An interplanetary diamond-rush

Roll-up, roll-up! For we have an offer you can’t possibly refuse. A business venture, to end all business ventures. And, you lucky people, all we need is your money and your expertise.

OK – here’s the pitch. Diamonds. People love them. And, crucially, they’ll pay handsomely to acquire them. Our plan (and, not ordinarily being the entrepreneurial types, we are particularly chuffed with this) is to collect some…then sell them.

Now, we appreciate this may sound simplistic. Idiotically so. But it is the location from which we plan to collect the diamonds that is key. Speaking at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences a few weeks ago Dr Kevin Baines said something remarkable. He thinks that 1,000 tonnes of diamonds a year are being created on Saturn.

Dr Baines, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, thinks that lightning in the upper atmosphere of Saturn turns methane into soot which, as it plunges deeper into the vice-like grip of Saturn’s atmospheric layers, turns into graphite.  Then, at a depth of around 6,000km, the pressure is enough to further crush the sheets of graphite into diamonds. They then plummet a further 30,000 km where they…well, no one really knows. In all likelihood, says Dr Baines, a sea of liquid carbon awaits to melt the falling diamonds.

Simply put – it rains diamonds on Saturn.

“WHAT!” we collectively shouted at our computer screens when we realise this. “WHY DON’T WE GO AND COLLECT SOME…THEN SELL THEM!” Eventually we stopped shouting, gathered our skirts and realised that with you – our delightful readers – we might have the possible solutions to the odd, insignificant, problem with our plan.

Insignificant problems like getting to Saturn (at its closest, the be-ringed gas giant is around 746 million miles from Earth); navigating the intense winds (which can reach 1,100mph at the equator) and bone crushing pressure of the atmospheric layers; managing the magnetic field (about 578 times more powerful than our own); collecting the falling diamonds and returning them back to Earth.

Oh, and the money. The vast, almost offensively enormous amounts of money it’ll take to make this happen. Mere trifling hiccups at worst I’m sure you’ll agree. Negligible flies in an otherwise flawless ointment.

And so we turn to you, the readers of Laboratory News – insightful of mind and shrewd of spirit. All we are asking is just two little things – that you solve these problems, and pay for the trip – and in return you’ll get a perfectly formed slice of the profits. Plus you get to say you helped bring extraterrestrial diamonds to the bling lovers of Earth. You can become the frontiersmen and women of the interplanetary diamond-rush.

So, what do you say? By this time next year we’ll all be millionaires. Well, actually scratch that. The fastest transit to Saturn to date has been The New Horizons mission, which took about a year and a half to get there. By this time in at least three years we’ll all be millionaires.

Seriously, if you don’t do it – we’re taking this straight to dragons den.