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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
(A diamond asteroid figures into the plot.)