The element of What doctors are for

They say you learn something everyday. They say a lot of things. But in this instance, they are right. Today I learnt that potentially in my lifetime there will be no more Helium on Earth. The human race will have wiped out an entire element. We have allowed it dissipate almost entirely unchecked in balloons that say "Happy 50th!" and what reserves we have are being sold off by the Americans (the primary source for the world's helium) who privatised Helium in the 1990's and are selling off their strategic reserves of the inert gas massively cheaply outside the Free Market.

A professor called Richardson has looked around and stated that Helium will no longer exist in 20-30 years time.

Children will never know it was ever on the periodic table. And they will grow up to be scientists - who also will not know that Helium was on the periodic table! What sort of madness is that? That I will know about Helium but scientists won't?

What about that bloke who could sing all the periodically ordered elements really fast? That's his party piece busted. It'll be more like a Proclaimers song in the future: "Bathgate No More, Helium No More, Lochaber No More".

That an element can simply disappear is mind positively blowing. It ranks, in my opinion, between finally laying waste to the rain forests and the impossibility to make gold. You know, it's like when the Panda goes extinct we might get lucky, find one preserved in amber and bring them back for them to take furious vengeance on us at the Rain Forest end of the scale and, although I realise that Helium is an element, it just feels like we should be able to make some more Helium easier than making gold, so it is just not quite at the, other, Gold Making end of the scale.

The thing is, Helium is hugely important in lots of things. It is a coolant for superconductors, medical equipment and solar telescopes. It could be the clean energy source that would revolutionise the planet's environmental issues. Frankly, we could be doing with loads of it.

Next time you go past a Clinton's you are perfectly within your rights as a Planeteer to rush in, spit at the teenage shop assistant, punch one of their inflated foil helium wasters and shout: "You solar telescope murderers!", I would have thought. No one would judge you for it.

Happily it appears these greeting card dwelling shops may yet be hoisted by their own petard. As Helium becomes more rare, the price is going to increase. Soon only the very rich will want their precious floating gold.

If you are clever, like me, you should buy your own underground helium containment lab and place one of the Helium canisters you can get for 30 balloons from ASDA in it. That baby will start paying for itself, and your pension, in 50 years. You could even have a foil balloon inflated to commemorate the anniversary.

All is not over, however. Scientists have been working on a solution. Masses of Helium has been discovered on the moon. We can mine the Helium there and bring it back in canisters or pods or whatever the space word for jars is.

Of course! The moon! Like most of science, it is all so simple when the answer is found. The moon is obviously full of Helium - that's how it stays up in the sky.

Seriously, Betty, you know what this meteor could mean to science. It could mean a lot. It could mean actual advances in the field of science.

Let me produce exhibit A: The man who once pressed 'rumba' on the Casio keyboard for a 90's pop band is now in charge of the Hadron Collider. He could kill us all with an unfortunately timed chord flashback.

And watching that keyboardist from D:REAM telling me that we are all made of universal sticky space plankton made me realise just how much science has been pimped and served up to the common man. That it is not necessarily a good thing.

To be fair, the feeling truly reverberated before this, when on a school trip to see the stage show of Johnny Ball where half-way through he was heckled.

There he was on the stage with his black marker pen and flip-chart. He energetically ran across the stage asking people for numbers and he would manipulate the numbers in a way that was as close to voodoo as I have witnessed.

The heckle - when it came - was as short as it was explosive.

Johnny Ball yelled to the audience: "Where did the remainder go? It went... [and he blew an increasingly high pitched whistle]"
The Heckler saw his chance with the precision of an electron microscope and at the end of the whistle and shouted in the silent auditorium: "Up your arse!"

Really - who on earth heckles Johnny Ball? But it was then when I thought - bringing science to the masses sometimes means that the masses can't run away fast enough. In every likelihood, this is why Johnny Ball wants us to increase our carbon emissions these days: so we'll die due to lack of oxygen and the Earth will go on fire - taking that asphixiated heckler with it as it sinks in a fiery ball below the stars. Hats off, Mr. Ball, that is some stone-cold putdown.

Trying to connect with the ordinary is particularly prevalent in advanced mathematics and physics.

A friend told me that his physics lecturer, attempting to help students understand an equation said:

This looks complex, but really think of X as a cow, Y as the field it is in and Z as the farm to which the field belongs. Now simply imagine that this cow is a perfect sphere, the field is a sterile vacuum and the farm is of infinite proportions that could not possibly exist.

For me science can be complex. I'll let it. I don't need an analogy.

And you know what? I am perfectly fine with that. I am very comfortable with areas of science to be obtuse, difficult and - for some - rewarding.

Now it seems to me that the whole of science is trying to be populist. It is trying to be Time Team doing History. I am not sure it is going to succeed.