So I spent two hours tonight, obviously really bored...

So a diamond planet was discovered, but just how much bank are we talking here? Well I'm going to do my best and get my dusty math brain clicking again to attempt to calculate how much in diamonds could be harvested if at all possible (which it's not... so...)

Reports say it's "twice as big as earth." which is pretty ambiguous. 2 times the diameter? Surface area? in what statistic is it twice as big? Well, the easiest would be to double the surface area, Earth is about 510,000,000 square km. So the new planet would be 1,020,000,000 square km. Easy enough.

So how much diamonds per square km of surface area? That's a variable that's unknown so we'll call it X for now.

How much is a diamond worth? 1 carat of pure diamond is 200 milligrams (but that's weight not worth) unfortunately this is another variable depending on the quality of diamonds you harvest ranging from $700.00 - $4,000.00. Seeings as diamonds occur rather natural here I'm thinking we're going to get some rather big ones, so we'll go with an estimate of $3,000/carret.

Now how BIG does a diamond have to be in volume to reach 1 caret? Someone fortunately did all that math for me and estimated 2/35 cm³. that's 2/35 a cubic centimeter. So for every one of the there's 3K bucks.

So how do we calculate this? Well we have the surface area, however, that is an area not a volume to have a volume we need depth, that's where "X" comes in. how much of the depth diamond? How much is other things? So many variables.

Let's make X REALLY simple for now. Let us say that for every square KM there is only one caret of diamond. Now obviously this isn't the case, you wouldn't be able to see such a thing from SPACE. Think about that, they can see these diamonds from SPACE. But let's be all gloomy about it and say only one caret per square KM. That's really simple 3K dollars times 1,020,000,000 = 3.06 trillion dollars.

Okay, so lets not be so stingy, I mean come on the earth certainly has more the one caret per square KM so a freaking DIAMOND planet?

Alright, lets say that the crust of the planet had a layer of diamonds 1 cm thick, to put a little on the top and because I'm lazy I'm not going to account for narrowing of the sphere size difference 1 cm deep... I mean that's just being geekily asinine, let's keep it simple. Lets first convert the KM to centemeters to make it easier to work with 1,020,000,000 square km is 10,200,000,000,000 square cm, now with it being 1 cm deep it's simply that 10.2 trillion cubic cms.

And now we have our X where X is depth/square mile. 10.2cm^2 * (x)cm = Total diamonds on planet

Okay so now we can calculate total diamonds for all values x so where my money?

Well divide the total diamonds by the size of a caret to get total carets

(10,200,000,000,000cm^2 * Xcm) / (2/35 cm^3) = Total carets.

So with x being 1 we get 178 trillion carrots. Multiply that by our money and... 535 quadrillion dollars.

That's a little better. We could pay off the debt it took for us to get there... maybe. These pickaxes aren't going to pay for themselves.

Of course with all that diamond now in your hands... it'll probably inflate the value of diamonds by quite a bit so... yeah, there's that (utility theory after all, we have LOTs of diamonds, so they aren't rare, so aren't as valuable). Guess I just wasted your time, :) aw well.

Don't tell the private corps that though, there's DIAMONDS on there planets! DIAMONDS pitch up, move out "west" go pioneerin'!

Oh, what if the entire planet were made of the stuff?Impossible, but, just for other extremes. 8.9 octillion dollars. What's an octillion mean? It means to heck with you your diamonds are worthless now, that's what it means. It's such a high number that the spellchecker incorrectly thinks it's not a word.

Also note the formula is a "noob" formula and is an estimation more then an exact. To do that would require calculus to determine the change of "internal surface area" for larger values of X (The deeper you go the smaller the cross section of surface area, like an ever-lasting gob stopper). The limit of x is 9,009 km or 90,090,000 cm. I did not use this formula to get the octillion value, I instead changed the surface area to volume using those well established math formulas for such conversions. Using the formula I made to do it for that would probably be extremely inaccurate for the highest limit of x.