ORICHALCUM UNIVERSE sidebar: Lumaliths...

[Johnny1A.2]

LUMALITHS

"A Diamond Is Forever".

Well, that all depends. A gem diamond may be enduring in terms of time, but its value is quite another matter. Likewise rubies, emeralds, sapphires, topazes, etc. Their value is entirely contextual.

Diamonds were first produced artificially in the sixth decade of the Twentieth Century. Synthetic emeralds were produced in the seventh decade, synthetic rubies existed decades before either.

The existence of such synthetic gemstones, naturally, represented a threat to the business model of the major gemstone sellers, but for a long period in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first Centuries, the advertisers and marketers were able to work around this by a combination of market manipulation and encouraging irrational valuations of 'natural' stones over artificial ones that were otherwise identical. This was not sustainable, however, especially when the price of artificial stones continued to fall and at times the 'distinction' between natural and artificial stones came down to paying a price premium for stones that were objectively of lower quality simply because they were natural.

As time passed, the gem industry turned synthetic stones to their advantage by marketing artificial jewels that were expensive and difficult to make, and which had no natural version. The greatest salvation of the industry, however, came with the discovery on the Jovian satellite Io of the natural gemstones that came to be called lumaliths. [1]

Products of the Ionian biosphere and the unique electrical, magnetic, chemical, and radiation factors of the Ionian environment, lumaliths have yet to be produced artificially as of A.D. 2120. Attempts have been made, but the stones are enormously complex molecular structures, involving multiple elements and subsidiary compounds, both ionic and covalent bonds, and their formation involves chemical processes that are still imperfectly understood even by 2120.

Lumaliths are a subset of a larger class of such objects produced by biological processes on Io, but most of them are not suitable for use as gemstones. Some are aesthetically unappealing, many are unable to survive the hostile chemical conditions prevalent on Earth and similar worlds.

(Large amounts of free oxygen only seem benign to us because we are evolved to live in it. Free oxygen is a very destructive chemical.)

Some of the stones that could endure free oxygen are vulnerable to water vapor or intense light (such as solar insolation at one AU).

Many of the 'cousins' of lumaliths would make beautiful gemstones, except for the fact that they would discolor, deform, or even disintegrate within days of their first exposure to Terran conditions. Others could endure Terran conditions but are simply not visually appealing.

Gem-grade lumaliths form near volcanic vents on Io, usually in underground chambers, but never far below the surface. In their natural state they are difficult to distinguish from other lithic rubble, they are mostly recovered by remote-controlled drones operated by skilled 'prospectors'. Attempts to entirely automate the process have not been fully successful, human judgement still plays a role in identifying the stones. The best 'prospectors' are highly valued and usually paid by percentage of the value of the stones.

Once located, the stones have to be physically recovered, which involves both robotics and human effort. The Ionian environment is almost inconceivably hostile, combining temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero C and thousands of degrees above, as well as earthquake and other volcanic hazards, plus strange and dangerous electrical and magnetic effects, and a constant sleet of intense radiation from the particle belts of Jupiter. A lethal dose of radiation can be accumulated in no more than minutes if shielding fails. The recovery process is expensive, time consuming, and dangerous, adding to the allure of the final product in the markets of Earth.

The specific subset that are lumaliths are actually a set of closely related molecular structures, each with slightly different optical and physical properties. From the point of view of the gem industry, the relative rarity of 'useful' stones is actually a plus, as is the cost of transportation from Io to Earth, both add to the perceived value of the gems.

Lumaliths require cutting and polishing to bring out their maximum beauty, much like traditional gemstones. However, a high-quality lumalith has a 'fire' that is actually greater than that of a diamond, and a color play reminiscent of a combination of opal and corundum. They refract light in patterns of exquisite complexity, an effect some have likened to a 'rainbow in a rock'.

Most lumaliths have a 'basic' color that can be either clear, intense red, or deep green, depending on the viewing angle and the local lighting. The gem industry calls a lumalith 'base color' that color that it displays at least fifty-five percent of the time under direct sunlight on Earth.

The same stone, though, might range from intense blood-red to an intense blue-violet, touching on every color between, all with diamond-like fire, depending on the viewing angle, the lighting, and even sometimes the temperature of the stone. A ring with a lumalith setting might flash from red to green to blue to yellow to red again, just over the course of a few seconds, merely because the hand on which it is worn is in motion.

To make it better, from the gem industry point of view, each stone is a unique molecular structure, meaning that the exact color patterns it displays is also unique. The complexity of the molecules enables many small but optically significant variations, and being natural products produced by biology, each one has its own unique pattern of structural quirks and atomic impurities, giving each stone its own optical/color 'aura'. The uniqueness of the structure also means that cutting and polishing and otherwise preparing such stones is still partly an art as well as a science, involving both precision algorithms and human judgment. The most talented gem-masters command very high wages indeed.

Physically, lumaliths rate at about a nine on the Mohs scale of hardness, comparable to ruby or sapphire. Though they are softer than diamond, they are also substantially more resistant to fracture along cleavage planes than diamonds, because of their complex molecular structure. A lumalith is not a single crystal, but rather a complex assemblage of crystals with complicated internal stress patterns.

Lumaliths are rated using the same mass scale as diamonds, the metric carat. Most lumaliths on the market on Earth in 2120 run from 1 carat to 20 carats. Anything from 21 to 100 carats is a rare specimen, anything over 100 carats is a paragon stone, and immensely valuable. Lumaliths are actually slightly less dense than diamond, so that a stone of a given carat rating will be slightly larger than an equivalent gem diamond. The largest known lumalith on Earth, as of 2120, is a 5000 carat gem set into the Imperial Throne, its monetary value would be almost literally incalculable.

Being luxury products, the value of a gemstone is a combination of its innate beauty and 'social' factors such as rarity, fashions, and snobbery. Lumaliths were the greatest gift to come to the gem industry in centuries. Rare, uniquely beautiful, difficult to obtain, still impossible to synthesize, their origin on Io giving them an 'exotic' tinge even in 2120. Lumaliths are a major mark of wealth and position in the Terran societies of 2120.

The combination of their rarity, difficulty of recovery, difficulty of preparation (cutting and shaping and polishing), transport costs from Jupiter to Earth, and a demand that runs well above supply means that there is no need for the gem industry to use the cartelization techniques that were so long associated with diamond. In terms of 2020 money, an average quality lumalith would run around $100,000.00 (U.S.) a carat. The higher quality stones would run 3 to 5 times that. Of course that ignores considerations like the cost of the setting or special-case gems.

In 2120, most lumaliths are cut, polished, and prepared on one of three major centers: Antwerp for the Empire, Denver, Colorado, for the USA, with a smaller but significant center of activity in Jerusalem for the Israelis. These three cities see over 90% of all lumalith preparation, and the vast majority of the stones that are brought to Earth pass through one of these three markets. A few small centers of activity exist elsewhere, some of them legal and a few of them not. The gems are valuable enough to make smuggling profitable, and smuggled gems require processing.

It would make a certain amount of economic sense to process the gems on Io before shipping them to Earth, to reduce transported mass, but at least as of 2120, the cost savings of setting up processing on Io have not been sufficient to overcome the enormous difficulties of doing so.

Interestingly, lumaliths are sometimes condemned by moralists because, unlike previous precious gems like diamond or sapphire, lumaliths are pure luxury products. They have essentially no applications other than jewelry and objects of scientific study (chemists still strive to understand their formation processes and why their molecules exist at all, some believe useful applications might come of such understanding eventually). Diamonds have been used in industry and technology for decades, corundum has many applications, but lumaliths are pure luxuries. Expensive luxuries, expensive enough that people can and do kill over them.



[1] The term 'lumalith' derives from 'light stone' and was originally a brand name that became a general term.