Every time I read one of these, I am amazed by how much stuff superconductivity allows, and how limited we are because it needs ultra low temperatures.
The disadvantages of water-based life.
Antimatter has been transported for the first time
81–90 of 222 posts
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#82Sounds like the start of research ending in antimatter bombs.
Unless we'd be fighting literal alines in space, and need a weapon for them, I think this would be many many many orders of magnitude too expensive / tricky for earth use. We have plenty of non sci-fi big boom sticks already as it is...
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Black holes are good star ship engines because they turn everything into Hawking radiation.
Can you elaborate? Why is HR useful for starship engines?
I suppose they mean if you could harness Hawking radiation to do useful work, then you could use any matter as fuel.
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#84From 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?
From a layman's point of view, I'm more interested in antimatter's potential as a weapon. 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.
Not that great. Chances are you will destroy your country before you destroy some other.
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would depend on how it's distributed. If it's very homogeneous, totally anihilated. If there are galaxies of matter and galaxies of antimatter, more or less like us with a bit more background radiation.
How do we know there are no antimatter galaxies far away from us?
There's a great episode about this on History of the Universe yt channel - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJGaqe5t14g
It talks about symmetries, but has a nice story about this exact hypothetical scenario. (Someone else already replied why this probably isn't possible in our observable universe, but the episode is cool so I thought I'd share)
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#86Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a layman's point of view, I'm more interested in antimatter's potential as a weapon. 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.
Not that great. Chances are you will destroy your country before you destroy some other.
That's just an engineering problem as well.
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#88From 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 familiar with the subject so genuine question. HOW would antimatter be used as fuel? There is energy released in matter antimatter annihilation, but where would the force to move a spacecraft come from?
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Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Antimatter reactions are about a million times more powerful than conventional combustion. They surpass even nuclear explosions in energy release. That means even a small mishap becomes a large mishap.
You can carry exactly (or roughly) as much energy in the form of antimatter as you would energy in the form of fuel.
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I visited CERN, they mentioned that there were some large number of protons in the ring at a time, and the runs would last a significant amount of wall clock time. (Don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was like 10^19 atoms of H, and days of wall clock) The upshot was, it was likely that less than a mol of hydrogen had been run through the ring.
If humanity doesn't perish in the next hundred year and masters interplanetary spaceflight, antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion. Interstellar spaceflight will become (barely) feasible once spaceships can reach velocity between 0.02 to 0.1c are possible. Even assuming non-100% conversion efficiency, antimatter has enough energy density to provide this capability.
> antimatter drive is the logical next step in propulsion after fusion
Maybe. Beamed propulsion makes a hell of a lot more sense in the solar system.