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How could we harness this energy and make it usable?
You use it to boil water.
As a side note, it's mind boggling that overwhelming majority (more than 98%) of the visible universe's mass are only from two most lightweight of chemical elements namely Hydrogen and Helium.
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If you can electromagnetically trap enough antimatter to use it as fuel you could as well trap a miniature charged black hole that can be fed regular matter to produce power, which skips the whole inefficient part of making antimatter.
Miniature black holes would just evaporate. Antimatter wouldn't.
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> it's mind boggling that overwhelming majority is it though? I mean literally everything has to start there and the only way get to heavier elements is via stars and many-many iterations. it's not like heavier things popped into existence.... or did they...
Yes, it's a little mind boggling because the typical human context is this rocky ball of what is ultimately a very uncommon distribution of heavy elements. It's a strange feeling to know that almost everything is utterly unlike the everyday human experience. If you turn down the uhm acksshuwlly a few notches I think parent post's point is quite obvious.
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If you can electromagnetically trap enough antimatter to use it as fuel you could as well trap a miniature charged black hole that can be fed regular matter to produce power, which skips the whole inefficient part of making antimatter.
We know how to make antimatter and have actually done it. We have no realistic way to obtain a black hole of any size.
Can't wait for the day we can trap more antimatter so that governments that right now pretend this is for science weaponize it into a bomb way larger and harder to detect than nukes
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They made a movie about this. It didn’t end so well for the crew.
I admit to invoking the phrase “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see” at least once a year when something feels like it’s going horribly wrong.
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> it's mind boggling that overwhelming majority is it though? I mean literally everything has to start there and the only way get to heavier elements is via stars and many-many iterations. it's not like heavier things popped into existence.... or did they...
Yes, it's a little mind boggling because the typical human context is this rocky ball of what is ultimately a very uncommon distribution of heavy elements. It's a strange feeling to know that almost everything is utterly unlike the everyday human experience. If you turn down the uhm acksshuwlly a few notches I think parent post's point is quite obvious.
Earth's biosphere is profoundly 'lucky' on several very disparate time-scales. And then there's the size of the moon...
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For those who are time-rich and knowledge-poor: https://youtube.com/watch?v=i6jMnz6nlkw (Angela is genuinely a great science communicator and that video is time well spent if you are interested in this topic.)
You can skip the first 42 minutes that are about how bad is an article titled "how antimatter space craft will work". This part is absolutely boring as hell !