Interesting. He's not shitting about the cost of doing by air separation, though, he may actually be underselling it. I used to work in air separation, and various companies have tried going after the rare gasses, like xenon and helium. You're dealing with so few molecules that keeping the in/out flow in the columns stable is nearly impossible.

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Qatar is currently producing about 1/3 of the total helium production from its natural gas production. It could produce more if the price was higher.

Helium in natural gas isn't that rare, it's just that the very low prices we've had for years don't make it economical to extract.

The important point doesn't change though. We can tap tons of wells of helium that we didn't tap for natural gas because there was too much helium. The price just has to go up to make that profitable. We're not going to run out of helium any time soon.

This is fascinating, and it's remarkable that we have all that many heavier elements, considering all that

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Mergers of neutron stars are the probable primary source of heavier elements according to recent research.

There is only one of every species, by definition of species. You can have a number of varieties within one species, and Homo sapiens is no exception. We just don't call distinct human groups a "variety" even though there are obvious differences between sub-groups.

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It’s called a monotypic genus, and there are a lot of them out there. It’s particularly common in plants, but also happens in animals too. There did used to be other species in the Homo genus, but they’re all extinct now.

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We're not even close to depleting earth's supply. It's just that years ago, it stopped being economical to bother capturing it as it comes up with natural gas. Uranium decay creates the helium deep underground. So when it gets expensive enough, they'll rebuild the capture and separation equipment.

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Well, it's not a uniform distribution. The fact that it's the second most abundant element in the universe doesn't mean it was the second most abundant element on Earth.

Do you mean apes? We're still great apes. We're just not hairy.

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Similar to how oxygen is actually the 3rd most common element in the universe.

You must be mixing up 96 kHz and 96 bit? A 24bit audio would already give you dynamic range of 144 dB, so "96 bit" audio must be a mistake. If I'm wrong I'd be really happy to know a use case for 96bit audio! :)