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Comment by aeternum | Hacker News Reader

Helium luckily is the second most abundant element in the universe. A good reason to go to the stars.

mostly out of our reach unless you have way of removing it from the sun without your retrieval craft melting or being captured by the suns gravity well or from gas giants without the onboard system being fried by the intense radiation or again captured by the gravitation.

We might find it quite difficult to extract from the stars, that said.

It might be expensive compared to improved Earth mining, but lunar regolite is rich in Helium 3, there would be no need to mine stars.

The funny part is, lunar regolite soaks Helium from its exposure to solar wind, so mining it would be an indirect mining of a star, our sun.

It is pretty much impossible to extract it from stars, but the 4 big planets have large amounts of helium.

It would be quite expensive to extract it from there, due to the necessity of escaping from their gravitational field, but not impossible.

If we have such advanced tech, and trip to big planets would seem economically feasible, I think we will be long beyond the point of desperately needing transporting helium to do such crazy trips.

Once we have the tech to cross the world's oceans in luxury, I think we will be long beyond the point of desperately needing to transport oil in ocean liner sized ships to do such crazy trips.

Once we’re talking about the scale of the universe, all elements are essentially “abundant” from earth-size prospective.

A round-trip lasting centuries is not a practical solution. Star Trek is fiction.

“Not within a thousand years will man ever fly”

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