Astronomers discover planet made of diamond | Hacker News Reader

Astronomers discover planet made of diamond

reuters.com

21 pointsrblion29 comments

Amazingly timely given that I'm about half way through A Deepness in the Sky.

(A diamond asteroid figures into the plot.)

Not 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.

Am I the only one imagining the Dwight Schrute meme while reading this? http://memegenerator.net/Dwight-Schrute

If 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?

Diamonds 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.

Interesting read on the history of diamonds/marketing them: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you...

Good 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.

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.

harvesting 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_saw...

You can cut diamond with diamond saws or lasers, if you wanted to pull out diamond bricks from a big mass or whatever.

Given 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.

I 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.

If 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.)

HN 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

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.

Economic growth is nearly exponential. With a title like "Why we are unlikely to _ever_ leave the solar system" I can see why people disagreed.

That 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?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

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.

Selection bias may be the only reason we are still around. Or we just got here way before the rest of the party started.

The key word about economics in your comment, for the reasoning by Charles Stross (the author of the article submitted to open the other thread), is "nearly." I used to read a lot of science fiction about interstellar travel when I was a kid, so I understand why HN readers suspend disbelief about interstellar travel, but economic growth at any rate is not going to answer the arguments of Stross (himself an experienced author of science fiction) about the absolute resources needed to send a group of human beings off on a voyage to another star, uphill for millions of expensive miles. As Thomas Sowell has commented, the first principle of economics is scarcity. And the first principle of politics (or of science fiction fandom) is to ignore the first principle of economics.

Just 200 years ago the richest king in the land would not have been able to afford 5000 horsepower. Now any man can, at least for a day or two.

When people talk about the energy costs of getting a man or group of men to the nearest star I always think to myself, "doesn't this seem petty?" Indeed it does. Time, sure. Let's assume that the group would need to be in a boring spaceship for 50 years, but energy? No. We'll be able to convert 1 cubic meter into energy with little hassle, so let's forget about energy; let alone the possibility of ftl travel.

There's already more oil on Titan than there is on Earth. :)

Curiouser and curiouser...

"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." - Sir Arthur Eddington

I can imagine a colony being set there by the year 4000 run by the "Company"...

The sky is made of diamonds.

Lucy must be there :)

Not all of it -- this is obviously a custom job from Magrathea.

That, or the Spiders. But I didn't see an erupting binary with a disturbingly regular 250-year period.

Therefore, sky is forever.

Twinkle twinkle little star ... Like a diamond in the sky

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