The universe can be wild, yet it runs on simple laws, and its common elements (hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and carbon) become extraordinary when conditions align. On Earth, diamonds appear when carbon endures immense pressure for long ages, which is why they are rare here. In space, violence is ordinary, so the pressures and heat that forge treasures are everywhere, hinting at a cosmos rich beyond measure. Asteroids may be worth billions, helium carries vast energy promise, and water scattered through the void could help carry human life outward.
This promise has accelerated interest in space mining, strengthened by the 2015 U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, Public Law 114-90 put forth by the Obama Administration, which opened resource extraction to private companies. Of course, this law was originally meant to allow the mining of elemental resources on the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.
Yet the growing interest has driven scientists to look far deeper into space, toward realms humanity will not reach for at least a thousand years. Yale researchers in 2012 found 55 Cancri e, a world that may be sheathed in diamond rather than water or granite. This super Earth is roughly twice Earth’s size and eight times its mass, lies about 40 light years away, orbits in a tight tidal lock 25 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our Sun, and blazes near 9,200 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In sheer thought-experiment terms, its wealth has been pegged at about 26.9 nonillion dollars.
A 2020 study in the American Astronomical Society outlined how diamond planets likely form around stars with high carbon to oxygen ratios, where carbides dominate over silicates. Laboratory simulations showed that above 50 gigapascals and up to 2,500 kelvin, silicon carbide transforms into silica and diamond, a process that may also touch places like Charon, Pluto’s moon, the carbon rich hot Jupiter WASP-12b some 1,200 light years away, and even the atmospheres of Saturn and Jupiter, where diamonds may fall as rain.
About a hundred years from now, people will send rockets to the asteroids orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter, mining them for rare elements essential to the machines of the future, if not for gold itself. The nation that learns to harvest them best will hold the upper hand in the global economy.