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Yup. 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 th
by burke 15y ago
Yup. 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.
- chc 15y agoGiven that making diamonds in a lab is cheaper than mining it right here on earth, it's hard to see how it could be cheaper to fly hundreds of thousands of miles through outer space to mine it.