Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Antimatter has been transported for the first time

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 222 posts

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#141

Post by adrian_b »

queuebert wrote: post #77
crooked-v wrote: post #64

Earlier 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.

Nuclear energy is limited to a little less than 1% of the energy release possible with antimatter, per mass.

The practical limit for nuclear energy is about 5 to 10 times less than that, because the theoretical limit corresponds to the transmutation of hydrogen into iron, coupled with the capture of the entire energy, which will not be achievable any time soon.

But there is an essential difference between nuclear energy and antimatter energy. Nuclear energy is stored in our environment and you just have to exploit it. Antimatter energy is a form of energy storage, so you need some other form of energy to make antimatter. The energy efficiency of making antimatter is many orders of magnitude worse than the factor of less than 100 that exists between nuclear energy and antimatter energy and the mass of the confinement device needed for storing antimatter is also orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the stored antimatter.

For now, there is absolutely no hope of ever using antimatter in practice for storing energy. Such a thing could be enabled only if some technologies that we cannot imagine would be invented.

Despite the great technological progress of the last couple of centuries, it is hard to say that there have been many inventions that have never been imagined before. After all, already 3 millennia ago the god Hephaestus did his metal smith work with the help of intelligent artificial robots.

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#142

Post by malfist »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #110
voidUpdate wrote: post #3

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

If it's built to federation specs, we even have redundancies for the redundancies.

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#143

Post by michaelmcdonald »

0x3f wrote: post #137
nimonian wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mention Dan Brown in the article! This book occupies a special place in my heart and I was glad to see it mentioned.

Not being funny but I only ever see Dan Brown mentioned in a mocking tone. I've genuinely no idea, but are the books actually good in some sense?

Read them for what they are (fictional novels with allusions to truth and fact) and you will truly enjoy a good story!

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#145

Post by burkaman »

0x3f wrote: post #137
nimonian wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mention Dan Brown in the article! This book occupies a special place in my heart and I was glad to see it mentioned.

Not being funny but I only ever see Dan Brown mentioned in a mocking tone. I've genuinely no idea, but are the books actually good in some sense?

They are very entertaining stories, that's why they're so popular. If that's what you're looking for then you'll probably like them. If you're easily annoyed by plot holes or historical/scientific inaccuracies then you might not, and if you're looking for sophisticated or artistic prose then he isn't the right author. Obviously "good writing" is subjective, but I think most people would agree that Dan Brown's writing is relatively simplistic, but that often isn't a problem when the story is good.

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#146

Post by Lyngbakr »

0x3f wrote: post #137
nimonian wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mention Dan Brown in the article! This book occupies a special place in my heart and I was glad to see it mentioned.

Not being funny but I only ever see Dan Brown mentioned in a mocking tone. I've genuinely no idea, but are the books actually good in some sense?

His books are perhaps in the same category as Nickelback albums: people love to rag on them, but if you look at the sheer number of units shifted, clearly lots of folks enjoy them.

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#147

Post by xeonmc »

gopalv wrote: post #131
api wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E=mc^2 and c^2 is a big number.

> c^2 is a big number. Famous tweet about conversations with God. [1] - https://x.com/WraithLaFrentz/status/1981404849305686219

Except the fine structure constant

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#148

Post by xeonmc »

burkaman wrote: post #145
0x3f wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being funny but I only ever see Dan Brown mentioned in a mocking tone. I've genuinely no idea, but are the books actually good in some sense?

They are very entertaining stories, that's why they're so popular. If that's what you're looking for then you'll probably like them. If you're easily annoyed by plot holes or historical/scientific inaccuracies then you might not, and if you're looking for sophisticated or artistic prose then he isn't the right author. Obviously "good writing" is subjective, but I think most people would agree that Dan Brown's writing…

See also: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10049454/Dont-make-fun-o...

Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time

#150

Post by BobaFloutist »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #122
d_silin wrote: post #51

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.

My memory is that 1g of constant acceleration grants sufficient relativity to make it to the edge of the known universe in a current human lifespan.

Now, it's true, there's some slight issues such as radiation, food storage/production, psychological effects, and any random space rocks obliterating your craft, all of which could reasonably turn out to be enough to make it not work. We also don't have a fuel source that can provide 1g of constant acceleration for 80 years for a reasonably sized space ship, though again my memory is that nothing prohibits it from a physics perspective (this is where my knowledge/understanding get prohibitively poor. I'm not sure how the math works if you stick a thousand ion drives to a spaceship that's already in space or if you just need a huge snifter of compressed hydrogen or if you can just use nuclear propulsion but I'm pretty sure that antimatter would do it, if you could bring yourself to waste the money. But maybe we don't have a plausible way to contain it so what do I know).

Maybe I'm remembering wrong, or maybe I glossed over what's currently considered a physics, rather than engineering/economic/materials science problem, but that's what it looked like last I checked.

Post reply on HN