>>339659>Diamonds are only freakishly expensive because of global monopoly on diamond mines.Not even a monopoly on diamond mines, it's artificial value bubble created by jew-eller conspiracy. Raw diamonds, that can't be cut, but can still be used in machinery (abrasives, diamond anvils, etc) are something like forty bucks to a bag.
Of course, it doesn't help that you can manufacture diamonds to exact specification - said bubble is the only way diamonds are valuable at all.
>There's a finite amount of it on earth.So is pretty much everything else, save for hydrogen (sun shoots it at us) and maybe iron and nickel (meteorites). Being finite isn't its main quality that led it to be used as currency.
By the way, another reason is that gold can be native: its properties result in being able to find nuggets of pure gold, as opposed to various oxides and sulfates everything else comes as.
>>339648>plant-based fabricsThey're called cotton and linen, genius.
>plant-based plasticsTechnically you can make basic bitch polyethylene from plants easily, but anything actually useful like polyphenylene sulfide, ha ha no.
>>339645>replaced with alternativesLook up ammonia reactor.
>>339655Going by the spergouts, russian, made some exceptionally retarded financial decisions, and is now throwing a tantrum.
>>339661It still doesn't remove the issue of exceptionally toxic (like, you think burning gasoline is bad? try "spent lithium batteries dumped offshore poisoning the world's water supply".) components required FOR electric cars.
The reasonable solution is to rape the automotive companies into dissolution, leave combustion-driven personal cars, but rebuild public transport (trams, subway, trains) to the point you don't NEED the cars anymore.
>>339665By the point you can waste nuclear on gold (and purify it enough so you don't need a NBC suit to handle it), you're already deep into fully automatic gay space communism and scarcity does not concern you. Hunting down gold asteroids is a far more likely prospect, as is having automatic spaceships mining Titan (it's MADE out of fucking hydrocarbons, if you can reach that, all your oil needs are solved for the next million years).