I've started a new drinking game where I take a shot whenever a tech bro uses the term "Kardashev scale."

(Though to be honest, it's less of a game and more of a coping mechanism.)

There’s a great quote from an actual authority on the history of space exploration, Dwayne Day.

Over the decades, many people—most notably Carl Sagan—have noted that space enthusiasm shares many characteristics with religion. People have a set of beliefs that seem perfectly logical and reasonable to them, but which they have great difficulty explaining convincingly to those who do not share the beliefs, or have an alternative set of beliefs. They also tend to not recognize the logical fallacies in their belief systems.

Of course, it’s possible to take this analogy too far. But it also has a great deal of explanatory value. One common attribute of many religions is their ability to incorporate superstitions or iconography or traditions. Space activism does this as well. There are fetishes—imbuing certain technologies with virtually supernatural abilities—and also what might be best called incantations, or things that people say almost out of unconscious habit. The belief in helium-3 mining is a great example of a myth that has been incorporated into the larger enthusiasm for human spaceflight, a magical incantation that is murmured, but rarely actually discussed.

Fortunately, NASA as an institution has been immune from the helium-3 incantation, even when human missions to the Moon were actual policy. This is probably because the agency has its own antibodies that have effectively fought it. At the very least, if a NASA official sought to invoke helium-3 for fusion reactors in a major speech or policy document it would have to be vetted with other government agencies like the Department of Energy, and would quickly be quashed. NASA’s scientists and engineers know that helium-3 is not a justification for a human lunar program, and the continued mention of helium-3 in popular articles about the Moon—or by non-American space officials—is not going to influence whether the United States sends people there or not. But you can guarantee that talk of helium-3 will flare up again whenever the discussion turns to returning humans to the Moon, but never producing much in the way of heat or light.

If you try to follow the techno-optimists, particularly regarding the commercialization of space, there are certain terms and phrases that you will encounter with mind-numbing frequency:

Kardashev scale
Making a civilization interplanetary
Abundance and the end of scarcity
Regolith
In situ resources
And yes, helium-3, just to name a few

Sometimes these words do feel like incantations—efforts to invoke some mystical force. Other times, they simply reveal a lack of knowledge or imagination. People writing these essays and business proposals don’t actually know that much about the field, so they mindlessly repeat what they’ve heard others say.

Much of the time, again especially regarding space, I think it’s simply grasping at a very small number of straws available. The sad truth which none of them want to face is that, beyond low Earth orbit, there is little potential for a space economy in the foreseeable future, and effectively none for manned spaceflight.

This explains the weird persistence of space tourism proposals. When you get beyond the just-barely-outer-space of Virgin Galactic day trips, travel to even the closest destinations is long, uncomfortable, and somewhat dangerous. The Moon offers a nice view of Earth, but it’s barren and and exposed to high levels of radiation. The trip to Mars would be even worse. This is not something that any technological breakthrough currently on the horizon is likely to improve. There’s simply no future for that industry.

For the foreseeable future, the only viable model for manned spaceflight is government-subsidized, and the only rationale, in an age of increasingly sophisticated robotics, is national pride. Anything else ignores the laws of physics and economics in equal measure. The True Believers don’t want to hear that, but it remains an inescapable fact.