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The Planets with the Giant Diamonds Inside
- achow 5y agoThe info related to the title is buried in the middle of the article. For those who don't have patience.. ..Uranus and Neptune must contain vast quantities of water, ammonia, and methane on the inside.. He finds that the carbon atoms spontaneously break free of their molecules and arrange themselves into diamonds. Inside Uranus and Neptune, such diamonds could grow to the size of a person, slowly raining down toward the core of the planet..
- Crash0v3rid3 5y agoIt saddens me how people still put so much value in diamonds given how prevalent they are on Earth and across the solar system.
- Magodo 5y agoHey, I'd give anything for more people to be interested in space! If saying something like it rains diamonds on a planet to make people at least mildly interested in this kind of thing, I'm all for it, even though such a thing is banal at the cosmic scale
- tobmlt 5y ago“A diamond is metastable, just like your marriage and our cartel” -de beers ...possibly
- klyrs 5y agoGiven its incredible thermal conductance, I've often wondered if diamond would be a better substrate than silicon... a significant challenge being the difficulty producing single-crystal wafers of a useful size. If only we could extract these person-sized diamonds from the environments hostile enough for them to form in...
- jazzyjackson 5y agoSomething I stumbled upon while studying crystallography as a hobby is that Silicon and Diamond have in common is their lattice structure called "Diamond Cubic" [1] Can't find what I'm looking for but I think it was a recent article here about molecular-scale mechanical computers -- we're getting better at arranging single atoms in space, and building diamonds from carbon is on the table. Q for you tho, what does thermal conductivity have to do with being a digital circuit substrate? I didn't think heat-management was the bottleneck. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_cubic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_cubic
- klyrs 5y agoI'm not an expert in this at all, but I have seen thermal management mentioned as a bottleneck to increasing circuit density[1], and especially for 3d integration[2] where heat removal is significantly more challenging. [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180705144357.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180705144357.h... [2, pdf] https://www.cs.utah.edu/wondp/eckert.pdf https://www.cs.utah.edu/wondp/eckert.pdf
- iamnotwhoiam 5y agoIn the last two Space Odyssey books, diamond from the core of Jupiter are used for mega construction projects like space elevators. Clarke went way beyond a simple tether and imagined inhabited towers extending to geosynchronous orbit. All made of diamond.
- barbazoo 5y agoRegardless of prevalence I don't understand how people put so much value in diamonds. As far as I know they're not heavily used for anything productive.
- caseyavila 5y agoAren't diamonds heavily used to improve cutting tools? I know they are not worth as much in that context, but it's still a productive use case.
- barbazoo 5y agoExactly, I doubt they'd be worth much in that context.
- jazzyjackson 5y agodiamond dust, not multi-karat stones.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago"Conspicuous Consumption", a prior art to Proof of Work, a way to express how much money you can afford to burn.
- optimalsolver 5y agoOr so we have been told by the Virginia Company.
- wrycoder 5y agoGreat article! I think I learned something new in every paragraph.
- barcoder 5y agoIf you're interested in space mining there's an excellent book called Mining The Sky: Untold Riches From The Asteroids, Comets, And Planets by John S. Lewis that goes into great detail about the how space mining and building in space could work
- jazzyjackson 5y agoSome great cover art to boot, thanks for the recommendation.
- cheaprentalyeti 5y ago"Well, that's one way to lose these orbit blues Diamonds at the cores of our hues..." Eh, nah, doesn't scan.
- LorenPechtel 5y agoDeBeers is going to be trying to block the space program when they read this! :)