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Nonetheless, "moving antimatter by truck" is pretty SF. More grounded than epic space opera, but stillvery cool.
I was once transporting antipasti and no one wrote HN post about it :(
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ideal spacecraft fuel If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation. I suppose at least it will kill you faster than your neurons can communicate so you wouldn't even notice.
If you're on a spacecraft you're sitting on a tank of rocket fuel anyway. It's the same problem, just slightly less total.
With antimatter the tiniest leak will annihilate your ship.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ideal spacecraft fuel If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation. I suppose at least it will kill you faster than your neurons can communicate so you wouldn't even notice.
If you're on a spacecraft you're sitting on a tank of rocket fuel anyway. It's the same problem, just slightly less total.
From a layman's point of view antimatter seems like an ideal spacecraft fuel. It's as energy dense as E = mc^2 allows, and if you have infrastructure to make it, the only input you need to produce it is electricity. Being able to transport it seems like an important piece of that puzzle. Production and storage would need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, but that's merely an engineering problem...right?
> ideal spacecraft fuel If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation. I suppose at least it will kill you faster than your neurons can communicate so you wouldn't even notice.
Don't you have that problem with any energy-dense fuel? It's just that it doesn get more dense than that, so you can be very space and weight efficient.
It's like everybody saying that a hydrogen car is a rolling bomb because of the energy stored in the hydrogen. Well, sure, but gasonline has just as much energy stored. Which is the whole point of fuel. To store energy. It's not like you are bringing 100x as much energy with you just because it's hydrogen. So that doesn't make an ICE car any less of a bomb...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ideal spacecraft fuel If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation. I suppose at least it will kill you faster than your neurons can communicate so you wouldn't even notice.
If you're on a spacecraft you're sitting on a tank of rocket fuel anyway. It's the same problem, just slightly less total.
From a layman's point of view antimatter seems like an ideal spacecraft fuel. It's as energy dense as E = mc^2 allows, and if you have infrastructure to make it, the only input you need to produce it is electricity. Being able to transport it seems like an important piece of that puzzle. Production and storage would need to be scaled by many orders of magnitude, but that's merely an engineering problem...right?
Not necessarily because I want to use it, but because I have a vague idea of what it's capable of, and what that would mean in the hands of certain groups capable of producing it.
Sounds like the start of research ending in antimatter bombs.
I was once transporting antipasti and no one wrote HN post about it :(