Uranus and Neptune May Have "Oceans of Diamonds" 347
Third Position writes "Oceans of liquid diamond topped with solid 'icebergs' of the precious gems could be on Uranus and Neptune. The first-ever detailed research into the melting point of diamond found it behaves like water during melting and freezing — with its solid form floating on the liquid. A large diamond ocean on one or both of the planets could provide an explanation for an oddity they both share: unlike Earth, they do not have magnetic poles that match up with their geographical poles." The article doesn't mention what the pressures might be like in these outer-planets environments, but the researchers found that liquefying diamond requires 40 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level.
Finally (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
So now /.ers can tell their "girlfriends" that if you want a diamond, you're free to look for one in Uranus?
I'm sorry langelgjm but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Incontinentia
Re:Finally (Score:5, Funny)
So now /.ers can tell their "girlfriends" that if you want a diamond, you're free to look for one in Uranus?
Worth a shot...
...and now I have a black eye to explain to my boss. Damn you, science!
"Hey, baby! Answer me this: What's the hardest thing known to man, and you can find lots of it way up in Uranus?"
*oof*
Re:Finally (Score:4, Funny)
How is the starship Enterprise like toilet paper?
Both circle Uranus picking up Klingons.
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liar!
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No it won't. Diamonds are cheap because of enforced supply. With any likelihood, this would be lobbied to never take off so the diamond supply stays small and controlled.
Re:Finally (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think you live in the DeBeers reality distortion bubble.
The biggest diamond on earth can be made industrially for a few cents.
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Re:Finally (Score:5, Funny)
vindication for bluegrass (Score:5, Informative)
Like many sci-fi authors who predicted inventions long before they became practical, bluegrass can now claim [youtube.com] foresight into future scientific advances.
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obligatory uranus joke (Score:5, Funny)
"Pardon my French, but Cameron is so tight that if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you'd have a diamond."
-- Ferris Bueller
Well, that's one way to get the space race moving. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to let everyone know that Mars is full of gold just under the crust, and every planet around Proxima Centauri is rich with uranium.
Get that space program moving.
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:4, Funny)
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Good riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:4, Interesting)
I recall someone doing some maths and determined that if there were a mountain of gold bars on the moon it would not be economical to go get some. Same applies here I'd imagine, much moreso.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And you might also be interested to know that a mountain of gold doesn't eve exist on the earth. Apparently all the gold ever refined in the world would only fill a cube 20 meters on each side.
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:5, Informative)
Using your figures:
116,000 short tons.
1 ft^3 = ~.5 short tons
(insert cup of coffee here)
232,000 ft^3
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:5, Funny)
>if there were a mountain of gold bars on the moon it would not be economical to go get some.
Why not? All you have to do is get there, ie. the cost of the rocket and fuel, plus training and supplies.
Then once you're up there, all you have to do is throw all the gold back down.
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:5, Funny)
Then once you're up there, all you have to do is throw all the gold back down.
Well, you'd have to "throw" it down slowly enough so that it doesn't become a molten, white-hot projectile and embed itself several miles in the ground when it crash-lands.
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:5, Funny)
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Mycroft
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:5, Insightful)
Though if it would be possible to mine this form of coal in industrial quantities, it could suddenly become useful as a mineral... (yes, I know diamonds are useful already - but those are usually small amounts of manufactured ones). There's even one book by Stephenson more or less about it. And hey, you have whole moon out there full of hydrocarbons, in quantities many times greater than deposits on Earth.
Is it impractical now? Hell yeah. Will it always be? I don't know. But I'm sure many people would laugh at you only few thousand years ago for suggesting that dark rocks can be used as a source of energy. A thousands years ago for suggesting the same with whale oil on industrial scale. 200 years ago with that black oily substance seeping from the ground here and there. Rocks from which people get mysteriously sick used for power generation and most powerful explosives? Tapping the power of a volcano? Splitting water to get to the Moon? That's insane!
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:4, Insightful)
Just to be pedantic... (Score:3, Interesting)
Stephenson's Diamond Age [powells.com] isn't about mined diamonds, it's about when we're so capable of satisfying our every need with nanotechnology, that diamonds are cheap and easily fabricated (with interesting societal implications)... by far, my favorite Stephenson book.
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:5, Informative)
You know what else De Beers is peeved about? Man-made [gemesis.com] diamonds [apollodiamond.com]. They're cheaper and more ethical than anything De Beers can find in Sierra Leone.
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:4, Informative)
That and Canadian and Russian production that basically broke the cartel.
It might be more accurate to say they joined with the cartel to ensure that profits stay high through artificial scarcity.
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:4, Informative)
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I didn't mean legally joining, I meant aligning themselves with the overall philosophy and methods. I particularly like how the Canadians have their "Polar Ice Certification" to ensure that you get a real Canadian diamond, and not one of those crappy ones from somewhere else...
http://www.polaricediamonds.com/ [polaricediamonds.com]
Re:Well, that's one way to get the space race movi (Score:5, Insightful)
Yellow synthetic diamonds (nitrogen impurity) are easy to make, comparatively, and form the basis of a lot of the industrial uses. However, vapour deposition techniques are quite capable of making blue (with boron) or colourless synthetic diamonds that are visually indistinguishable from a pure volcanic diamond.
In fact the only way to distinguish them is to do a chemical analysis (eg with UV light) and compare the result against the impurities listed in volcanic diamonds from all the known mines.
For the dull knives in the drawer (Score:5, Insightful)
I only point this out because you would be surprised at how many human beings don't know this, but for it to float to the top, that means its frozen state is less dense, hence expands, when freezes. Almost nothing else does this.
Re:For the dull knives in the drawer (Score:4, Informative)
There's at least one notable substance that shares this property: Water. That's why it forms ice on the top surface rather than along the bottom/sides of the container (be that container a bucket, a river, or a lake). This very fact is instrumental to life on our little globe.
elements where the liquid is denser than solid (Score:2)
There's at least one notable substance that shares this property: Water.
And another notable one, silicon.
Re:For the dull knives in the drawer (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:For the dull knives in the drawer (Score:5, Interesting)
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Water does that.
Only because water (h2o) is a polar molecule. When we're talking diamonds and other similar materials we're talking raw elements (carbon in the case of diamond) which don't have the opportunity to be polar, and thus will always contract as cooled.
Re:For the dull knives in the drawer (Score:5, Informative)
Bismuth, Silicon, Germanium and Gallium are all elements that have a solid phase that is less dense than their liquid phase. Acetic acid I hear is less dense in its solid phase but I haven't had a chance to verify this.
Re:For the dull knives in the drawer (Score:5, Informative)
Darkroom photography verifies this. 'Glacial' Acetic Acid is used in developing and fixing photographic film, and particularly silver halide based prints. Normally, it is kept heavily refrigerated between uses to slow evaporation and keep it at the right concentration, and it not infrequently gets cold enough for bits to solidify and float on top. Home photographers, who often left bottles sitting in their darkroom fridge for months, tended to notice sizeable bits more than pros who went through whole bottles in days, and it was some of these amateurs who tried thawing out just the frozen bits, and by proving they worked at the same speed in film processing, showed they were at least roughly the same concentration as the liquid chemical, and were not acetic acid depleted, near pure water ices.
Of course, now that practically nobody actually develops film anymore, what was once well known chemistry for amateur hobbyists becomes unverified rumor to a new generation.
Re:For the dull knives in the drawer (Score:4, Informative)
Water decreases in density when it freezes because it forms a rigid crystal structure where there's quite a bit of empty space between molecules. Elements, such as carbon, can do that too, except the crystal structure is formed between atoms instead of molecules.
Since the story is about solid diamond being less dense than liquid, why would you claim that elements will always contract as they're cooled?
Article is clearly misinformed (Score:2, Funny)
There's no way this is even remotely possible.
I mean, diamonds are rare, aren't they? You know it, I know it, and De Beers know it.
Much as I'd love to make a great pun about uranus. (Score:5, Interesting)
The possibilities of exploring the outer "ice giants" is massive. I think, at least. I may not even make the pun because I think the idea of exploring them is so interesting.
Submarines are designed to handle a test depth of maybe 1600 ft which means maybe 50 bar of pressure. At that pressure, the atmosphere of Uranus is a little below freezing. The gravity is less than Earth. I suspect that with correct ballasting you could make a metal sphere float in the atmosphere for quite some time by keeping the insides pressurized to a convenient atmospheric pressure. So sticking around for a while isn't hard.
I can't find any good information on the radiation environment there and if you could put humans in the little bubble circling Uranus.. um.. yeah, I lied above.
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Escape velocity is such that while humans could be landed on Neptune or Uranus they couldn't be lifted off without advanced fusion powered rockets. I don't actually think the giant planets have much potential for us unless we find ways to exploit humungus amounts of mass. Applications like building ringworld and dyson spheres could require that much mass.
The moons of the giant planets will keep us busy for 1000 years at least.
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The problem isn't somuch the escape velocity required, as it is getting the fuel there. Look how much fuel it takes to get the shuttle out of the atmosphere. Compare that with the weight of the shuttle itself. Now imagine what it would take to launch that much fuel into orbit, if you were going to take it with you and use it to take off from Neptune after you landed.
Fusion drive probably wouldn't be any more useful there as it is here. Currently the most practical way to orbit is to trade mass at apprec
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The atmosphere of Uranus is 83% hydrogen. If we can't turn that into fuel for a fusion reactor then we won't be operating in the atmosphere of that planet. So the planet has plenty of fuel, and fusion power is (as always) 50 years away.
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Actually a nuclear powered rocket will do just fine. Nobody there to get pissed off if you pressurize some of the abundant hydrogen into a tank and run it past a fission reactor.
Re:Much as I'd love to make a great pun about uran (Score:4, Informative)
Escape velocity is such that while humans could be landed on Neptune or Uranus they couldn't be lifted off without advanced fusion powered rockets.
Yeah, well don't forget about the gravity. If humans landed on those planets I doubt they'd be very interested in taking off again. Although they might make good frisbees from then on.
As cmowire pointed out gravity on most of these planets is not so great, with the exception of Jupiter where it is IIRC 2.5 g or so. On saturn it is just over a g and on Uranus and Neptune it is below one g. While their mass is huge their density is low so gravity is modest.
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Thats easy:
Escape velocity of uranus: 21290 m/s [wolframalpha.com]
Escape velocity of earth: 11180 m/s [wolframalpha.com]
Interestingly it is actually only about twice as hard to get away from Uranus. Thats a lot better than I expected. Maybe its because of the low density and the fact that you start out in the fluffy atmosphere. Escape velocity from a singularity with the mass of Uranus or Earth is of course infinite.
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Thats easy:
Escape velocity of uranus: 21290 m/s [wolframalpha.com]
Escape velocity of earth: 11180 m/s [wolframalpha.com]
Interestingly it is actually only about twice as hard to get away from Uranus. Thats a lot better than I expected. Maybe its because of the low density and the fact that you start out in the fluffy atmosphere. Escape velocity from a singularity with the mass of Uranus or Earth is of course infinite.
About four times as hard. KE=1/2 m v^2
pressure off by a magnitude (Score:5, Insightful)
40 million atmospheres is the kind of pressure that you'd measure under 400 million meters (400,000km) of material at a density of 1 g/cm^3 at a constant 1 g. Uranus and Neptune's gravity field is near 1g give or take and the density is not much more than 1g/cm^3 so the pressure in the core can not be 40 million atmospheres as there isn't ~400,000 km of material sitting above the core. Given that Uranus has a radius of ~25,000 km, density of ~1.27 g/cm^3, surface gravity of 8.7 m/s^2 and that the gravity field drops off roughly linearly with depth, the pressure is probably about a tenth of what TFA says diamond started to melt. Either someone dropped a zero where it didn't belong or Diamond isn't fluid in these planets' cores.
Re:pressure off by a magnitude (Score:4, Informative)
The core pressure of Uranus is estimated at 8 million bar, temperature about 5,000 K.
For Neptune, 7 million bar, temperature 5,400 K.
So yes, someone is full of shit.
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1 atm = about 100 kilopascals
according to http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/PavelKhazron.shtml [hypertextbook.com], At the centre, the pressure is about 380GPa (380,000,000,000pascal)
so pressure at earth's center is about 3.8 million atmospheres. Quite a bit shy of 40. But that's assuming the same radius and density, which are probably quite a bit off. But not by that much I don't think.
Actually "Oceans of melted coal" (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder why the headline isn't
Uranus and Neptune May Have "Oceans of melted coal"
"diamond" is by definition a solid crystalline form of carbon. If you melt it, it is by definition not diamond anymore.
Re:Actually "Oceans of melted coal" (Score:5, Informative)
Normally when you try to melt a Diamond, the Diamond converts to graphite first and then melts. When the material freezes again, it isn't Diamond anymore. In the case of the article, the Diamond is under so much pressure that it no longer converts to Graphite before melting. When the liquid freezes again, it isn't Coal but Diamond.
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Carbon's phase diagram shows quite clearly that Graphite becomes the less stable form as temperature and pressure increase to a sufficient degree. So bringing Graphite to these conditions would indeed convert to diamond as you freeze it out of the liquid phase.
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What? "Insightful"?
So viking80 and everyone that modded viking80 didn't think to RTFA. It sets about answering this question right from the offset.
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Obviously "liquid carbon" is the proper name, but I guess why they are calling it "liquid diamond" is because they are exploring the pressure/temperature region of the phase diagram where it solidifies into diamond (ergo diamond floating in liquid carbon).
http://dao.mit.edu/8.231/carbon_phase_diagram.jpg [mit.edu]
I don't get whey they are saying liquid Carbon may exist on Uranus though - the phase diagram indicates a minumum temperature for the liquid phase of 4.5 x 10^3 K, and even the core of Uranus is nowhere near
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The article is misleading (it appears that the author is himself confused).
There's only one liquid phase, and it's the same one between graphite and diamond. SpinyNorman's phase diagram graph shows it well. Look at "graphite + metastable diamond". There are diamonds at that temperature, although they'd "rather" be graphite, to anthropomorphise it. Then increase temperature by going directly to the right. It will first turn to graphite as it crosses the dashed line, then it will melt. Cool it down by g
These aren't valuable (Score:2)
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De Beers actually has much less control over the diamond market than they used to... the market is still tightly controlled, but it's not just De Beers anymore.
But, as long as enough women get sucked in by diamond industry marketing and make receiving a ridiculously priced piece of carbon a condition of getting married, diamond prices will remain high.
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The cost of something depends on quantity and demand/supply. So if it took 3,000$/kg to mine these diamonds from these gas giants, it wouldn't be profitable to mine enough of them to decrease the overall cost of diamonds below this value. If the supply of Diamond crashes to the point where the demand pushes up the cost of Diamonds enough that mining them from these gas giants is profitable then the price would still be at least what it cost to mine them from these planets. The only way that diamond value
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The price of the diamonds would still need to cover the price of retrieving them, so until it got cheap and efficient to collect them, they would still be rather expensive.
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Diamond is the hardest metal known to man! Imagine a safehouse or a car made of the stuff.
Calling it (Score:2, Funny)
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Diamonds for all! (Score:2)
liquid crystals? (Score:2)
So, how is liquid diamond different from liquid graphite or liquid carbon? It's my understanding that the only difference between graphite and diamond is that the crystalline structure is 2-d in graphite and 3-d in diamond.
Is it just the fact that at those temperatures and pressures the natural crystals formed from the liquid are diamond?
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Life at 40 million atmospheres (Score:5, Interesting)
Hal Clement thought too small. Mesklin may be too low pressure for complex life.
One of the reasons earth is so amenable to life is that ice floats, so the oceans remain deep and liquid. The hydrocarbon oceans of Mesklin would be shallow and cold, a thin layer of liquid ammonia or methane over ices and clathrates. Thus they wouldn't serve as a moderator of temperature and reservoir of life the way Earths oceans have.
But if life based on crystalline carbon at millions of atmospheres is possible at all, it's all the more possible if the carbon-cycle resembles the water cycle on Earth.
Oh, NASA (Score:2)
That was a very clever trick. NASA won't need to worry about getting the funding to build long-range spacecraft anymore now. Devious...
Diamonds aren't rare. (Score:2, Informative)
Watch Out! I saw this on Doctor Who! (Score:2)
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It's a wonderful planet (Score:5, Funny)
Utopia Project (Score:2, Funny)
It's the SKIES that are made of diamonds.
BLING BLING!!! (Score:2)
A C Clarke (Score:4, Informative)
I think it was first mentioned in the book 2010 that Jupiter may have a core of diamond, nd later in the book 2061 an astronomer finds a piece of it (after Jupiter is blown up into a star by the monolith) on Europa.
So it would not be surprising to find diamond at the core of other gas giants. But so what, we could make diamond here on earth for less energy cost than digging it out of a gas giant and bringing it back to earth.
In other news... (Score:2)
...DeBeers lobbies congress that the Space Program is a huge waste of money when there are real problems to be solved *here on earth*.
What's Unlike Like? (Score:5, Informative)
"...unlike Earth, they do not have magnetic poles that match up with their geographical poles."
Unlike Earth, neither does Earth. The Earth's south magnetic pole is presently about 25.6 degrees from the south pole. Granted, that's not 60 degrees, but apparently neither are theirs since according to TFA the magnetic poles on Uranus and Neptune "can be up to 60 degrees off the north-south axis", it they were, there's be no reason to say "can be".
There's no note regarding secondary poles on the giant planets like on the sun, but according the Oersted and Magsat satellite data and article in Nature in 2002 (416/8661, pp 620-623) there's an alternate pole developing in the South Atlantic west of South Africa. There's also a geomagnetic anomaly near Lake Baikal in Siberia that causes deflection in the magnetic field measured as far away as Japan, but there's no evidence (or none as yet) that it's a developing "alternate". But one's enough, when it comes to picking apart TFA. Not only is Earth unlike the Earth they compare against while constructing their theory, it's quite capable of being equal to the giants in its unlikeness in the complete absence of diamond seas with or without diamondbergs.
grumble grumble grumble (Score:4, Informative)
This is slashdot, so I suppose it should not come as a shock that the summary makes claims that don't stand up to even a casual examination. About 15 seconds on google scholar produces the following paper:
Correa, A.A. and Bonev, S.A. and Galli, G, Carbon under extreme conditions: Phase boundaries and electronic properties from first-principles theory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.103, 1204 (2006)
link to article [pnas.org]
The second paragraph of the article [nature.com] in Nature Physics (subscription required) that this story is about mentions at least 11 other papers on theoretical calculations and experiments on the melting of diamond. So no, this is not in fact the first time that the melting of diamond has been studied. Indeed, the linked article itself refers to previous experiments at Sandia National Laboratory that melted diamond, but were unable to accurately determine the temperature and pressure.
This is truly impressive work by some very skilled scientists, but let's discuss it for what it is and not what it isn't.
Artificial Scarcity (Score:4, Insightful)
Waht do yo mean, unlike earth? (Score:3, Interesting)
Earth's magnetic poles don't match the geographic poles. They pretty much never have, except by coincidence.
Let's get one thing straight.... (Score:3, Funny)
So? (Score:3, Interesting)
All the “worth” of diamonds is artificial anyway.
A diamond can easily be made and is worth a few cents. Tops. And it’s even of higher quality than anything nature has to offer.
The only people who still go “Ooohhh, diamonds!” are either very uninformed, or ignorant retards.
But, Earth's magnetical poles do not... (Score:3, Insightful)
Semi-precious diamonds (Score:3, Insightful)
From Wikipedia:
The traditional classification in the West, which goes back to the Ancient Greeks, begins with a distinction between precious and semi-precious stones; similar distinctions are made in other cultures. The precious stones are diamond, ruby, emerald and sapphire, with all other gemstones being semi-precious.[2] This distinction is unscientific and reflects the rarity of the respective stones in ancient times
That means if diamonds were to be classified today, they would be downgraded from "precious" to "semi-precious". Diamonds are not rare in the least. In fact, all planets are likely to have diamonds. All planets with geological activity, present or in the past, are likely to have diamonds on or near their surface.
I wish people would understand that the diamond market is completely artificially manipulated. Only industrial diamonds are mostly influenced by basic market supply and demand - but not completely. Diamonds which are used as precious stones have their supply tightly controlled so as to create artificial scarcity. Control on diamonds are so tightly controlled, in some countries (Africa), picking up a diamond without government permission (e.g. DeBeers) may result in execution on the spot. Think about that. If diamonds were so scarce, why would then need to specifically make legal provisions to allow for an extremely rare event of discovering a natural, rough diamond on the ground? Unless of course, they're not rare at all and diamonds really are commonly found simply laying on the ground. And people face execution because an unfeathered supply of diamonds to the market would crash their value over night.
There are few things in the modern times which have caused more pain, misery, death, and mass slavery than Diamonds and DeBeers. But to be clear, DeBeers is not alone here.
Few diamonds in the world, contrary to the conflict free marketing, are truly "blood-free", as as much as 60% of the "conflict free" diamonds are actually smuggled from "conflict zones". In other words, over half of every diamond you see in stores is there because of someone's murder, slavery (including children), and illegal imprisonment, torture, so on and so on.
So remember nothing says I love you like blood, summary executions, and slavery. Its not just a moto, its fact.
Re:motivation (Score:4, Interesting)
A) Diamonds are only expensive on earth because of artificial scarcity. If we could bring them back to earth by the spaceshipload, suddenly they wouldn't be worth very much. Apparently this is different than the nature of unobtanium.
B) Space flight is extremely expensive. If it turned out the moon were solid gold, and we could go there and bring it back a ton at a time, it still wouldn't be cost-effectice to go get it. It really does cost that much to go into space.
Re:motivation (Score:4, Interesting)
Diamonds are only expensive on earth because of artificial scarcity
I don't think even that is the case anymore. Maybe in the past, and maybe that's why the present is where it is, where something has a perceived value that's arguably a great deal above it's actual or practical value. The diamond market goes to great lengths to maintain this public perception. The only diamonds that are scarce are large natural ones.
Heck, helium is fast becoming a scarce material, which is just weird to think about. But they're not making it anymore so I suppose.
Re:motivation (Score:4, Insightful)
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If it turned out the moon were solid gold, and we could go there and bring it back a ton at a time, it still wouldn't be cost-effectice to go get it. It really does cost that much to go into space.
But returning a ton of stuff from space can be quite cheap. Returning gold from the moon could be cost-effective, if you were willing to spend quite a few billion dollars building a mass-driver to launch it to Earth, and facilities to build simple lifting bodies to land it safely.
That said, if you were to return enough gold to justify such an investment, the price of gold might drop too low to justify the cost :).
Of course in this case even if you could build a mass-driver on one of Neptune's moons that was
Re:can't you just make a diamond in the lab? (Score:5, Interesting)
Synthetic diamonds are for the most part, industrial grade which tends to be opaque unlike gem quality natural diamonds which are transparent, contain Nitrogen and don't fluoresce under UV like synthetic diamonds generally do. Synthetic diamonds are synthesized in rapid fashion which leaves two major crystal phases in the finished material which is responsible for the fluorescence under UV light. Any transparent synthetic diamonds tend to either be devoid of Nitrogen (crystal clear) or have a yellowish tinge to them caused by Nitrogen in the crystal. Natural diamonds have Nitrogen in them but they form in such long periods of time that there is only one major crystal phase in them and the Nitrogen has migrated to regions in the crystal in such a way as to leave the diamond clear instead of yellow. So yes diamonds can be synthesized cheaper than those dug out of the ground. However, they are not quite the same as of today's technology and can often be differentiated from natural diamonds because of minute differences in their characteristics.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It is likely cheaper to create the technology to create perfect synthetic diamonds than to create the technology needed to fish them out of a gas giant ocean pressurized to 40 million pounds per square inch.
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I put $100 on “You”ve got that ‘information’ from the DeBeers website.” ^^
Re:can't you just make a diamond in the lab? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes.
Even natural diamonds aren't the slightest bit rare on Earth. It's just the diamond cartels that make it rare.