On a more serious note. What happens to these “hard” currencies if science does get to a point such that they can be manufactured?
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I don’t know but I bet RP’s head would explode.[/quote]
Slight hijack…But read the diamond article. It’s pretty interesting….Especially the part about DeBeers…
General Electric managed to do this in 1954 by using a 400-ton press to crush the hell out of carbon. GE’s machine economically produced diamond dust for industrial uses, and by the early 1970s the company had even managed to manufacture stones as large as 2 carats. But that effort took so much time and electrical energy, it was more expensive than buying a mined diamond. The Russians claimed their machine was relatively cheap, took no more energy to run than a dozen lightbulbs, and would produce a 3-carat stone in a few days. And the General could have it for just $57,000.
Clarke was skeptical. On the long flight back to the States he tried to forget about the offer and sleep, but the light creeping through his window shade kept him awake. If this thing really could make a diamond, he thought, $57,000 isn’t that much money. “Hell,” he mused, “what could be more fun than trying to make diamonds?” By the time the plane touched down in New York, he’d decided to give it a shot.
Three months later, Clarke returned to Moscow. Bodyguards met him at the airport and took him to a warehouse outside the capital. In an unheated room in the middle of winter, he watched Nickolai Polushin – one of the original Siberian scientists – lift the top half of the machine’s sphere. Polushin pulled out a small ceramic cube, smashed it with a hammer, and handed Clarke a small diamond. Everybody smiled. The General eventually ordered three machines and told Semenov to ship them to Florida.
But there were two immediate problems. First, nobody in the US knew how to run them. Clarke solved that by moving a crew of Russians to Florida. (“I felt myself all the time in a sauna,” remembers Nickolay Patrin, who now lives full-time in Sarasota.) The second and more fundamental obstacle was that the Russians themselves had not yet mastered the process. In fact, the machines did not reliably produce diamonds.
The General and his newly minted Gemesis needed help. He turned to Iranian crystal expert Reza Abbaschian, head of the University of Florida’s materials science department in Gainesville. Abbaschian agreed to try turning the Russians’ hit-or-miss method into a rigorously controlled and more reliable technological process. With the aid of some graduate students, he ripped out the analog knobs and dials and installed a computer control system. They upgraded the power supply and methodically tracked the slightest variation in each diamond synthesis attempt. With more than 200 parameters to control, it was painstaking work, and by 1999 – three years after Gemesis was founded – the General needed another infusion of cash.
Abbaschian’s efforts had produced some very high-quality stones. So Clarke flew to London to show off a batch to potential investors. Rather than simply present them as a pile of loose diamonds, he went to a jeweler in Hatton Garden, the city’s diamond district, and asked if a few of his stones could be set in rings. The jeweler agreed, and Clarke returned to his hotel room at Claridge’s. The phone rang. It was De Beers.
According to Clarke, a De Beers executive, James Evans Lombe, was tipped off about the synthetic diamonds within two hours of their arrival at the jeweler’s. Lombe asked for a meeting with the General. The De Beers executive drove directly to Claridge’s, and the two men sat down in the tearoom to the strains of a piano and violin duet.
De Beers refuses to comment on the meeting – or about anything for this story – but Clarke says he simply placed his diamonds on the table. “When I told him that we planned to set up a factory to mass-produce these, he turned white,” the General recalls. “They knew about the technology, but they thought it would stay in Russia and that nobody would get it working right. By the end of the conversation, his hands were shaking.”
But De Beers wasn’t backing down. Throughout 2000, the cartel accelerated its Gem Defensive Programme, sending out its testing machines – dubbed DiamondSure and DiamondView – to the largest international gem labs. Traditionally, these labs analyzed and certified color, clarity, and size. Now they were being asked to distinguish between man-made and mined. The DiamondSure shines light through a stone and analyzes its refractory characteristics. If the gem comes up suspicious, it must be tested with the DiamondView, which uses ultraviolet light to reveal the crystal’s internal structure. “Ideally the trade would like to have a simple instrument that could positively identify a diamond as natural or synthetic,” De Beers scientists wrote in 1996, when the company unveiled plans to develop authentication devices. “Unfortunately, our research has led us to conclude that it is not feasible at this time to produce such an ideal instrument, inasmuch as synthetic diamonds are still diamonds physically and chemically.”
FTC rules says synthesized diamonds must be labeled…If they could be distinguished, why is such labelling necessary? Go figure…Anything to protect the debeers monopoly..
