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Helium
No Laughing Matter
After Hydrogen came Helium, so is fittingly also the second most abundant element in the Universe.
Together with Hydrogen, in our Universe at least, that was pretty much it for a long while. I imagine that maybe it was for 4 of the 6 days god worked, or something like that.
Anyway, the stars we can see at the furthest distance from us are fuelled by Hydrogen and Helium, so it appears to make more sense to try and work out their age to work out how long it took for the world to be created than count the generations of who begat who in the Old Testament.
In these Group 1 stars, all of the heavier elements that are laid out in this car boot sale in the form of various second hand goods are produced, and these scattered through explosions to form all of the other elements.
All of the items laid out here today are made of various elements which are the result of explosions that seeded the Universe
Helium means god of the sun, but is in fact more the son of the sun.
Signs of it were first discovered on the sun before it was found on earth. A French astronomer, Janssen noticed a yellow line in the sun's spectrum while studying a total solar eclipse in 1868.
Helium makes up only about 0.0005% of the earth’s atmosphere. This trace amount of helium is not gravitationally bound to the Earth and is constantly lost to space, only replaced by the decay of radioactive elements in the earth's crust.
At car boot sales I occasionally see signs of helium floating about, sometimes held captive inside a Disney cartoon shaped balloon and carrying an excited child on a piece of string. Which is fitting in its way as helium, together with nitrogen, is used not only to make voices sound squeaky, but also to preserve Uncle Walt himself, cryogenically, until such time as he himself can be re-animated.
It’s commercially extracted in gas deposits in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. (We’re not in Kansas anymore)
It’s other less esoteric uses include weather balloons and blimps, as well as being used by deep sea-divers.
Cosmochemist and geochemist Ouyang Ziyuan from the Chinese Academy of Sciences who is now in charge of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program has already stated on many occasions that one of the main goals of the program would be the mining of helium-3, from where "each year three space shuttle missions could bring enough fuel for all human beings across the world."[23]
For his part, Schmitt, the former astronaut, thinks one of the moon's most valuable resources is helium-3, a lightweight form of helium contained in rocks on the moon's surface.
The material is so valuable as a potential source of nuclear-fusion power that a mere 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of it could replace 140 million U.S. dollars' worth of coal, Schmitt said.
Fusion technology has yet to be perfected, and probably won't be anytime soon (nuclear fission is the technique used in current nuclear power plants.
But there is already a market for helium-3 on Earth, in medical imaging technology—such as PET (positron emission tomography) scans, which are often used to spot cancerous cells—he added.