Appreciate the brief re-education about Helium-3...I've forgotten a bit more than I'd like.

We can still take this idyllic rock apart and put it back together and get our nickel and iridium et al out of it without wrecking the place.

in the next 100 years or so, I doubt we're gonna run out. In 200, I believe we'll have extracted enough that it'll be like Futurama - watch your ship get heated to liquid and...crushed, or extracted, or whatever.

They weren't clear on that overmuch.

But screaming out of our gravity well, which is hugely expensive (thermodynamics, physics, etc, not money) and then delta-V-ing our asses out to an asteroid or Mars, and then bringing it back, planting it somewhere landable...

And doing it at some kind of profit? I don't think so.

Maybe if you found some huge iridium mound on Mars...otherwise, you need the total cost of going out there +1 and sending everything back.

We have all of this stuff here.

We still have no reasonable idea for fusion - the Germans - I think - 3D modeled and built a fusion reactor which still don't achieve sustainable reactions.

Burn everything we've got for nuclear payload - there's reactors out there that'll politely walk things like Pu through each successive step - and re-use it - until it's useless and can be stuffed into a hole a dog dug.

Warren seems to be against that, and Stein called it some names I don't even want to bother with.

We need better politicians.

Let's go to the moon. But - let's actually hire SpaceX to do it, pay them good money, and get a lunar mission.

Given the effort, delta V involved to hit the Moon, and difficulty in sustaining any kind of outpost out there, shipping out robotic harvesters, etc...