121–130 of 222 posts
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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?
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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.
We're not going anywhere without a revolution in our understanding of the universe.
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> If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation. 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…
Volatility and energy content are not necessarily related.
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> If you're ok with the looming threat of total annihilation. 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…
Surely you understand there's a difference? Liquid gasoline does not spontaneously explode like an action movie. You can put a match in the fuel tank and (presuming infinite oxygen availability) it'd just start a small fire. Heck, may even just give a little puff and then put out the match. Antimatter in any sufficient fuel quantity, the moment it breaks confinement, will completely annihilate and release ALL it's en…
Batteries have some of these same risks: they store a lot of energy and it can be released very quickly under the wrong circumstances.
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E=mc^2 and c^2 is a big number.
indeed, but note that c^2 is just a factor to convert between units here and is completely arbitrary (or rather, c is so high because our units are human scale) indeed, in the most natural systems of units in this area, we set c = 1 as to simplify the equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrized_unit_system
(not /s for clarification)
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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.
There are a lot of completely random statements about how much a gram costs floating around out there. Anywhere from $60T to $3,000T. 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...
Those aren't comparable costs. The cost given for antimatter is the cost of producing it from nothing. The cost given for gold is the market price of buying gold that already exists.
Consider the cost of producing one kilogram of gold from nothing.
(Consider also the cost of ownership. Gold has a higher-than-average cost of ownership; you have to provide security or it will be stolen. Antimatter's cost of ownership is far, far beyond that.)
How could we make enough antimatter to do something useful? Would we need to go hang out near the sun or deorbit Jupiter's moons with superconducting coils to get enough energy?
The more important question is not could we. it's should we
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When we're talking scales like 10^-23, "one" and "one sixth" are comparable enough to warrant an "approximately".
I'm not sure! One is just barely within human scale and one isn't. I think I could feel the impact of a mosquito on a sufficiently sensitive patch of skin. I'm not sure I could do the same with one sixth of a mosquito. Its like the difference between something I can lift (100 lb) and something I definitely cannot lift (600lb)
I'm pretty sure I could feel one sixth of a mosquito hit me, because I've been pelted by much smaller gnats before!
(It does depend on where, of course.)
Angels & Demons anyone?