>>43307219There is helium content in every cubic foot of fresh wellhead natural gas, it's just that no one bothers to collect it. Once the price of helium is high enough, people will collect it. It's just a bi-product of beta decay in capped permeable rock formations, it's literally everywhere, stop being such a shitty uninformed Malthusian.
Funding an exosolar colony is within the economic means of more than a dozen individuals on this earth, we just haven't found anywhere to go yet. Asteroid capture is a mission NASA has asked under a billion dollars to accomplish, nuclear warheads aren't legal for private ownership at the moment, but we've proven we can start fusion with lasers, so the need for a fission initiator is obviated, and the physics package of the fission initiator stage is the part of a thermonuclear device that's easy to control, with laser initiated fusion, you just need Trit, Duet, a neutron reflector, and an optics package, literally no easily controlled content.
If you can beard that dragon (thousands of low yield nuclear weapons in the hands of a non-state actor, in space), the rhodium and platinum content of the waste volume of the asteroid we capture and mine out to make the Orion craft will probably come close to paying for the construction and freight on all the colonists/sufficient water/breathable gas you need to stick on old fashioned rockets to get to a lagrange point.
Shit, we're likely to have fusion reactors by the time we actually image a planet with an oxy-nitro atmosphere, we could even just VASIMR instead of Orion
