It rains solid diamonds on Uranus and Neptune | Hacker News Reader

It rains solid diamonds on Uranus and Neptune

washingtonpost.com

95 pointscs70269 comments

The WP article says that "Most lab-grown stones are produced via a blasting process..." This is not true.

Where "lab-grown stones" means gem quality diamonds, they're produced by microwave-activated plasma chemical vapor deposition.

Some small-diameter diamond abrasives and nano diamonds are produced with explosives. Nothing bigger than a few microns in diameter, AFAIK.

Paywalled. More easily accessible at http://www.dailyitem.com/news/it-rains-solid-diamonds-on-ura...

huh - where is the pay wall? maybe it's neutralized by ublock origin.

Can we officially rename Uranus to Caelus? Uranus (more accurately, Ouranos) is a Greek god. Besides Earth, all the other planets are named after Roman gods, thus Uranus should be named Caelus to be consistent.

That's not the only reason to rename Uranus

I've always preferred "Terra" or "Gaia" to "Earth."

It could be a preference from video games, or maybe it’s because the common usage and being a synonym for ground and dirt has made the word seem ”low-brow” and the alternatives classy, exotic or poetic, and if their popularity was reversed we would think "Earth" was a classier word, but still.

“Terrans” will always sound better than “Earthlings” however. :)

Where did the name Earth come from? https://www.indifferentlanguages.com/words/earth

It is a common word in many languages and it has many forms like Ard or Erd or Jord.

The other word for earth that is also very common is zameen, but that means land.

You can usually look up etymologies on Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Earth#Etymology

Earth comes "from Middle English erthe, from Old English eorþe (“earth; Earth”), from Proto-Germanic erþō (“earth”), from Proto-Indo-European h₁er- (“earth”)."

Also (from the page for lowercase "earth"): "Probably unrelated, and of unknown etymology, is Old Armenian երկիր (erkir, “earth”)). Likewise, the phonologically similar Proto-Semitic *ʾarṣ́- (whence Arabic أَرْض‏ (ʾarḍ), Hebrew אֶרֶץ‏ (ʾereṣ)) is probably not related."

I think this is just one instance of a near-universal perception among English speakers that Greek/Latin words ("Terra") sound more sophisticated than Anglo-Saxon ones ("earth").

It's hard to hypothesize about whether this could be reversed in an alternate universe because this tendency goes back many centuries: for a loooong time Latin was the language of the scholarly and political elite, whereas Anglo-Saxon Old English was used by commoners.

There is a similar reason for why English swear words sound Germanic: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/06/swear-words-etymo...

Such an interesting article. Churchill was known to take advantage of this in his speeches, for example in (parts of) the famous "We shall fight them on the beaches": https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/97665/did-the-we...

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all. - Winston Churchill

>for a loooong time Latin was the language of the scholarly and political elite

French was too for hundreds of years even up until now and maybe for the EU again after Brexit.

"Terra" means ground/dirt in Latin just as much as "earth" does in English.

Terra also means ground, for example: terra firma.

It's funny because in Brazilian portuguese, people commonly use terra to refer to dirt.

Some people use Earth for dirt as well, like earthwork.

Why is it that it bothers you that it's a Greek name and not that there's a planet named after the sky?

It's not named after the sky. It's named after the God of the Sky, which doesn't bother me any more than other planetary bodies being named after deities of couriers, beauty, war, thunder, agriculture, ocean, the underworld, and so on.

The main reasons to rename Uranus is 1) consistency and 2) the puns. Either name it Caelus to be consistent with the naming convention used for the other planets or name it Ouranos to be closer to its Greek spelling and pronunciation.

I prefer (1) because the current situation is similar to having a codebase where all class names are PascalCase but there's this one class name in Upper_Snake_Case.

Is it really worth the waste of time it would be to debate this at the IAU and the confusion it would cause? Dwarf planets don't follow any set mythology (e.g., Makemake follows Easter Island mythology). Most people aren't experts of Greek and Roman mythology. The English language is full of inconsistencies.

It is named after the sky. Or rather, it's named after a deity which was named after the sky: οὐρανός is/was the common term for sky in Greek.

> the puns

That's a reason to keep the name - it's a rich seam that never seems to run dry. Also, if we did want to change the name, we all know what the anointed successor is...

The valley spirit never dies;
It is the woman, primal mother.
Her gateway is the root of heaven and earth.
It is like a veil barely seen.

Use it; it will never fail.

~Lao Tzu

Don't worry; it will be renamed in 2620: http://www.cc.com/video-clips/a6o404/futurama-smelloscope

Can someone explain a concept to me? I never understood how gold rushes were profitable. If you suddenly found a mass quantity of a "rare" material, wouldn't it no longer be valuable since its value depended on its scarcity?

Depending on the resource, there may be latent demand that can be met when a cheaper source of a resource is discovered. Demand curves are not linear.

Often times, as a resource becomes more readily available, a ton of new uses spring up that were not economically feasible when the cost was higher.

The term for this is price elasticity: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/priceelasticity.asp

A "gold rush" probably didn't make gold abundant -- it was just enough to make a few people rich.

Generally people that sell inputs like shovels, jeans, and land. Prospectors generally lose money.

Gold rushes tend to be more guaranteedly (I just made up that word, if it isn't one :) profitable to the people who promote them as being profitable - than to those who rush in trying to find the gold. Look up "picks and shovels".

It takes a bit of time for that information about abundance to propagate through the economy, and for prices to update to reflect it. During that lag time people are able to get rich.

Book recommendation: The Man Who Sold the Moon by Robert Heinlein. One of the things handled in the plot is the fictional assertion that the moon is covered in diamonds.

Seeing the story about water on Luna reminded me of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. And now the public library copy is on my desk.

I'm reading some more recent short stories right now that take place in several moon colonies. They talk a lot about the scarcity of water.

I think this is a pretty gross misuse of the word "rain" for clickbait. The diamonds form close to the planets' solid cores, not anywhere near what we see as the planets' surfaces.

Reminds me of a plot point in Arthur C. Clarke's 2061: Odyssey Three.

Lucy in the sky with diamonds...

There's an old sci-fi short story about a planet with diamond rains. I wish I could remember the name - Google is failing me right now. I think I read it in one of those yearly compilation books.

One great place to identify stories is the Science Fiction and Fantasy StackExchange site. They have a tag specifically for story identification, and they're very good at finding stories, common and obscure alike. I'd suggest you check it out if you'd like to find out exactly what it was.

Thank you, posted it. No luck so far, but someone linked me to another person asking the same question with a better description of the story.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/168074/does-anyone...

Without giving anything away, you might be interested in Outcasts — a 2011 British television science-fiction drama serial. Unfortunately it was cancelled after one season.

Is this a thing in Ringworld? Been a long while since I read that one but I seem to recall diamond rain in that one.

I don't remember that in Ringworld, but that was the first real sci-fi book I read! Still one of my favorites.

IIRC there is a Heinlein Story about travel to the moon an diamonds found there.

In The Killing Star, by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski, there's a section where a submarine-like vessel explores the depths of Neptune. They find diamonds there.

Hasn't this been debunked?

From TFA:

> In a study published this week in the journal Nature Astrophysics, researchers say they were able to produce this "diamond rain" using fancy plastic and high-powered lasers.

New shit has come to light, man.

Noice!

SpaceX' master plan revealed. Poor DeBeers.

CVD diamond synthesis has become so effective that it's embarrassing.[1][2] The diamond gem industry made a terrible mistake. They promoted "flawless" diamonds as the most valuable. Now they're up against a process borrowed from the semiconductor industry, which makes flawless crystals in bulk.

DeBeers keeps trying to maintain the distinction between natural and synthesized diamonds, but it's coming unglued. They keep coming out with more and more elaborate machines for detecting synthetic diamonds.[3]

[1] http://www.cvd-diamond.com/products_en.htm [2] https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/cvd-diamond.html [3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/02/28/de-beers-step...

"The best diamonds are diamonds with slight natural flaws; that's what makes each one unique, like your love" -- my diamond dealer.

Next up: CVD diamonds with controlled random flaws.

If that were true then IF graded natural diamonds wouldn't be multiple times more expensive than the VVS grades.

The words of salespeople should really ring hollow.

IF graded natural diamonds are rarely more expensive than any colored VVS diamond (the coloration automatically grants a VVS since it's understood that the coloration in a diamond comes from inclusions.)

Two more weeks until GIA certification. The diamond course is the final one!

There was a beautiful wired article about these:

https://www.wired.com/2003/09/diamond/

Wow, thanks for the link. Found sad that Apollo is no longer, and Gemesis rebranded

Synthetic diamonds are not available to consumers much cheaper than real ones.

Look on Alibaba. Cubic zirconia by the metric ton. CVD and HPHT synthetic diamonds, polished, in bulk. (Be careful that you don't get cubic zirconia when you order diamonds, though.)

Moissanite is though, and it has a higher refractive index and higher dispersion than diamond, so in the metrics that theoretically make diamond attractive as a gemstone, it's superior.

Aren't we still a ways off from when this technology can scale and become economically viable? Still, I'm sort of tempted to get one of these things off Alibaba and have it looked at.

My wife wanted a flaw in her diamond just for this reason.

Sounds like a fantastic reason to buy a Dremel, you'd definitely save some $.

Yeah, DeBeers has already had a rough century. Now this? When will they get a break?

Uranus is fine in my mother tongue /p

If diamonds are coming out of Uranus, though, you gotta relax more.

Please stop posting pay walled links, or at least put in the title that they are pay walled.

Open in private browsing window.

Things you don't say out loud

I once said in a college paper that what gets listed as scarce resources will change as we venture into space.

#thisisawesome

It'll still be scarce because it's still under diamond producing pressure! No submarine is going to be able to dive down and get them.

Eh, my point is this bears out the principle behind my idea, not that we can readily mine these specific diamonds.

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