abfalter: On a side note anyone who buys a diamond is wasting their money.

These are less than half the price of a diamond, are over 90% as hard, and almost indistinguishable from a real diamond.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite

Explain that to a girl waiting for a ring. Diamond or highway biatches!!!

abfalter: On a side note anyone who buys a diamond is wasting their money.

These are less than half the price of a diamond, are over 90% as hard, and almost indistinguishable from a real diamond.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite

I'm going to buy my girlfriend some Moissanite earrings to float the possibility of a Moissanite engagement ring rather than diamond.

She wants a traditional diamond mostly because she doesn't want to explain to her girlfriends why she doesn't have one. I'm hoping she will be dazzled by the extra fire in Moissanite.

If not she's getting a lab diamond

Rapmaster2000: Richard Freckle: Marcus Aurelius: xynix: "The Russians say most such diamonds found in the past have been "space diamonds" of extraterrestrial origin found in meteor craters."

Im no planetoligist or whatever but I had the impression diamonds were made by carbon that's squished hard. Can this happen in an asteroid? How would that much gravity exist on a small rock (even a large rock)? I can see a carbon deposit on Mars or something being turned into diamonds but on an asteroid?

Also does this mean there could be oil in asteroids? "Fossil Fuel" to me means no fossil (bio) no fuel but can it come from any old carbon?

Stars can create diamond. I'm not sure they'd survive an exploding star, though.

White dwarfs are diamonds
Link

No match for Black Diamond.

We get it, it's a Carbonado

This wouldn't be news if women ...nevermind. But you know what I'm thinking.
/they suck at math, too.

As far as space jewels go, I prefer Moldavite.


Or Staite

So Lucy is in the sky with diamonds...

Swoop1809: abfalter: On a side note anyone who buys a diamond is wasting their money.

These are less than half the price of a diamond, are over 90% as hard, and almost indistinguishable from a real diamond.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite

I'm going to buy my girlfriend some Moissanite earrings to float the possibility of a Moissanite engagement ring rather than diamond.

She wants a traditional diamond mostly because she doesn't want to explain to her girlfriends why she doesn't have one. I'm hoping she will be dazzled by the extra fire in Moissanite.

If not she's getting a lab diamond

If you end up going for a diamond, check out the antiques dealers in your area. Some of them have authentic diamond rings that have a ton of character and unique settings, and can be purchased there for a fraction of the cost as one of those peddlers who sell the off color garbage with specks in them. Only difficulty is you'd have to hire someone to verify that it's a diamond and estimate its value to make sure you're not buying something from a crackerjack box.
Sounds like trouble, but with a budget, buying diamonds is a pain in the ass no matter what - tons of studying, tons of negotiating variables, and generally the prices are overmarked about 200%. The "unique antique" route was actually easier and much, much less expensive.

YakBoy42: APPROVES

[upload.wikimedia.org image 194x315]

Lucy is here!

Ahhh mosanite, keeping fat girls with broke boyfriends happy since, well whenever the fark it was created.

Was your setting forged by lars the metalsmith at the ren faire as well?

cman: How do we know that the big-ass object that crashed into our planet (both creating our moon and giving us our wobble) didnt shoot off lifeforms along with debris?

Speak for yourself.

/beer gives me my wobble.

Most gemstone quality diamonds found on Earth are found in Kimberlite pipes (or the beds of streams that have eroded such deposits). They are believed to form in the Earth under great pressure and heat. The Kimberlite pipe is the throat of an old volcano and the diamonds, plus the clay in which they are found, come from deep in the Earth.

The diamond found in meteorites have (at least until now) been very small diamonds formed in stars. Small stars like our Suns start "burning" Hydrogen, forming Helium, as they age they switch to making heavier elements by "burning" Helium. Carbon is one of the elements that is made in small dwarf stars like our Sun. The heaviest element formed by this type of star is Iron.

Astronomers have concluded that some small stars, when they collapse are composed almost entirely of carbon, which because of heat and pressure, makes them giant diamonds. When they explode, they scatter diamonds through space.

If the Russian story is true and the Russians are correct about possing a large meteorite impact, it is composed of vasts amounts of space diamonds. Many of these are probably industrial grade--very small and impure, not gemstone quality but good for industrial grinding and blades.

Russian diamonds have long been plentiful but of relatively lower quality, so it's possible they have some space diamonds in the mix already.

If this is so, I would expect that the Russians would be able to undercut the cost of industrial grade and small gemstone diamonds at the expense of other producers such as South Africa and Canada, which are mining Kimberlite pipes for gemstones. If a small percentage of these trillions of carats of diamonds are gemstones of good size and quality, they could crash the cartel that is led by DeBeers.

They have no real interest in doing so, though, so I can't see why they would announce the real source of their diamonds. They should stock-pile and manipulate the price just like the DeBeers cartel.

On the other hand, if they do release a lot of diamonds, flooding the market because they need the money, it means that industrial grade diamond prices will plummet, gemstone prices will fall, and the only diamonds that will hold much of their value will be historical stones associated with famous people, such as Marie Antoinette, or with famous jewels, such as Liz Taylor's diamond ring and the Crown Jewels of Great Britain.

Historical stones have a known provenance and are guaranteed not to be space diamonds (which are not rare) or artificial diamonds (which can be very nice to look at, but are cheaper to make than to find).

Expect blades to be sharper and polishing dies to be more sparkly if the Russians are not lying or the news story is not BS.

Also, now might be a good time for coloured stones such as emeralds, rubies and sapphires to make a come-back as wedding ring settings. They are more costly than diamonds any way, and they are not as easy to make, nor is there a giant cartel sitting on God only knows how many tonnes of them.

If things keep moving in this direction, gemstones will mostly become much cheaper over time. You might want to consider pearls--not the cheap cultured pearls, but the real thing. Our oceans are a mess. Pearls may hold their value better than other mineral deposits because they come from living organisms, and unlike diamonds, you can't make pearl oysters. Not yet, at any rate.

As for oil in meteorites, not likely. "Real" diamonds, which is to say gemstone diamonds, do form deep in the Earth, while space diamonds form in stars. Oil is unlike to form in stars because it is largely organic in origin. Of course, some geologists (notably Russian geologists) and Thomas Gold, have claimed that oil is formed inorganically in vast quantities and that the reason why they have found it in meteor impact craters is that it is formed deeper in the Earth than the deposits of organic fossil fuels such as coal and bitumin.

This is probably crank-science, so oil from non-biological processes is unlikely, at least until somebody proves Gold right.

The conventional geologists claim the oil is found in fractured rock simply because it seeps into the cracks from the normal layers which contain ancient seabeds.

By the by, oil is not made from dinosaurs.That is advertising. Oil is made by bacteria, so some of it may be made more recently than the bulk of it, which was formed millions of years ago and buried by sediment and volcanic ash and lava.

If Gold is right, of course, there's so much more oil and natural gas (non-biological) down there to be found, we are doomed to even worse climate change than if we used up all the normal bio-fuel in the form of fossil deposits. If bacteria make oil, there's not a lot of it and it isn't necessarily all that deep. If geology makes oil and it seeps up into porous rocks and cracks, it could be anywhere, everywhere and very deep but very plentiful.

Which is better? Personally I hope the biological theory is right. We can't take much more of this fossil sunlight being released into our air, water and soil without being broiled.

mauricecano: Marcus Aurelius: xynix: "The Russians say most such diamonds found in the past have been "space diamonds" of extraterrestrial origin found in meteor craters."

Im no planetoligist or whatever but I had the impression diamonds were made by carbon that's squished hard. Can this happen in an asteroid? How would that much gravity exist on a small rock (even a large rock)? I can see a carbon deposit on Mars or something being turned into diamonds but on an asteroid?

Also does this mean there could be oil in asteroids? "Fossil Fuel" to me means no fossil (bio) no fuel but can it come from any old carbon?

Stars can create diamond. I'm not sure they'd survive an exploding star, though.

Fun fact, all gold is made from exploding stars and survives fine. Stars can create diamonds but so can other hard-mass objects. If you had a rock planet surrounding a star that exploded then pieces of that planet can be flung out into space and create asteroids with diamonds formed from the planet, same could be said of protoplanets that are later destroyed or rip apart.

Also Fossil Fuel is created FROM organic material, if you didn't have dead organisms first you didn't have fossil fuel. Read up please at wiki Link.


I suppose it's important to note the difference between a "fossil fuel" which is typically a hydrocarbon that was produced long ago and cannot be replenished at the rate at which it is removed (like fossil water) - and simple hydrocarbons, which can be produced by abiotic processes and don't require the existence of dead organisms to explain their presence.

For example, I know of several planets would huge amounts of hydrocarbons - nobody would suggest that the methane in Jupiter's atmosphere is proof that it once supported life.

Dear Putin,

Please sell some of the damn diamonds and use the money to do a little sumthin-sumthin in chernobyl. That damn 'cocoon' had a 25 year life which has expired. Remember?

Love,

K.Kritter