Viewing 34 posts - 1 through 34 (of 34 total)
  • Why can't we just make things if we know the chemical compound for it?
  • samuri
    Free Member

    Like emeralds and diamonds and beef?

    I have very little chemistry knowledge beyond O level so that’ll be why I don’t know. I’m guessing some of the compounds take a lot of energy to create or something. But explain it to me in laymans terms please.

    scaredypants
    Full Member

    we can – better than that, we can snap off the C from some CO2’s to make Oxygen and enough carbon for a diamond mountain

    (just press Windows/C/O together)

    Beef is tricky, mind

    tonyg2003
    Full Member

    You can make diamonds artificially it just takes hugh amounts of pressure.

    Beef? You could grow tissue in lab. It’s just too expensive and steak tastes good …

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    deadlydarcy
    Free Member

    Well, we can make diamonds. Just need carbon and a lot of pressure.

    As for other gemstones, well, their colours come from the various minerals, elements, etc contained within their crystalline structure. They tend to be not as hard as diamonds though so there’s not a lot of interest in creating them. Also, industrial diamonds, while incredibly useful for drilling and what not, are not as pretty as the ones Africans die mining for us. Sometimes, you can’t beat time and millions of tonnes of pressure.

    As a general rule (if your chemistry is lacking), more reactive substances combine to form more stable compounds; two good examples are water and salt, both formed from highly reactive elements: Sodium, Chlorine and Hydrogen, Oxygen (elemental oxygen, not the oxygen molecule we breathe). Then, the more stable a substance, the more difficult it is to take it back to its constituents, hence why despite hydrogen being a wonder fuel, and water being full of it, and the world being full of water, it’s hugely expensive to get hydrogen from water because of the amount of energy you have to use to break the incredibly strong bonds in the H2O molecule.

    Anyway, enough to be going on with…but it’s a good start in terms of understanding why some things are more stable than others.

    Mandarin
    Free Member

    Yeah… “we” can do it:

    http://d.neadiamonds.com/creating-man-made-diamonds

    http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2013/06/05/shmeat-the-first-in-vitro-hamburger/

    But it’s a lot easier just to dig a hole in the ground or shoot a cow.

    Saccades
    Free Member

    DD – I use industrial rubies and emeralds in my everyday job.

    deadlydarcy
    Free Member

    DD – I use industrial rubies and emeralds in my everyday job.

    Well that’ll reach me to make assumptions about industrial gemstones, an area about which I know even less than I thought I knew 😀 – I stand corrected. What do you use them for then?

    samuri
    Free Member

    He covers his/her naked body in animal fat and then rolls in industrial gems before throwing him/herself down a huge hydro power pipe to clean out all the limescale.

    It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.
    .

    deadlydarcy
    Free Member

    Where do I apply?

    samuri
    Free Member

    Come round ours tomorrow. I’ve not got any actual gems and the pay is rubbish but we’ll certainly get you up a pipe of some description and you’ll feel dirty afterwards.

    bigrich
    Full Member

    synthetic chemistry is hard. it takes energy and controlled conditions to get the right bonds to form where and when you want. many many steps to build even a simple compound. each step isn’t 100% so the more you have, the lower the final yield.

    jonba
    Free Member

    We also cannot control individual atoms to build up molecules so have to look for what is already available.

    Beef is a bad example from a chemistry point of view as it is so complex. However, there are techniques to synthesise amino acids and then start to build up proteins. It is time consuming and expensive – I built some VPGVG peptides for my chemistry masters back in the day.

    So lots can be done, it is just a question of practicality.

    For beef it is still easier to go down the cow route than the lab route. For diamonds it depends on your purpose.

    onehundredthidiot
    Full Member

    It becomes synthetically much more difficult as the compound gets more complex. As well as overcoming the fact that some reactions are energetically impossible.

    maccruiskeen
    Full Member

    DD – I use industrial rubies and emeralds in my everyday job.

    You’re a drag queen?

    prettygreenparrot
    Full Member

    Beef’s a tricky assortment of a whole variety of chemicals with a whole bunch of weird organisation. Tricky to create, easier to farm.

    BTW, any catch the informative and amusing ‘A comprehensive overview of chemical-free consumer products‘ in Nature?

    joshvegas
    Free Member

    Id hazard a guess and say watch repair or lasers.

    Its gotta be lazors

    Spin
    Free Member

    Artificial meat is a major research area and not just at Ann Summers.

    kayak23
    Full Member

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    In general we can figure out the structure of anything, and make just about anything, take the pharmaceutical industry as an example, it’s feedstock is mostly pence per kg, but the product is often more expensive than gold, it’s just a case of developing a recipie and following it rigorously.

    Also, don’t confuse physical chemistry (making diamond would be very much physical chemistry, there’s no reaction going on, just altering somethings state), organic chemistry (making petrochemicals, plastics, or pharmaceuticals), inorganic chemistry (making simple stuff that doesn’t involve carbon chains) and biology (growing steak isn’t really a chemical problem, we can make amino acids, it’s then a case of mimiking the cow to produce somethin that looks like muscle tissue). There’s a lot of crossover where one branch does it better than another, for example converting CO2 into elemental carbon and oxygen, you can do that with physical chemistry, the process is very well understood as the reverse is used a lot in S.Africa where there’s lots of coal but no oil for petrol, and like most reactions it’s an equilibrium so you can swing it the other way under different conitions. But it’s very endothermic, and ultimately it’s cheaper to let nature do it by growing trees/alge.

    ahwiles
    Free Member

    i use man-made rubies at work:

    google: Verneuil process

    globalti
    Free Member

    It would be great if we could synthesise rhino horn and elephant tusk then flood the market with them to drive down demand.

    I saw a TV vet programme last week in which they drilled into a rhino’s horn and denatured it by injecting a very smelly red dye under pressure. This has to be the answer for rhinos but I’m not sure how we can stop the effing Chinese killing all the ellies.

    Saccades
    Free Member

    He covers his/her naked body in animal fat and then rolls in industrial gems before throwing him/herself down a huge hydro power pipe to clean out all the limescale.

    You’re a drag queen?

    Id hazard a guess and say watch repair or lasers. Its gotta be lazors

    Christ – 2 of those guesses are a little close to the mark…

    Use industrial rubies as parts of high pressure valves and emeralds as parts of high pressure piston rods (coupled to gold seals), I also get to use plasma beams and pots of platinum.

    It sounds a lot more sexy than it really is…

    samuri
    Free Member

    Nah, it sounds like you’re a technician for a Bond villain.

    Which must be awesome.

    rusty90
    Free Member

    it sounds like you’re a technician for a Bond villain

    Do you get thrown into a pool of piranhas if you make a mistake?

    IA
    Full Member

    “retirement” 😉 plan for a bond villain technician probably not the best either.

    DavidB
    Free Member

    Replace the “S” with a “J” on kayak23’s photo

    Saccades
    Free Member

    I’ve been upskilling and I’m thinking of opening a grooming parlour for sharks, before the spacebased volcano is attacked again.

    tonyg2003
    Full Member

    Quorn is a fungal product grown in huge quantities in incubators. So we are sort of all already growing beef (substitute).

    brassneck
    Full Member

    Quorn is a fungal product grown in huge quantities in incubators. So we are sort of all already growing beef (substitute).

    I’m pretty convinced it’s Soylent Green.

    Not sure on the veggie rules on longpig 😕

    VanHalen
    Full Member

    I’m thinking of opening a grooming parlour for sharks

    you can vajazzle a shark? 😯

    benji
    Free Member

    It would be great if we could synthesise rhino horn and elephant tusk then flood the market with them to drive down demand.

    Failing that rather than burning what they seize, flood the market and drop the money out of it. Never understand why they do burn it, just helps keep the price and demand up. Economics and conservation just never seem to meet.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    Chemical formula isn’t everything of course. Take right-handed and left-handed molecules, for instance. And then there’s the structure as mentioned above. Beef is just proteins, but it’s nothing like protein powder you can buy – it needs to be made into structures. We probably could synthesise a lot of things, but making them work usefully is far harder.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    Never understand why they do burn it

    Corruption opportunities. Poachers keep on shooting it, officials sell it, poachers get a cut, go on poaching.

    jfletch
    Free Member

    Isn’t the simple answer in O-Level chemisrty terms just…

    There is more to chemistry than just the ingredients.

    If you just put 12 parts carbon, 22 parts hydrogen and 11 parts oxygen in a bowl you don’t automatically get sugar.

    In the same way that if you put some beef, flour, butter, potato, salt, pepper and water into a bowl you don’t end up with a meat and potato pie.

Viewing 34 posts - 1 through 34 (of 34 total)

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