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The best part of a party is the balloons -- but not for long: Experts say we're running out of helium.

That's it, the party is over... in 25 to 30 years. According to The Independent, humanity is squandering the Earth's supply of the second-lightest element in the known universe, helium, at a rate that could deplete our reserves in only three decades.

With the lowest boiling point of any gas, helium is quite useful in all sorts of operations like cooling nuclear reactors, detecting infrared radiation and MRI scans (and of course, making the human voice sound funny). Taken together, those things are -- dare we say it -- more vital than party balloons.

According to Robert Richardson, Nobel Laureate and physics professor at Cornell University, the primary reason humans are wasting this precious resource at such a tremendous rate has to do with the US Congress (shocking, we know). You see, back in 1925, the government decided to stockpile all available helium in a giant underground well near Amarillo, Texas. The US National Helium Reserve, as it's now called, is now by far the largest store of helium left on the planet, containing nearly 50 percent of the world's reserves.

In 1996, Congress, in its infinite wisdom and apparently seemingly infinite supply of helium, decided to sell off the entire reserve by 2015 to recoup some financial losses -- all of it! Following the law of supply and demand, a concept that was apparently not well understood by the political class of the mid 90s, that resulted in an artificially low price for helium. The price is now so low that it is impossible to justify any attempt at conservation or recycling, which means that we may be on the road to helium extinction.

In effect, Congress' decision to dump its helium onto the marketplace has had a worldwide effect. "You might at first think it will be peculiarly an American topic because the sources of helium are primarily in the US, but I assure you it matters of the rest of the world also," Richardson explains in The Independent.

The emptying of the US National Helium Reserve has helped make helium the world's most popular inert gas, used with abandon in both life-saving applications and the much more frivolous party balloons. In Professor Richardson's estimation, the price of a helium-filled party balloon should actually be hovering around $100. In our experience? You can get one for as low as $1.

So why not just make more helium, right? Because helium is a non-renewable resource, one that cannot be manufactured by man. That seems an important thing to emphasize. "Once helium is released into the atmosphere in the form of party balloons or boiling helium it is lost to the Earth forever, lost to the Earth forever," Professor Richardson tells the Independent.

Now that you know that you're toddler's birthday balloons are depleting the Earth of a valuable resource, will you be blowing them up yourself? Or does this all seem like a lot of worry about nothing?