You want about 200 cu. ft. of helium for a 1200 gram balloon lifting 1060 grams of weight. Helium costs about 2$ per cu. ft. meaning you have to spend 400$ to relieve 1Kg of weight from the backpack.
EDIT: As suggested by u/uNki23 I reviewed the numbers, i was slightly wrong. Helium can lift around 1Kg per m3. A helium balloon of this size weight 800g, so the total lift required is 1800g, needing 1.8 m3 of helium. Price varies but we can approximate 100$/m3, so to relieve 1Kg from the backpack weight is 200$.
The helium "crisis" is mostly just a dip in production. We used to mine huge quantities along with natural gas since they tended to get trapped in the same pockets, but as natural gas mining has waned over the decades and helium usage has gone up, helium-as-byproduct is becoming less viable. The Earth has a large enough supply of helium that we don't really need to worry about running out anytime soon, especially as more is generated constantly by radioactive decay deep underground. It's just going to get more expensive as we start having to pay for the actual cost of mining the helium rather than just the marginal costs of processing and storage we were paying before
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u/nico282 Jul 18 '24 edited Jul 18 '24
You want about 200 cu. ft. of helium for a 1200 gram balloon lifting 1060 grams of weight. Helium costs about 2$ per cu. ft. meaning you have to spend 400$ to relieve 1Kg of weight from the backpack.
EDIT: As suggested by u/uNki23 I reviewed the numbers, i was slightly wrong. Helium can lift around 1Kg per m3. A helium balloon of this size weight 800g, so the total lift required is 1800g, needing 1.8 m3 of helium. Price varies but we can approximate 100$/m3, so to relieve 1Kg from the backpack weight is 200$.