Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Geology, Palaeontology & Archaeology => Topic started by: RRR on 24/09/2005 08:01:24
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Are gold and diamonds present in the crusts of the nearest planets and orbital bodies (Moon, Mars and Venus)?
What is amount of a gold (and diamonds) into the Moon, Mars and Venus?
On the Earth different gold and diamond mines are located in areas with mountains... the Moon, Mars and Venus have a lot of high mountains..
So where is the biggest potential mine for gold and diamonds in the Solar system?
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Well most precious stones are aluminium silicates and usually crop up wherever there's been volcanism or hydrothermal activity. Hence, since other rocky planets adjacent to ours - such as Mars which is home to the largest volcano in the solar system - have evidence of past or current volcanic activity, I'd argue that it's a good bet that there are precious stones there...
Chris
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It's not in our solar system but the white dwarf star "bpm 37093" a.k.a "Lucy" contains a lot of bling...
Diamond star thrills astronomers
Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered.
The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3492919.stm
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I've heard of theories that suggest that the heavier elements are found closer to the Sun. There have also been a few quite knowledgable people theorising that the gas giants may have a giant diamond at their core and this was something that was postulated in one of ACC's novels.
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Unlikely,
We have to get there to really know. Light spectrum however gives us a good idea of the composition of our sun and other stars in the nearby universe.
But red Mars is full of surface iron
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Isn't there a rather large diamond on Venus, left there by the russians?
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It's not in our solar system but the white dwarf star "bpm 37093" a.k.a "Lucy" contains a lot of bling...
Diamond star thrills astronomers
Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered.
The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.
50cent is already on his way there
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diamonds
Nanodiamonds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanodiamond) can be formed during meteorite impacts into carbon. Carbon is fairly common in the solar system. The Moon is exposed to meteorite impacts, so could have nanodiamonds on the surface. But being invisibly small, nanodiamonds would be no use on an engagement ring.
Diamond is the most stable form of carbon about 100-150km beneath our feet, where rock is molten.
In theory, it would be possible to drill down that far, but the deepest drill hole to date is only around 10km deep. Trying to drill into molten rock in hopes of finding a large lump of diamond does not seem very profitable.
It would be cheaper to manufacture diamonds on Earth's surface.
gold
It is thought that when rocky planets get hot enough to melt, the denser elements would tend to sink towards the center, resulting in differentiation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_differentiation). This is the process that produces a spherical planet or a dwarf planet.
An exception to the usual rule of "dense elements near the center" can occur if the dense element is highly soluble in a much lighter mineral; for example, Tungsten is highly soluble in silicate minerals.
Gold is classified as an iron-loving element (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldschmidt_classification#Siderophile_elements), and is most likely to be found in Earth's core. That makes it really hard to mine.
Rather than tunneling to the center of the Earth or the Moon, it may be better to look in the remains of an asteroid that has been split apart by collisions, exposing the metallic core. An upcoming space mission will visit the asteroid Psyche, which seems to fit this description.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(spacecraft)
In reality, stellar fusion does not produce elements heavier than iron or nickel, and small amounts of heavier elements are produced in supernova explosions; it is thought that neutron star collisions might have produced all the elements we see heavier than gold. In any case, these heavy elements will be very rare in the solar system, so you would not go into space to mine for them unless you had another reason to go there.
It costs about $20,000 per kg to get material into low-earth orbit; at least 10 times that to get to the Moon's surface. It would take many tons of mining equipment to start mining on the Moon. You would probably have to launch over 100kg of fuel to bring 1kg of refined ore back to the Earth.
At present, space travel is just too expensive to go mining for gold or diamonds. It is much better to send back information, which is far more valuable (and much lighter).
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Gold and gem-quality diamond have some industrial use but their principal value is in their rarity and "unforgeability". The world price of gold is fixed daily by the banks and the supply of natural diamonds is controlled by deBeers. There is no point in mining either at a higher cost than the current artificial price, and any attempt to sell at a lower price would cause a major upset in the world banking system and a few people to fall out of high windows.
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Because launch costs are so high, it makes sense for an expedition to another planet to learn to "live off the land" as soon as practical. That means creating sources of air, water, food, shelter and energy from locally available materials.
Until a settlement became self-sustaining, the major flow of gold would be towards the settlement, in the form of thermal shielding, wires on computer chips, etc.
A few diamonds might go too, in the form of a hardness comparison for mineral identification, a high-speed bearing or a strong window on a pressure vessel. But diamonds have few practical uses, and there are alternatives to diamonds for many of these - like lasers to assess mineral content and magnetic bearings.
But the focus of any early mining would be for water, oxygen, hydrogen and carbon which can be reformed into air, water and food. The next priority might be to scrape some silicate dirt over a shelter to provide some protection against cosmic rays. Gold and diamonds are well down the priority list.
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There might be some utility in mining asteroids for platinum group metals (ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, and platinum). They are quite scarce in the Earth's crust, but also very useful metals (catalysts for making chemical reactions more efficient, light absorbing or light emitting compounds for LEDs and light harvesters, super-hard alloys etc.). The availability (or lack thereof) of these metals on Earth has set some pretty hard limits on what our industry is capable of. None of these elements is nearly expensive enough right now that the economics of space mining would make sense (or even remotely close), but most of these metals are underused and undervalued because there isn't enough to build an industry around them. One could imagine that, say iridium (there is less than 5,000 tons of globally, and is currently traded at just under $1000 per troy Oz) is brought back in high enough amounts (thousands of tons), that the supply increases dramatically. This might cause the price to drop initially, but if the higher supply means that more companies will invest in technologies that use iridium, the price may actually end up increasing in response!
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I would expect SI units not Troy ounces and carats to be used on a scientific forum .
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We could but I think there are more valuable materials out there.
Even the moon has some extra good resources in there.
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Gold and gem-quality diamond have some industrial use but their principal value is in their rarity and "unforgeability". The world price of gold is fixed daily by the banks and the supply of natural diamonds is controlled by deBeers. There is no point in mining either at a higher cost than the current artificial price, and any attempt to sell at a lower price would cause a major upset in the world banking system and a few people to fall out of high windows.
I heard that the gold price never goes down, thus my parents ask me to invest my money on gold. However, when I told my brother-in-law about it, he said that it can go down if there's inflation. Which one is true and if my brother-in-law was right, how does it happen?
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I heard that the gold price never goes down, thus my parents ask me to invest my money on gold. However, when I told my brother-in-law about it, he said that it can go down if there's inflation. Which one is true and if my brother-in-law was right, how does it happen?
Why did you necromance an old thread to ask this off- topic question?
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gold price never goes down
Gold and beer buck economic trends.
If the economy looks like it is going to crash, some investors will sell their stocks and bonds and buy gold as an investment (and thus hastening the crash).
If the economy has crashed, sales of beer go up.
It is no more profitable to visit other planets and drill for beer than it is to drill for gold there...
But I am certain that astrobiologists would be fascinated by a planet which was able to produce beer!
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_as_an_investment
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I heard that the gold price never goes down, thus my parents ask me to invest my money on gold. However, when I told my brother-in-law about it, he said that it can go down if there's inflation. Which one is true and if my brother-in-law was right, how does it happen?
Why did you necromance an old thread to ask this off- topic question?
Because it's still related to this sentence:
The world price of gold is fixed daily by the banks