[HN Gopher] The Planets with the Giant Diamonds Inside
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       The Planets with the Giant Diamonds Inside
        
       Author : dnetesn
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2021-07-08 10:33 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (nautil.us)
 (TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
        
       | barcoder wrote:
       | If you're interested in space mining there's an excellent book
       | called Mining The Sky: Untold Riches From The Asteroids, Comets,
       | And Planets by John S. Lewis that goes into great detail about
       | the how space mining and building in space could work
        
       | optimalsolver wrote:
       | Or so we have been told by the Virginia Company.
        
       | achow wrote:
       | The info related to the title is buried in the middle of the
       | article. For those who don't have patience..
       | 
       |  _..Uranus and Neptune must contain vast quantities of water,
       | ammonia, and methane on the inside.._
       | 
       |  _He finds that the carbon atoms spontaneously break free of
       | their molecules and arrange themselves into diamonds. Inside
       | Uranus and Neptune, such diamonds could grow to the size of a
       | person, slowly raining down toward the core of the planet.._
        
       | Crash0v3rid3 wrote:
       | It saddens me how people still put so much value in diamonds
       | given how prevalent they are on Earth and across the solar
       | system.
        
         | tobmlt wrote:
         | "A diamond is metastable, just like your marriage and our
         | cartel"
         | 
         | -de beers
         | 
         | ...possibly
        
         | klyrs wrote:
         | 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...
        
         | Magodo wrote:
         | 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
        
       | wrycoder wrote:
       | Great article! I think I learned something new in every
       | paragraph.
        
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       (page generated 2021-07-10 23:01 UTC)