I live near a business that has tank farms and piping for pressurized gases. They provide a lot of oxygen for health care use. If they can “manufacture” a gas, why can’t they make more helium?
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Helium is very light (about 1/8 of the mass of oxygen) but molecules of all gases take up the same amount of space. As a result, helium has a very low density and the lower something’s density is, the higher up it will rise compared to other fluids.
Helium is so light that it can escape earth’s gravity and drift out into space, so the gas doesn’t get recycled or recovered (e.g. from party balloons or all of the gas in the Goodyear blimp). It also can’t be “manufactured” since helium is an element; the only source of new helium we have on earth comes when large atoms like uranium decay radioactively.
All of this means that the supply of helium is massively limited.
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