What if Darmstadtium was never discovered? Or Seaborgium? Or protactium? 😱😱😱

I once went to the trouble of plotting the number of known isotopes by time. It was a brilliant piece of detective work, if I may say so ;-)

Beyond the natural stable elements, the first discovered were all the isotopes from the natural decay chains. Next, those created by neutron radiation of natural elements. After that, time of flight mass spectroscopy isolated the hundred or so stable isotopes that nobody had realised were there.

Elements like Fermium and Einsteinium first turned up among the fission products of a-bombs and h-bombs.

Only then was there any converted effort to manufacture new isotopes and elements in cyclotrons and synchrotrons, by bombarding heavy elements with precisely tuned calcium ions and heavier ions.

There have been a couple of new advances in the discovery of new elements and isotopes since then. But even now we're stuck with the problem of there being no easy way to feed a heavy isotope enough neutrons.

Tell me anything would be different in any way for any person living on this earth.

The funding for this work has been abysmal, it's not like it's taking money away from anything vital.

There is always hope that it will become useful in future, General Relativity languished for almost a hundred years before a practical application was found in GPS.

A lot of isotopes have been of practical use to the average human. Americium in smoke detectors being the obvious one. I was recently injected with the synthetic isotope 18F as part of a PET scan to test for a brain tumour and for Alzheimer's disease.

For me, without such discoveries I wouldn't have been able to plot the progress of discovery in this fascinating branch of physics.