[stdgy]

Not to mention supplying these hypothetical moon lasers with enough power to blast these mini-probes into another star system.

[Zikes]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3 ought to do the trick.

[Zikes]

I'm a bit surprised at the downvotes. I'm no scientist, but I meant this suggestion in earnest. As far as my layman's knowledge goes, I've always understood the Moon's He-3 reserves to be a "vast, as-yet-untapped power resource".

[marcosdumay]

People have to learn how to harvest power from fusion before.

[ars]

You know how they have chemically pumped lasers?

So it would be awesome to directly pump the laser from H3 fusion.

H3 fusion is actually very easy - I think we could do it today. We just don't have a readily available source of H3 for fuel.

[Ankaios]

3He fusion is easy—you can do it in a garage with some hacked-together equipment.

However, 3He fusion with net power output is exceptionally hard, even with complete disregard to cost. Much harder than deuterium-tritium fusion. We don't know how to do it yet.

[ars]

Thanks for the correction. Seems the rosy predictions I remembered are not accurate.