111–120 of 222 posts
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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.
https://home.web.cern.ch/order
If containment was to fail, it the total energy released would have been approximately 2.766 * 10 ^ -8 J, so it wasn't particularly dangerous
It would be trivial to reroute power from the secondary systems to the forward shields anyway
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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.
The big advantage of nuclear weapons is they are very cheap per unit of energy yield. Bang for the buck, if you will. Antimatter production is so inefficient that they will be much more expensive per unit energy yield.
According to, Michael Doser, a prominent particle physicist at CERN, "one 100th of a nanogram [of antimatter] costs as much as one kilogram of gold."
S: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-02-19/antimatter-fa...
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?
The confinement scheme used here is likely a Penning Trap. Such devices are limited in the amount of antimatter they can store by the Brillouin limit. The energy stored will be no more than the magnetic energy of the field of the trap, and so much less than the explosive yield of a mass of TNT (say) equal to the mass of the trap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma
Earlier 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.
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Which seems suprisingly high given that it's 92 protons worth of antimatter!
E=mc^2 and c^2 is a big number.
indeed, in the most natural systems of units in this area, we set c = 1 as to simplify the equations
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that great. Chances are you will destroy your country before you destroy some other.
Not to be dramatic, but wouldn't that level of destruction threaten all life on Earth? After the immediate destruction of the first county, extreme climate change would cause the same kind of problems as nuclear winter would, no?
We can't afford to blow up ourselves that way.
There are plenty of other ways we can afford, so antimatter isn't top of anyone's worries.