Regardless of how it was made, one is just as much "forever" as the other. The real major difference is in the labor practices being used.
De Beers had a good run as a cartel but as they say, "the jig is up"
Every gem out there is “the crystalline form” of something. Diamonds are (were?) the expensive crystalline form. And plenty of people equate “expensive” with love, or care, or respect. Even if the same people would never be able to tell the difference between diamond and cubic zirconium, knowing it’s the cheap one makes it less valuable in other ways. This depends on the person, of course.
If it’s not diamonds it will have to be something else that shows “I put my money where my mouth is”. A simple metal wedding band is the same wherever it’s made but a famous jeweler will charge an arm and a leg more than your local shop for the same amount of precious metal, same effort, and same result. And yet Tiffany’s isn’t going out of business for the same reason. It’s what it represents.
I am curious to see if tastes or fashion shift towards other rarer or more expensive gems not yet manufactured cheaply en masse.
As people quit believing in God, they stop thinking in terms of "God brought us together/we were made for each other" (though they stop thinking that a generation or two later than they stop believing in God).
If you think that we made this relationship, then maybe a lab-grown (human made) diamond fits? (Though it may take an advertising campaign before people see it that way.)
Disclaimer: I'm not a sociologist. This is just my speculation about how the dynamic could change.
For those obsessed with materialism, real satisfaction is out of reach. There is always bigger, better and more expensive.
Personally, I would tend to reconsider any long term relationship with such a person.
Jewelry is the pinnacle of “just monetary value”. Unlike almost any other possession, a car, a house, clothes, etc. jewelry serves no practical purpose, only shows the willingness or ability to spend for it. The more you spend, the more valuable the gesture, the more you cared to please the recipient.
Materialistic people have the same feelings you have. Those just happened to be triggered by different values than yours.
If you want something nice, you get something nice, not something expensive. That's difficult to comprehend for people who measure niceness in a visibly displayed price tag.
> nice things that are done by people who love making them have a tendency to be expensive
No and no. People love making things as much as anyone loves their job, and the price of your output is not what determines it. Niceness and price are almost completely independent characteristics. You can have beautiful cheap trinkets, and garish expensive jewelry, and everything in between. Look no further than when you need an expert to tell apart real and counterfeit items. Or when your "nice and expensive" luxury items are cheap crap because nothing says "made with love so it's expensive" like luxury companies making a $50 bag with slave labor and selling it for $3000 [0]. In the end what matters to some people is the visible price tag, that's the signal, that's the core value.
In the real world you’d flash some bling and people would instinctively give more weight to your opinion. Here it has to stand on merit. So I see why price is such a core value.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2024/06/24/italian-...
The entire point of using diamonds in wedding rings is for the male to signal how committed he is to the marriage by expending a large amount of money on both the ring and the wedding itself. It then acts as a way for the wife to signal her status to other women by showing off how much her husband was willing and able to spend on the ring.
It is a hold-out from the tradition that the male is a provider and the female is a caregiver. If you reject traditional gender roles, you should also reject expensive diamond rings regardless whether they are mined or grown. Otherwise, embrace the shiny, but make no mistake: the cost is entirely the point.
Assume you have 2 diamonds that cost the same.
One is natural, the other is larger and man made.
Which one is more likely to convey your point to the average person?
Are you arguing that anyone who would accept and display a precious gem is ineligible for marriage? More so if it is larger, but not if more expensive? The post you are replying to presents a plausible social economy of the tradition. What is your point?
No. My point is that anyone who conditions marriage on the size or cost of a diamond is ineligible to marry me.
My wife accepted my marriage proposal without a ring. One was added later --- after other more urgent finances were covered and reassuring her that it would be modest and not overly wasteful.
In other words, this was done strictly because I wanted to --- not as a pre-condition for her acceptance. She says doing it this way was more meaningful.
That's some nice historical background (which could be post-hoc contextualization that fits certain agenda), but traditions have this weird habit of outliving their actual purpose and still having the form without the role.
So no, you don't have to commit to traditional gender roles to have diamond rings and don't have to make them expensive as otherwise it's not doing the thing it's supposed to do. The could just not do the thing at all and you can still have them.
I recommend to all newly engaged couples to buy them and save the money for more important things like raising children or buying a home.
And if you look on eBay, you can get CVD diamonds for even less. (At a bit of a risk, of course.)
I'd say it's like AI music or art - something made by a machine, for some reason, just doesn't have any "soul" to it.
I'm not actually entirely convinced in my argument, but there is something there...
Wired: we will put a soul in this rock for $10,000
For the first time, physicists have demonstrated that information can flow through a diamond wire. In the experiment, electrons did not flow through diamond as they do in traditional electronics; rather, they stayed in place and passed along a magnetic effect called "spin" to each other down the wire -- like a row of sports spectators doing "the wave." Spin could one day be used to transmit data in computer circuits -- and this new experiment revealed that diamond transmits spin better than most metals in which researchers have previously observed the effect.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140323151718.h...
And thus, any distinction between them exists mainly in your head.
Natural diamonds won't always fluoresce but the ones that do will do so in a variety of colors, and sometimes change depending on what wavelength is irradiating them.
The difference is not instantly apparent under UV.
Only about 30% of natural diamonds have fluorescence --- which is *caused* by impurities and imperfections in the material.
Manmade diamonds tend to lack this because they have fewer impurities and imperfections. Equating increased perfection and purity with inferiority is highly debatable and smacks of marketing BS.
Stable hydrogen wasn't able to form until several hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang when the universe cooled sufficiently for electrons to bind to protons.
Even assuming you're counting lone protons as hydrogen atoms, it's still absolutely false. I don't know if that's true for the majority of protons in the universe, but there are mechanisms by which new protons are made all the time. Neutrons can turn into protons through beta decay, and high energy particle interactions like those involving cosmic rays can produce brand new protons. These processes can and do happen terrestrially.
... and at rates that mean that the amount of non-big-bang hydrogen is not even a trillionth of a trillionth of the total.
I didn't say it was a huge fraction of the total. You said "literally all of them" were from the Big Bang, which is just wrong. Plenty of other processes produce protons/hydrogen
> We exchange diamond rings as part of the engagement process because the diamond company De Beers decided in 1938 that it would like us to. Prior to a stunningly successful marketing campaign, Americans occasionally exchanged engagement rings, but it wasn’t pervasive. Not only is the demand for diamonds a marketing invention, but diamonds aren’t actually that rare. Only by carefully restricting the supply has De Beers kept the price of a diamond high.
Imho, that "soul" you describe is an artifact of human sentimentality and a very successful marketing campaign by a bunch of Afrikaner colonialists.
Walter Benjamin called it "aura" - something a physical original has, but a reproduction doesn't.
It explains why collectors pay $$$$$ for a guitar played by [famous musician], even though they can't play.
There's no objective way to look at any one guitar and divine its history. Without provenance or physical customisation, any Rickenbacker or Les Paul is indistinguishable from any other of the same production run.
But we believe in sympathetic magic. Objects are charged with mysterious non-physical manna through proximity to wealth and status. Owning these special objects confers that manna on us, and perhaps our fortune will increase.
It's the logic of witchcraft lurking at the heart of capitalism.
One of the fun things about AI is that it deconstructs this while reinforcing it. Huge collections of high status manna are now inside a machine, and available for free, or near as.
Do we still believe in magic, or not?
They do that so, when they get together, they have a story to tell to other famous people. If that guitar were to be replaced, nobody would be able to tell the difference.
We can talk about "anima", in latin, the same inside "animal" or "animation" to apply it to a wider concept of living beings.
We can go further in time to the greek concept "daimon", devils, allude to supernatural powers or spirits to start applying it to things.
Then we could apply De Boers sociopaths concept that goes back to using the Christian concept to rocks again.
The only "soul" those rocks have is the one of the millions of African people that died in wars, the women that were raped and the kids that were traumatised being forced to kill their family members so a woman can look at beautiful iridescence in her finger.
Disclaimer: I have worked as a volunteer helping refugees, mostly from Congo, so I am biased a lot.
Diamonds are a product of natural geological processes. (Or, are grown in a lab, by recreating similar conditions.)
Music and art are products of human talent, skill, and labor - that ML companies have used (without a license, permission, or even credit) to build datasets that are now being used to make money, at the expense of these artists.
These are not the same things.
Urea disproved "vital force" theory. You are doing something similar.
Indeed there is a diamond planet that old too.
A diamond planet, "55 Cancri E", is a super-Earth exoplanet known for its high density and potential diamond composition. It is located 41 light-years away and is about twice the size of Earth and nine times its mass. The planet's extreme heat and pressure are believed to have crystallized its carbon-rich composition into diamonds.
People buy inferior, counterfeit merchandise all the time because they can't tell the difference.
But there is nothing inferior or counterfeit about a manmade diamond. It is *exactly* the same material as a natural one.
Yes, you can buy a man-made diamond the same you can buy counterfeit branded clothes. That only shows that you’re tasteless and that you can’t afford the real thing.
If it is strictly about the money, a larger man made diamond can easily cost just as much as a smaller natural one --- while instantly conveying to the untrained eye the appearance of being more expensive.
If you see someone wearing a 6-carat diamond, you know it's either a $100,000 natural diamond, or a $4,000 lab-grown diamond. And you'll assume it's the latter, as far more people can afford the latter.
On the other hand, a 1-carat diamond would be more like $2000 natural, $300 lab-grown, making it far more believable that it was natural.
My screenshots of NFTs are pixel accurate, but not exactly as valuable as the real thing.