Egregoros

#Helium 🧵 is super interesting!

It’s an inert gas, atomic weight 4, and is 24% by weight of the entire known universe!

Because it’s so light, we can only transport it in custom reinforced metal canisters, and even then it leaks rapidly.

Delays in shipping may mean complete loss of the helium - 6 weeks is about the longest you can get away with.

#Helium is so inert we can’t chemically combine it with, say chlorine, to make it into a solid to more easily transport it.

Despite it being all over the universe most of it on earth has leaked away into space. The only place we find it on earth is in gas and oil deposits, so it’s a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry.

#Helium is unusual tha it wasn’t discovered on earth, but as a spectrographic line of an undiscovered element in the sun.

Later it was detected in volcanic eruption observations.

Finally it was extracted from uranium decay, but this is a very slow way of producing what we need.

So it comes out slowly under the earth and floats up into gas and oil fields.

#Helium is used in CPUs and RAM. In rockets and making fiber optic cables. Used in deep sea diving, and superconductors for science and for high tech medical imaging. For detecting leaks, and of course in blimps and kids balloons.

And because you can’t effectively store it, the world needs a continuous supply, which only comes from oil fields such as in Qatar, so we can’t just store and buffer to manage supply chain problems.