Elements 93+

If one were to look at a periodic table of the elements, one would find over 100 different named elements. (In fact, 112 was recently officially named by the IUPAC as copernicium with the symbol Cn.) However, only elements 1-92 are naturally found in the environment, with the exceptions of 43 (technetium) and 61 (promethium), which are for some reason never found either.

Of the elements 93 and above, I know of uses for two of them off the top of my head. Plutonium (atomic number 94) is used for bombs and flux capacitors (of course, later Mr. Coffee is some sort of biological fuel source replacing the plutonium...). Americium (atomic number 95) is used in smoke detectors.

I will admit this is probably not an extensive list of all the elements above 92 that are useful. However, still the majority of these synthetic elements are extremely radioactive with extremely short half lives. In fact, you'd be lucky to randomly select an isotope of one of these elements and have it last more than a minute.

So much money is wasted on trying to create these atoms, but if they have no practical use, why bother making more and more? Try to revolutionize usage of the natural elements for some actual problems in the world instead! Maybe the full potential of molybdenum (atomic number 42) hasn't been found yet, or maybe xenon's (atomic number 54) reactions with oxygen and flourine atoms (atomic numbers 8 and 9) could be put to use.

Yes, both the scenario I put down and the scenario I proposed have potential. However, the latter is significantly cheaper and shows more immediate promise, as no synthetic atoms aren't radioactive.

So yeah, maybe it's cool for chemists to theorize about getting a completely new level of electrons and a new block on the periodic table as the new electron levels would arrange in a new way, but leave that to theory, don't waste time and money on creating a new noble gas ununoctium (temporary name for atomic number 118) and beyond. Make what we have better.