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Astronomers discover planet made of diamond
- glimcat 15y agoThe sky is made of diamonds.
- danberger 15y agoLucy must be there :)
- stan_rogers 15y agoNot all of it -- this is obviously a custom job from Magrathea.
- glimcat 15y agoThat, or the Spiders. But I didn't see an erupting binary with a disturbingly regular 250-year period.
- TeMPOraL 15y agoTherefore, sky is forever.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoIf we could make a few discoveries like that a little closer and in slightly more hospitable environments, maybe we could get some enterprising capitalists to try to cash in, and thereby make our way through and beyond the solar system. Well, I can dream, can't I?
- Natsu 15y agoDiamonds are just a special form of carbon which is, itself, not very rare. Granted, it's fairly hard to coax carbon into that form, at least if you want something that looks like a gem, but we already have CVD processes which can make diamond. The main reason they're valuable is due to marketing.
- xibernetik 15y agoInteresting read on the history of diamonds/marketing them: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you-ever-tried-to-sell-a-diamond/4575/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you...
- typicalrunt 15y agoGood link. It's a super old story [1982] but the information in it still stands the test of time. It's a great read into how the PR departments of DeBeers influenced entire countries (e.g. Japan) where diamonds previously held little/no value.
- burke 15y agoYup. Producing several megatons of diamond in labs would be many orders of magnitude easier than harvesting it from another planet. Even if it were the moon that were made of diamond, I strongly suspect that the energy requirements to harvest it would still exceed the normally-extreme energy requirements of growing it in a lab.
- typicalrunt 15y agoharvesting it from another planet You raise an interesting idea here. I wonder how difficult it would be to harvest diamond from a diamond planet. Diamond can be cleaved if you hit it at the correct angle [1] but if the entire planet is made of diamond then what would happen? Would a wrong cleave or heavy force shatter the planet into nothingness? Rather, I think the planet is made of many small (relative to an entire planet) sized diamonds embedded in dirt. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_cutting#Cleaving_or_sawing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_cutting#Cleaving_or_saw...
- jarin 15y agoYou can cut diamond with diamond saws or lasers, if you wanted to pull out diamond bricks from a big mass or whatever.
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- jarin 15y agoI think hydrogen-3 mining is probably more likely. From what I understand, it's far more common on the moon and gas giants than on Earth, and it's useful for fusion.
- patio11 15y agoIf we could make a few discoveries like that a little closer and in slightly more hospitable environments "Close" and "hospitable" only appear in space in science fiction. In real life, it's uniformly deadly to well-prepared people backed by billions of dollars of military hardware, and so vast it staggers the imagination. (People really don't have an intuitive understanding that just one light year is ~300 times more than Voyager has traveled in the last 30 years.)
- tokenadult 15y agoHN discussion of the article "The High Frontier, Redux" (the HN title was "Why we are unlikely ever to leave the solar system"): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456 The submitted article was very sound reasoning on why no one in humankind is ever going to make a trip to an extrasolar planet. The comments on the HN thread that disagreed with that conclusion showed appalling lack of consideration of physics or economics.
- 3pt14159 15y agoEconomic growth is nearly exponential. With a title like "Why we are unlikely to _ever_ leave the solar system" I can see why people disagreed.
- arethuza 15y agoThat makes me wonder about the Fermi Paradox - if economic growth is nearly exponential then presumably there should probably be a large number of civilisations that have been undergoing exponentional economic and technical growth for a long long time. So where are they? After all, if you believe that economic growth will definitely get us to the stars one day why hasn't someone/something else got there/here first?
- salemh 15y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event http://www.skepticalscience.com/Earths-five-mass-extinction-events.html http://www.skepticalscience.com/Earths-five-mass-extinction-... Then theorize on the older civilizations which we have little record outside of temples of engineering which can baffle the mind, and, perhaps, at the apex of planet-lift off, a Caldera blows. Just a thought.
- 3pt14159 15y agoSelection bias may be the only reason we are still around. Or we just got here way before the rest of the party started.
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- pmiller2 15y agoThere's already more oil on Titan than there is on Earth. :)
- kevindication 15y agoAmazingly timely given that I'm about half way through A Deepness in the Sky. (A diamond asteroid figures into the plot.)
- masterzora 15y agoNot that amazing. Considering that Vinge is of high interest to a number of HN readers, that there are a fair number of HN users, and that Deepness in the Sky is of sufficient length and density that a readthrough (especially a first) can take a pretty decent length of time, I wouldn't find it at all surprising is there was always at least one HN commenter who either was currently in middle of or had just finished Deepness in the Sky.
- prawn 15y agoAm I the only one imagining the Dwight Schrute meme while reading this? http://memegenerator.net/Dwight-Schrute http://memegenerator.net/Dwight-Schrute
- rblion 15y agoCuriouser and curiouser... "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." - Sir Arthur Eddington
- shasta 15y agoTwinkle twinkle little star ... Like a diamond in the sky
- bond 15y agoI can imagine a colony being set there by the year 4000 run by the "Company"...