Re:ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC
by kijin on Saturday May 10, 2025 @01:02AM
(#43943344)
There is no scarcity of diamonds for industrial use, only for ornamental use -- and both are equally "real".
An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold. Apart from the cost of turning it into a desired shape, gold is entirely fungible. Not so with diamonds, because you can't forge a single 10 ct crystal out of one hundred .1 ct crystals.
So it would seem that lab-grown gold has a better chance of disrupting the market than lab-grown diamonds ever will. Unlike with diamonds, nobody will be able to tell where that gold came from!
That's not to say I think this shouldn't be pursued, but I feel like the science and technology side might end up being the easier half of cheap gold from this becoming a reality. I sadly have more faith in humanity's ability to figure out solutions to incredibly difficult technical problems in the long run than I do in our ability to solve the social problems that would benefit almost everyone but require changing the status quo.
(As an aside, I personally find the idea of lab-grown diamonds pretty cool just from a science perspective, and the fact that they're cheaper and don't have the same ethical concerns to make it unfathomable that I'd ever want to purchase a mined one, and I'm lucky that my wife felt the same way when we picked out her engagement ring, although she ended up selecting a lab-grown pink sapphire instead).