Singapore Flyer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It's the time of year when the minds of top Ivy League undergraduates turn to interviews with investment banks and consulting firms. Here's a good interview question to test their smarts: What is the diamond planet worth? The answer: $26.9 nonillion ($26.9 followed by 30 zeros).
Sure, this is the first time in your life that you have ever thought of a nonillion. But you've surely thought of trillions before -- and that's a one followed by 12 zeros. To get to a quadrillion you just at three more zeros and if you go up three each time, it only takes five more increments of three zeros to get you to a nonillion.
That's a big chunk of change. To put those $26.9 nonillion into perspective, think about the Earth's GDP -- The World Bank estimated global GDP at about $70 trillion in 2011. The Diamond Planet is worth 384 quadrillion times more than Earth's GDP. And a mere .0182% of the Diamond Planet's raw diamonds would handily pay off what the Economist estimates is the $49 trillion in debt held by the world's governments.
The Diamond Planet is formally known as '55 Cancri e.' According to Reuters, it orbits a star in the constellation of Cancer and completes a rotation that takes Earth about 365 days in 18 hours.
The Diamond Planet's radius is double Earth's and its mass is eight times greater. The 3,900F planet is warmish -- and is "covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite," according to Yale researcher, Nikku Madhusudhan.
But for an aspiring consultant trying to answer this brain teaser, a key fact about the Diamond Planet is that "at least a third of the planet's mass, the equivalent of about three Earth masses, could be diamond," according to Reuters.
You may not even be familiar with what consulting firms do but you have probably heard of one of consulting's alumni -- Mitt Romney. Before he started Bain Capital, a leveraged buyout firm, he was a consultant at Bain & Co.
And when consulting firms hire undergraduate students, they screen out the ones who crack under pressure. One way they put candidates under pressure is to ask them to answer questions that require them to make calculations in their heads.
For example, one former student who interviewed at Bain's Singapore office was asked to estimate the annual revenues of "the world's largest observation wheel," the Singapore Flyer. To sail through that interview question, all you'd have to do is describe the details of the revenue formula you'd use, plug in reasonable assumptions, and calculate the correct answer in your head.
To the best of my knowledge, consulting firms have not used "What is the diamond planet worth?" in an interview yet. But it would certainly be a timely and difficult question to answer -- and one that is of interest precisely because of pressure -- a key ingredient in converting coal to diamonds (at least on Earth).
How did I get that $26.9 nonillion? Just multiply the mass of the Diamond Planet's diamonds by the price of raw diamonds. I made the following calculations and my assumptions may be off:
- Diamond Planet's Diamond Mass = 17,920,800,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms = Three Earth Masses (3 x 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kg)
- Raw Diamond Value/Kg = $1.5 million = $300/carat x 5 carats/gram x 1,000
- Diamond Planet's Diamond Value = $26.9 nonillion = $26,881,200,920,800,000,000,000,000,000,000.
There is no doubt in my mind that it would be quite valuable for those of us on earth to be able to mine The Diamond Planet and sell its raw diamonds. Naturally, there is a question of whether all that supply could be absorbed by the market.
Unless we can find more planets with people willing to pay $300 a carat for raw diamonds or somehow raise the buying power of Earth's 7 billion inhabitants, bringing back all those diamonds to earth would create a big over-supply problem.
Solving that would make a pretty good consulting project though. And in the meantime, those aspiring consultants might be put to the test by answering this brain teaser: How long would it take a fleet of spaceships from earth to mine all those diamonds and bring them back?
I leave that as an exercise.
