This is gonna sound dumb, but Peak Helium is supposed to be like in the 22nd century, and it’s actually technically possible to extract it from gas giants using

This is gonna sound dumb, but Peak Helium is supposed to be like in the 22nd century, and it’s actually technically possible to extract it from gas giants using large floating platforms and launch it (with multi-stage, reusable nuclear rockets) to orbit and send it back to Earth. Uranus is probably the best planet for this. Helium 4 is one of the few bulk substances with enough value per kilogram to be potentially worth shipping across interstellar distances. (Helium 3 easily is valuable enough, but the market for it is tiny.) The prices of liquid helium are sometimes up to $50-100/liter, which is $400-800/kg. Launch prices from Earth may reach as low as $10-20/kg in the following decades, so it’s not impossible that nuclear analogues of vehicles like Starship could reach $400-800/kg to Earth. Helium-3 is worth orders of magnitude more, and probably can be made to work with expendable chemical rockets from Uranus cloud layer to low Uranus orbit and rendezvous with other near-term propulsion (electric propulsion?) back to Earth, if there was a Big market for low-neutron fusion fuel. Talking about in 100 years, of course. So the space nerd side of me almost hopes we use up all our helium so prices are high enough so we can harvest it from the gas giants.