Maybe I’m being whooshed, but if you want to remove CO2 from the air and turn it into building material, why not just plant some trees?
You’d have to have some place to put them, for one. And for another, most of the carbon in a tree ends up in the environment again.
These kinds of things don’t progress linearly, but rather in bursts. There could be a breakthrough tomorrow in material science, say, or in lasers, that’ll place fusion 5 years in the future.
[QUOTE=The Tao’s Revenge;10899760
What happens when a diamond building catches on fire?[/QUOTE]
Eons ago in my thermodynamics class/book something struck me even then.
Scientist BURNED diamonds to measure some fundamental values.
Can you imagine writing up the budget request for that?
Hell, today with all the outrage by “common folk” over science and engineering isuues they don’t have a fracking clue about, you probably couldnt even get the experiment funded.
I am tired of these muther fucking trees in this muther fucking forest 
Trees on a Plain.
Coming to a theater near you!
Staring Samuel (lumber) Jack son
Along these lines, and the recycling good or bad thread, I have often wondered if we should be recycling paper at all. If it stays stable in landfills for hundreds of years, and it mostly comes from farmed or quick growing trees, it almost seems it would be better to bury paper than reuse it.
Jonathan
Ah, just let the deBeers marketing guys kick it around for a while. I bet they’ll come up with something good.
Snap, but I had thought of burying (or just piling) them somewhere cold so that bacteria can’t break them down and release the carbon.
I think Alaska would be okay. Texas might not be so bad either.
Sure, why not? It’s not like it’s a precious gemstone like sapphire or something. Compare to the mirrors in the Advanced LIGO gravitational wave detectors, which are planned to each be a 40 kg flawless single crystal of sapphire. And that’s considered one of the easier challenges involved in building the thing.
I am talking about the PR aspect of it.
Can’t you see it now on FOX?
Crazy Scientists want to burn diamonds…with taxpayers dollars!
Yeah, they’d spend billions on a global smear campaign, denouncing the CO[sub]2[/sub] diamonds as inferior, cheap imitations that cannot possibly compare to their diamonds.
De Beers would only promote CO[sub]2[/sub] diamonds if they were given a monopoly on those, too. 
We could ship them all to Africa so the natives could make huts with em
It depends on what you mean by significant progress.
Do you know about ITER?
A lot of the stuff on that site is old but it appears that they are doing “Earth work and levelling” right now so they’re still preparing for construction. According to their schedule, they won’t create their first plasma until 2016.
As for breakthroughs, Korea just developed some innovative magnets WARNING PDF! The link is to a Feb. 20 article in Science magazine.
I’m going completely off memory here - I’ll look it up later but I don’t have much time atm. Is that the program that was created off-the-cuff in a meeting between Reagan and Gorbechev back in the '80s that has been one big farce, money-pit and embarassment plagued with one false-start after another over the years? I think they argued for at least a decade about where to build the thing.
That could very well be true. ITER could be the nuclear eqivalent of a ponzi scheme for all I know.
I want them to succeed and I hadn’t heard/read and independent news stories so I didn’t go searching on my own. I’ll have to look into it.
Eh, that sort of thing is fairly routine in science. I’m sure you could find something equivalent that’s going on right now. In fact, I can see right now on FOX “Crazy scientists want to monitor volcanoes with taxpayers’ dollars!”. But for the most part, the media doesn’t bother with it, because it’s not really interesting.
Oh, I eagerly await the skin-flaying diamond-duststorms that are sure to result from producing that much diamond dust. Silicon is bad enough, and it’s only 100 vs diamond’s 1600, absolute hardness.
The best ways to take CO[sub]2[/sub] out of the atmosphere are increased area under forestation/planting, reversing desertification, and increased reefbuilding. I don’t think much research has gone into methods for the last, maybe that’s something that could be looked at - maybe GE new super-reefbuilding organisms?
Less than $100. Two examples:
If I recall correctly, diamond is valued as a semiconductor substrate because it has extreamly high thermal conductivity, yet is an electrical insulator (or at least a semiconductor). It is rare that you want a poor thermal insulator as a building material.