I recently began wondering if a planet's helium supply could be the 'great filter'. As in, if a civilization could stall out due to not having access to enough helium to product the technology to access off-world helium.
Pretty much any time there's some kind of problem in the world, someone chimes in to say that maybe not solving this problem is the great filter; and we have exactly the same amount of evidence (none) for all such hypotheses. Why is a shortage of helium more likely to be the great filter than the development of multicellular life, getting absorbed in AI worlds, nuclear war, etc.?
This presupposes that there are no alternatives to helium for off world exploration. Would be interesting if warp drives were real but required vast amounts of helium to operate with no substitutions possible.
