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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Antimatter has been transported for the first time
201–210 of 222 posts
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#202Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Antimatter is a completely different story. The difference is that antimatter annihilates with any normal matter that it comes into contact with. This means you can't just put it in a tank, the way you can with hydrogen. You can't e.g. combine it with some metal to make a metal hydride to make it safer to store, the way you can with hydrogen. At an absolute minimum, you need extremely strong magnetic confinement and…
How is it possible to make as hard of vacuum as they did? I assume it's not perfect, so what's the trick? Does the magnet setup create a volume that's simultaneously high probability for antimatter and low for everything else?
For this antimatter transport experiment, they only transported 92 antiprotons. To store and transport that, the requirements for the magnetic field and vacuum are many orders of magnitude lower than what would be needed for macro-scale quantities.
Also, if there was an accident and all those protons annihilated, the consequences would be unnoticeable except to sensitive instruments. The energy involved is about one seven billionth of the energy in a single grain of gunpowder.
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#204This is quite interesting.
Imagine the estate of this in 10 years with all the tech advancements, and all the applications it could have.
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#205Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely, I've had a mosquito hit me while flying and you can actually feel it hit your skin.
The subject of this story is a single proton that you would definitely feel if it hit you: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/
Oh my god i never read this thats so cool
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tha…
Alpha Centauri yes, the edge of the universe no :D Edge of observable universe is something like 46 billion light-years away, even at 0.9c thats 50 billion years of travel (22 billion years experienced by the traveller) But yes, you can travel places by constant acceleration but unfortunately it still dwarfs in comparison to those places out of our reach. Unfortunately also, the universe is expanding at a rate faster…
If the craft could maintain a constant 1G acceleration the entire time or more it is feasible to get near the known edge for the traveler, assuming we could make and utilize enough anti-matter to do it and that what we see as the edge here is actually a recognizable edge once you are out there.
0.9C would be reached in only a year and a half for the traveler under constant 1G acceleration. After 2.5 years you would be at .99c, and at a bit over 3.5 years you would hit .999c with a 6x time dilation compared to earth. After 6 years of acceleration it would be .99999c and Earth would be 200 years in the past. As you approach 12 years you would be going 0.9999999999c and Earth would have experienced almost 70,000 years. As you go past 16 years you would be in the millions of years and as you got past 20 years you would be in the billions of years.
Of course doing that may only be feasible with anti-matter energy storage. The next best energy source is fusion energy but it is 2 orders of magnitude less dense. Perhaps some kind of ram scoop would make that route possible but that is going beyond just speculation because we don't know if you can feasibly capture random particles at that speed even assuming you didn't explode from just hitting them in the first place.
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#208Earlier 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.
Yeah but when you are talking about energy levels in the nuclear bomb range, the threat to the passenger stops going up. If im in a craft with 1 Hiroshima bomb of energy and another guy is in one with a million tsar bombs worth of energy, we would both be obliterated before we knew anything was wrong no matter how small of a mishap.
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#209Sounds like the start of research ending in antimatter bombs.
Using anti-matter for weapons isn't that much of a benefit over a nuclear bomb other than potentially the bombs volume. You would get much less explosion per dollar versus nuclear, and our largest nuclear bombs already waste most of their energy blowing it right out into space. Its like throwing bombs at an antfarm, yeah a full stick of dynamite would completely obliterate the ant farm, but so would a quarter stick of dynamite, and throwing 100 sticks of dynamite at an ant farm may boast impressive energy levels on paper but would be a complete waste of dynamite and effort because you already destroyed it 1,000 times over.
Re: Antimatter has been transported for the first time
#210Sounds like the start of research ending in antimatter bombs.
You need to preserve the oil. Else it is useless.