131–140 of 222 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which seems suprisingly high given that it's 92 protons worth of antimatter!
E=mc^2 and c^2 is a big number.
Famous tweet about conversations with God.
[1] - https://x.com/WraithLaFrentz/status/1981404849305686219
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.
pssh, antineutrinos are transported all the time!
That's a contentious statement! We're not sure if they are or aren't. More accurately: we aren't sure if antineutrinos are the same or different from neutrinos! https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.02110
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Any compressed gas fuel is inherently dangerous. There's a video of a CNG-fueled bus falling off a lift and sending a fireball through the maintenance facility. Batteries have some of these same risks: they store a lot of energy and it can be released very quickly under the wrong circumstances.
And, no, batteries can have outbursts but they're nowhere near as catastrophic as compressed, explosive gases or an antimatter bomb.
Angels & Demons anyone?
The mention Dan Brown in the article! This book occupies a special place in my heart and I was glad to see it mentioned.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Interstellar flight is a new physics problem, not a smash-the-tiny-rocks-together-to-make-bigger-bang problem. We're not going anywhere without a revolution in our understanding of the universe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Interstellar flight is a new physics problem, not a smash-the-tiny-rocks-together-to-make-bigger-bang problem. We're not going anywhere without a revolution in our understanding of the universe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
8 minutes to do a mere 1AU. Pretty slow. (not /s for clarification)