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Comment by Crash0v3rid3 | Hacker News Reader

It saddens me how people still put so much value in diamonds given how prevalent they are on Earth and across the solar system.

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Hey, 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

Given 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...

Something 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

I'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.h...

[2, pdf] https://www.cs.utah.edu/wondp/eckert.pdf

“A diamond is metastable, just like your marriage and our cartel”

-de beers

...possibly

In 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.

Regardless 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.

Aren'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.

Exactly, I doubt they'd be worth much in that context.

diamond dust, not multi-karat stones.

"Conspicuous Consumption", a prior art to Proof of Work, a way to express how much money you can afford to burn.

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