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If I'm willing to pay as much for helium as someone trying to pursue some lofty science goal, then either you have vastly underestimated the importance of amusement or science vastly overestimates the importance of the lofty goal.

Honestly, if my niece's quinceanera balloons stop the world from being saved, there's something deeply wrong beyond my scope of helping.

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Our helium supplies mainly come from oil drilling, which makes them a non-renewable resource. Once it is lost to the atmosphere it basically disperses into space. The problem here is that the US government built up a huge reserve of helium in the 20th century and then began selling it off at below-replacement prices, leading to vast amounts of the stuff being wasted. Meanwhile the oil and gas industry stopped capturing helium and let huge amounts of it go to waste. We got cheap helium balloons at our parties in exchange for major losses that will be difficult to make up (particularly as we wind down the fossil fuel industry in this century.)

Or society vastly underfunds science even though it's important.

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