system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If new elements are created by fusing old ones together (I'm aware that this is greatly simplified). Are there infinitely many undiscovered elements?

Are there infinitely many undiscovered elements waiting to be created (regardless of the difficulty of creating said element) or is there some sort of invisible wall that we might hit?

Thank you.
gpt
No, probably not. The IUPAC sets the criteria for the discovery of a new element, and one of them is a minimum lifetime of around 10^(-14) seconds. That's roughly how long a nucleus needs to live for in order to form an electron cloud and be considered a chemical element.

You can have nuclei with much shorter lifetimes than that, but that's what the chemists decided is the limit for a chemical element.

We can produce heavier and heavier nuclei, but the nuclear force saturates at some finite radius, so I'd find it pretty hard to believe that you can have bound nuclei of arbitrarily high mass number.

As you go higher and higher in A, there should eventually be a region where the system is so unstable that ground state lifetimes start to dip below 10^(-14) seconds, even near the extrapolated valley of stability.

So these nuclei would not be able to form atoms, and would not meet the IUPAC definition of an "element".