It is the four layers of resources, each one is smaller than the next.

1. What is the total theoretical resource?

2. How much of it do we actually now the location of

3. How much is technically recoverable?

4. And most importantly, how much is economically viable?

The last one is really the crux of the problem nowadays, there is a lot of helium but most of it just isn't in a high enough quantity to make the investment to built processing for it. Thus most of it just float off into space.

There will come a point when the price hits high enough to justify the cost but that also means higher costs to the end user.

> 4. And most importantly, how much is economically viable?

But literally the least important factor beyond “should we have started yesterday”. The amount of waste humanity has perpetuated in just the last 100 years because something wasn’t “economically viable” this fiscal quarter makes my head hurt.