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Uranus and Neptune May Have "Oceans of Diamonds"
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.
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.
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
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.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Might be worth the cost of shipping if it did away with the diamond industry once and for all! Of course, what with marketing, De Beers would probably buy up the stock from Uranus and either dump it in the ocean, or sell it at 500% the price of normal diamonds as "space diamonds... the most romantic diamond yet. Shit that's been floating on the seas of Uranus for millions of years can now be on your hand - FOREVER."
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
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.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
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!
One that hath name thou can not otter
C) good luck designing something that could survive the pressures and temperatures that cause diamond to melt, and yet that would also be capable of escaping the gravity wells of Uranus or Neptune. They may not be Jupiter or Saturn but they're still gas giants.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Yes.
Even natural diamonds aren't the slightest bit rare on Earth. It's just the diamond cartels that make it rare.
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
The cake is a pie
i believe you mean expensive, not cheap
weinersmith
Offtopic? - C'mon mods where's your sense of humour?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Not only that, but it would probably be much more practical to set up outposts near the supply to take advantage of them; if we can mine those diamonds, we should certainly be able to set up some industrial outposts to utilize the diamonds properly.
http://www.tenjou.net/
"Oceans of Diamonds"??? De Beers has that already. Have you ever heard of "Artificial Scarcity"?
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.
Are people really so shallow that they worry some random person on the street will pull out a magnifying glass and/or shine a UV lamp to "out" the synthetic-diamond-wearer?
It looks the same in natural light, right? That's all anyone should care about.
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.
Might I suggest a magnetic rail based system to launch payloads from Luna to Earth. I have reason to believe such a system could be quite effective.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
I think you live in the DeBeers reality distortion bubble.
The biggest diamond on earth can be made industrially for a few cents.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
...align with its geographical poles. We were all taught this in 3rd grade. Our magnetic poles wander around the planet all the time, and are pretty far off from the geographical poles. This is called magnetic declination, and is something everyone who has studied basic navigation is well aware of.
If so, why isn't anyone at GE Superabrasives defecting and setting up a new corp to exploit this market anomaly, mass-produce all kinds of shiny super-tough stuff and gut the business of two market leaders in the process?
blow your mind already
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.