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..

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

Some great cover art to boot, thanks for the recommendation.

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

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.

"Well, that's one way to lose these orbit blues Diamonds at the cores of our hues..."

Eh, nah, doesn't scan.

DeBeers is going to be trying to block the space program when they read this! :)

Or so we have been told by the Virginia Company.

Great article! I think I learned something new in every paragraph.