Moon treats helium-3 extraction as a solved problem.
Not speculative, not theoretical—the film renders it with the visual grammar of inevitability, showing LUNAR industries' harvester scooping regolith like trucks on a highway and power lines feeding cities.
The actual helium-3 abundance on the Moon is real, and fusion reactors using it would be cleaner than current fission. The math checks out.
What doesn't check out is the economics—and the film knows this and doesn't care. When Sam discovers the truth about the clones and the corporate lie, his rebellion isn't about the energy scam; it's personal. The film could have made his crisis of conscience about the falsity of the energy premise itself, but instead it makes it about labor exploitation and identity — leaving the technological solutionism untouched and gleaming.
This was 2009's exact move: panic about climate change, fund speculative physics, and avoid the conversation about whether a lunar industrial complex required the same political consensus as a carbon tax—which it does, only harder. The physics aged better than our motives.
Watch the 2012 TED talk 'The Case for Space-Based Solar Power' by Peter Diamandis, then rewatch Moon's opening montage—notice how identical the rhetoric of inevitability is, and how neither one addresses the political infrastructure required to make it real.
Read 'The Man in the Moon: How Duncan Jones Made Isolation Look Like Inevitability' from the DVD commentary and cross-reference it with David Bowie's actual statements about his son's technical research into real lunar economics during pre-production—the gap between what they studied and what they filmed is the whole argument.