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Re:The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) by generalizations on Thursday December 31, 2020 @01:42PM (#25595625)
Stuff on the far right of the periodic table seems like prime candidates also, just because they're easy to lose and probably some of the hardest to obtain. Helium is basically a limited resource unless we figure out how to get it back out of the upper atmosphere; same goes for the argon we use for fire suppression - that stuff is already super expensive.
Re:The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) by ghaff on Thursday December 31, 2020 @02:12PM (#25596002)
I'd assume if you can do interstellar travel, you can fuse hydrogen into helium. The other 8A elements? They're useful for various things but, in part because they are non-reactive, I'm not sure how essential they are for anything.
Re:The Theory of Interstellar Trade (1978) by admax88q on Thursday December 31, 2020 @02:09PM (#25595978)
Argon and Helium are pretty stable though. It's probably cheaper to recover them from our atmosphere than to ship them from another planet altogether.