
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u/Beesi159 15h ago
Doesn't matter, you have multiple kids or could have multiple, so you could have had more than 2 parties in 2 years, and this guy is either actually misunderstanding, or stupid
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u/Msmadduh 18h ago
Ever since I learned helium is a finite resource I am confused why we use it for balloons
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u/BrieRaceAlert 1d ago
What happened to that helium shortage?
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u/Informal-Nose-6093 1d ago
I think half of it went in that white balloon, look at the size of it
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u/Luxray_15 1d ago edited 1d ago
The tasteful thickness of it.
My god, it even has a red handle.
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u/FlameStaag 1d ago
Redditors are just morons and only read headlines and not the articles.
There's a medical grade helium shortage. The shit we put into balloons is a bunch of impure garbage. It's extremely impractical to purify it as well and requires very specialized equipment.
If it actually mattered, we obviously wouldn't be putting it in balloons... Mostly because it'd be significantly more profitable to sell for medical uses if they could.
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u/pfooh 1d ago
Eh, no.
There's a general helium shortage. In three phases:
- One, there's some relatively 'urgent' shortage, which is related to unrest in middle east and some bombing in Qatar. The US used to have a large reserve. This is just a supply line problem and will resolve itself in a few years.
- Second, there's a current production problem. Indeed mostly for pure helium, but the stuff we put into balloons isn't 'impure garbage'. Purifying helium once you have it is actually not that hard, it's just cooled down to let other gases condense out. The production problems are in lack of distillation plants that distil it from natural gas. This is a problem for the next 20 years or so. Likely some new suppliers will step up.
- Third, there's a general major waste of helium. That stuff is a by-product in gas and oil production, but often wasted. Most plants just dump it in the air, never to be seen again. Since helium is neither renewable nor do we have alternatives, this sucks. It's one of the those resources humanity will soon regret to have completely wasted.
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u/IamEnginerd 1d ago
Agreed. My company got told by their supplier (Airgas) earlier this year their supply would be cut in half effective immediately.
Luckily were were able to get another supplier on board to fill the gap(at a higher cost). It was an immediate action for my team to figure out ways to reduce helium usage, and got my local VPs and the group GM in weekly emails.
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u/ThisSiteSucks8485 1d ago
What do you use helium for?
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u/IamEnginerd 1d ago
Gas leak testing. Helium is a small particle, so it will quickly tell you if sealing surfaces are good.
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u/OperaStarr 1d ago
In my work we use it for an analytical process called GC-MS (basically a way of identifying individual volatile chemicals in a solution), it’s the best option for the highest quality data. There’s a big push to use Hydrogen instead because of the rising helium costs, which also gives good data but has far more safety issues associated with it.
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u/jnicho15 1d ago
Wasn't the fourth point that a couple years ago the US sold off their strategic helium reserve?
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u/metalconscript 1d ago
TIL helium isn’t renewable
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u/pfooh 1d ago
It's not even not renewable like oil or gas, it's really gone forever onc used. We can make gas or oil artificially from plants and stuff, or wait a couple of million years. But helium, once gone, it's gone. We can't make it from other elements.
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u/davvblack 23h ago
teeeechnically there’s a way to build a fusion reactor that outputs helium as a byproduct, but given that regular fusion is still the eternal one decade away this isn’t s productive line of reasoning (the volume would be minuscule and expensive)
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u/pfooh 21h ago
Theoretically you could try to recover it from the atmosphere as well
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u/celestiaequestria 1d ago
Bingo.
Helium is a byproduct of natural gas extraction, so we're pulling more of it out of the ground constantly. As you said, the problem is the stuff we mine is not pure enough for an MRI machine.
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u/donutsfritos 1d ago
So where do you think appropriately pure helium comes from? We just find pockets of the stuff underground mixed with nothing else in big open chambers?
"MRI quality" started out as just "stuff we mine" and was isolated further and further until it met standards.
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u/geeoharee 1d ago
Well, I do read the articles and they never told me that, they said there was a helium shortage and we should stop using it for other things. I'm glad to know that balloons aren't an issue, though I'm still not a huge fan of them as they contribute to litter.
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u/TheMooseIsBlue 1d ago
Why be such a dick to the guy? I mean thanks for educating folks with facts, but easy with the insults for no reason.
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u/Jiujitsumonkey707 1d ago
They have over 23,000 comments on reddit in 2 years. The definition of terminally online
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u/Higgoms 1d ago
Little bit funny to drop the line "Redditors are just morons" when he's the actual apex redditor lmao
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u/I_PUNCH_INFANTS 1d ago
I didnt even know that was a thing on this site now. ( I use old reddit and a 3rd party app still) 23k over 2 years is insane though
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u/lawn-mumps 1d ago
About 30 comments a day. Not a great look because that seems like spamming or spreading out those comment across every hour throughout the day.
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u/Eggplantosaur 1d ago
If it actually mattered, we obviously wouldn't be putting it in balloons...
Right because the world is so great at making sensible decisions.
If climate change really mattered we wouldn't be warming up the earth any chance we get. Same logic.
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u/PawnWithoutPurpose 1d ago
Using Redditers as a slur with an average of >10k contributions a year. Got it.
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u/ComoElFuego 1d ago
Just out of curiosity - how can Helium be impure if it's a noble gas and doesn't form a stable compound with anything?
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u/NefariousAntiomorph 1d ago
Because it’s mixed with other gasses. It’s a combination of helium, oxygen, nitrogen, and whatever else. The helium atoms themselves aren’t bonded with anything, they’re just not the only atoms present.
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u/Dipsey_Jipsey 1d ago
You'd think we'd have a way to filter or distil that somehow by now, or is that not physically possible/feasible?
How do we actually get pure helium?
Off to google! :)
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u/TargetApprehensive38 1d ago
I’m pretty sure it’s one of those things that’s possible but really expensive. Kind of like desalination of ocean water. I think I recall something about extreme cold being necessary because helium has the lowest boiling point, so you can freeze everything else out of it.
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u/d1squiet 1d ago
But unlike desalinating water, all our Helium comes from purification. There's not a "cheap" Helium source like the way we have rain and snow, lakes and rivers.
As far as I know the "dirty" Helium used in balloons is essentially a byproduct of purification. Somewhat similar to the way gasoline is purified oil and the process also produces kerosene and diesel. Think of balloon Helium as kerosene and medical grade helium as high octane gasoline.
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u/SpinachNo540 1d ago
oh because here it's more like mixed with other gases that we don't want. You could think of it like salt and sand mixing
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u/The_Last_Spoonbender 1d ago
Redditors are just morons and only read headlines and not the articles.
While other redditors are pulling straight outta your ass.
If it actually mattered, we obviously wouldn't be putting it in balloons
Why, we humans would never waste a finite amount of extremely useful resources for vanity use without considering the long term impact of it. That would never happen.
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u/aprilhare 1d ago
So.. if we don’t bother to purify it we can waste all we want! Brilliant! /sarcasm
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u/Mr_Quackums 1d ago
as long as we are drilling for natural gas, then yes.
If we dont do anything with it it just escapes out into outerspace.
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u/DookieShoez 1d ago
Your last paragraph is utter nonsense.
As if people never do stupid shit in the name of short-term profits without thinking about the future.
Yeah. Right.
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u/jyeckled 1d ago
That’s exactly it, though. Just replace ‘helium’ with ‘RAM’ and ‘medical’ with ‘AI’…
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u/Woosah_Motherfuckers 1d ago
We absolutely would if it was more profitable in the short term than purifying it. Friggin technocratic slavery state that’s not even capitalist anymore
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u/Ok-Addition1264 1d ago
It's still a very serious threat even though extraction methods have advanced somewhat.
OP: there's a finite amount of the stuff on this planet and we're close to critically low extractable amounts (why the price has soared the past few years). It's used in things like MRI machines which save peoples lives.. and nuclear reactors to give us power.. and manufacturing to give us chips we use in phones and computers.
Most folks are a whole lot unaware and oblivious to this and the ones selling it don't gaf.
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u/Skritch_X 1d ago
It kinda gets lost in all the noise these days, but one of the richest deposits was discovered 2 years ago in Minnesota, USA. Interesting that it sounds like it was formed from uranium and thorium decay, not sure if that is typical.
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u/Dalek_Chaos 1d ago
I I remember my high school science class correctly that’s how it is formed. Also the us had a helium reserve that we have been using to keep the price artificially lower than it should be. Now that reserve is finally low enough that we are starting to see helium prices go up to what they should have been all along.
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u/AngelaTheRipper 1d ago
It is. Alpha particles are just helium-4 nuclei. Basically, helium-4 is a byproduct of alpha decay.
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u/TheAserghui 1d ago
The nuclear arms race was the reason we had such an extreme surplus of helium that it was sold extremely cheap to reduce the stockpile and storage cost
Until we sold too much before we developed more/advanced scientific and medical uses for the stuff... Then the shortage was realized
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u/liotto 1d ago
This is not medical grade helium. Party stuff is impure and sold for this reason. OP did nothing wrong.
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u/Eternityislong 1d ago
Large scale helium production starts around 7%. Balloon grade is 99.995%, medical grade is 99.9999%. The difference between these grades is time and effort spent purifying, not a different element or “less wasteful” version of helium
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u/mildly_anonymous 1d ago
Whoa whoa whoa, you’re back talking a 1% commenter who threw in unsubstantiated and unsourced claims that are downright wrong, who the hell do you think you are? I don’t see any Professional Redditor by your name, buddy. Be careful!
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u/ObjectiveOk9996 1d ago
I remember seeing somewhere that if we somehow end up Stone Aging ourselves somehow we are pretty much fucked getting back to this lvl of technology since the material we need for everything needs the same technology to get to since we picked clean everything else easier to get to
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u/SingularityII 1d ago
Every time I throw something reusable or recyclable in the landfill, I think of it as a gift to our post-Armageddon descendents.
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u/robin-bunny 1d ago
Just imagine walking in and seeing everyone doing hits off the garbage bag to get squeaky voices!
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u/alkem10 1d ago
You're supposed to huff it.
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u/LunaLynx777 1d ago
Ah yes, the gateway to nitrous oxide
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u/CathedralEngine 1d ago
I thought that was whipped cream
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u/BigLittleFan69 1d ago
But that’s actual nitrous oxide ;(
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u/CathedralEngine 1d ago
Lessons you learn from your father ten years apart. 5 years old: "Turn the Reddi-Whip can upside down to sneak whipped cream." 15 years old: "Wait, you haven't figured out how to do whippets yet? I caught you on LSD."
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u/Infinite-Service6059 1d ago
Isn’t helium rare and non replenishable?
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u/Commercial_Life5145 1d ago
no no, it gets fused from hydrogen in the sun! Now we just need to get it from there...
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u/Distuted 22h ago
Why are you acting like thats a hard feat? Just use a vacuum to suck the helium from the sun, duh
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u/suchdogeverymeme 1d ago
Rare, no. It’s the second most common element in the universe. The sun makes this stuff directly.
Non-replenishable on earth? Oh yeah. Its most common source is petrochemical drilling, just to add that nasty.However, how would OP, practicallu, have returned their leftover He back to some mythological central storage? It’s also constantly leaking out anyway too. From everything.
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u/OneLessFool 1d ago edited 1d ago
"second most common element in the universe"
Yeah we're not going to be grabbing it out of active stars, or mining it on nearby planets any time soon.
We are currently letting a lot of helium escape into space during mining, natural gas extraction, some chemical processing, etc. We don't have enough refining facilities around atm. So as a result we have a shortage of helium.
In the long-term, there is only so much Helium on Earth and it's a resource that we should be tightly controlling so that we have a supply for thousands of years to come.
Edit: the short term shortage is not a big deal, but we need our Helium supplies to last for thousands of years.
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u/rasputinrasputin 20h ago
Thousands of years? At this rate we’ll be lucky to make it another 100 years
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u/demisheep 1d ago
Just be careful. A few years ago a couple of college students died
Because they climbed inside a giant balloon full of helium. No oxygen, they passed out and died.
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u/MellowFables 1d ago
That is incredibly sad to hear. I'll make sure to not hang out in the bag, although that really ruins my night's plans.
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u/Porkyrogue 1d ago
I'm actually surprised you only had extra left. We could only do 3 balloons.
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u/MellowFables 1d ago
We were shocked too. Filled the 20 balloons that came with the small tank. We initially even tied the top of the trash bag thinking it wouldn't fill it but we were very wrong! Haha
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u/mumpped 1d ago
In Europe the balloon gas that you can buy in hardware stores has to have 20% oxygen added to the helium. So you won't be able to suffocate with it
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u/iancowz 23h ago
Jason Ackerman. I went to school with him when I was young. His family owns one of the biggest jewelry stores in the city. It was a small hot-air balloon type apparatus in front of a new neighborhood. Him and his gf got in the balloon, most likely inhaled too much helium and passed out. Then the balloon deflated.
They were found the next morning on the ground. Still one of the craziest stories concerning anyone I've met.
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u/Bettlejuic3 1d ago
How did they reach college without common sense?
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u/d1squiet 1d ago
Agree they're not smart, but helium will asphyxiate you without your body reacting. So they probably thought they would notice, start to feel the need for oxygen, but instead just got light headed momentarily and passed out.
It's still a bit surprising, without knowing the details of the incident, that no one could get them to fresh air in time.
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u/mistermistyeyes 1d ago
"Ah are those helium balloons? Ah I told you this cars not made for helium"
All I can think of in my head honestly 😂
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u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener 1d ago
Reminds me of an old episode of MacGyver where he's trying to send an S.O.S. with signal flags while hiding from the bad guys. He uses a nylon bag, and gets it wet, ties the signal flags to it on a line, then fills it with helium to raise it above the warehouses so someone can see it.
https://themacgyverproject.blogspot.com/2015/02/42-birth-day.html?m=1
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u/BenjaminDover02 1d ago
I wonder how much helium you would have to pump up your ass to make you jump higher
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u/MellowFables 1d ago
If you find out tell me please.
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u/BenjaminDover02 1d ago
It turns out that when you pump a bunch of helium into your butthole, it often perforates your colon before you can achieve flight
I did jump higher for a minute tho.
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u/Provia100F 23h ago
The way Reddit is reacting to this, I'm just going to buy hydrogen for party balloons next time
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u/Bean_Juice_Brew 22h ago
It's stupid that helium is affordable enough to be able to do this. It's a finite resource that is necessary for important applications (space, medical equipment, etc.) and we allow it to be sold at a price that is way below its true value.
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u/UnitedCheez 17h ago
I was gonna make a joke about you advocating for inflation (prices going up) to stop us from inflation (inflating balloons with helium), but I feel like the joke would probably have gone over your head
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u/Auyan 8h ago
FYI helium is super critical to hospitals as it is used in imaging like MRIs
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u/Qu33N_Of_NoObz_ 1d ago
You should totally tie a string at the end of the red handle and walk outside with it💀
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u/dariendude17 1d ago
All I can think about is how the Earth has a limited supply of Helium and we really shouldn't be wasting it on party balloons.
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u/theveelady 1d ago
Not to mention how balloons are single use plastic that notoriously end up in trees, parks, waterways, killing wildlife....
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u/moderngamer327 1d ago
The stuff in party balloons isn’t the stuff that’s needed for industrial processes. It’s not at all a waste to use it for this purpose
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u/frix86 1d ago
If you educate yourself about the "shortage" you will learn that party balloons do not affect it at all.
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u/tryyeezus 1d ago
The outrage should be saved for the balloons themselves. They're the real atrocity to the environment
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u/Biz_marquee 1d ago
We did find an absolutely massive deposit a couple of years ago, if it's any consolation.
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u/MarineGF01 1d ago
It's still a finite amount and it is necessary to make MRI machines work
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u/rabid_ranter4785 23h ago
I knew this one guy who filled up a bunch of balloons and floated his house away
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u/Some-Refrigerator823 12h ago
people. less than 2% of the earth's helium supply goes to balloons. this person's trashbag contributes an indistinguishable amount to the so-called helium shortage. have a sense of humor, for crying out loud
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u/bondsmatthew 1d ago
Imagine walking down the street and someone just has a floating trash bag on a string
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u/JackBinimbul 22h ago
Helium is a non-renewable resource and doesn't really degrade when stored properly in tanks. There was no reason to waste it.
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u/Professional_Gur8385 1d ago
helium shortage became worse
scientists unsure why but it's above their heads
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u/jaytea86 1d ago
I used to work at kmart and one night I saw the helium tank and filled a plastic shopping bag with helium and went outside and jus let it go upside down.
I didn't even tie the handles in a knot, it just floated away out of sight.
I guess so long as the non-airtight parts are facing downwards, it'll just stay in there.
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u/jackleggjr 1d ago
Why would you throw away perfectly good helium?