i'm going to be rich

so i was reading the paper on the flight back to beijing yesterday, and one article caught my eye. a company called LifeGem will take the ashes of someone who passed away, and extract the carbon to create diamonds. one body has enough carbon to make over 100,000USD of blue/yellow VS clarity diamonds.

so this got me thinking. over 100,000USD from just a body? i should turn this into a business. this would work especially well in china since life is valued so cheap. for example, if someone hits you with a car and you die, they only pay out 6000USD. so let's look at it this way. average salary in major cities in china is in the 200USD a month range. let's say you offer families 2000USD in return for a major portion of their diseased ones' ashes. how many families would do this do you think? while this is close to the average annual salary of people in major cities, the majority of people have never seen this kind of money in their life. so let's say with a population of 1.3B, a few thousand die per day. if .1% of the people choose this option, that's still over 100,000USD of grey goods per day.

unethical? maybe a little. but you're doing the families a favour with all the money, and it's not like previous diamonds weren't created from the carbon of previous living organisms. so you can look at it as wearing a diamond that's fresh from another human, or wearing a diamond that was formed by the remains of a dinosaur. wait, dinosaurs are pretty cool. so let's say made from the remains of a retarded neanderthal. which would u rather have now?

okay maybe buying human remains is a little too far. but how about animals? i'm sure you can buy cattle or farm animals for quite cheap, and since they're organisms you can throw them into the fire and make a bunch of diamonds. and with cows being multiple times the weight of a human being, the amount of carbon in them is likewise the same ratio. so go around and buy up a bunch of diseased mad-cow animals, or chickens with bird flu and then burn them all up in the oven and pump out a bunch of diamonds. perfect.

so i bet someone is going to steal my idea in the near future since i don't have to capital to buy high-tech ovens which turn the remains of living organisms into prized jewellery. or maybe this LifeGem company is just a front for something of this nature? maybe by selling this service to people to turn their loved ones into diamonds it's a coverup for them burning heaps of cows thus flooding the diamond market with blue and yellow sparklies? i know one thing for sure, DeBeers will be crying over this whole ordeal in the future when somebody saturates the market with cheaper man-made diamonds.