Gemini says a firecracker releases 150 J, so yeah not a lot.
For a tiny number, that is still insanely high...
So that's 10^33 protons or 5/3×10^9 moles. It's difficult to get a sense of what that actually means because protons aren't a typical substance. I guess the closest human relatable approximation might be liquid hydrogen. That's about 2 g/mol and ~0.71 g/ml so 2.82 ml/mol but that's H2 (ie 2 protons) so our equivalent would be 1.41 ml/mol yielding 2.35 million liters.
I tried to compare to oil tankers but glancing at Wikipedia it seems the smallest crude tankers are at least 25× that size. The largest oil tankers in the world (of which there are 4) carry ~450 million liters which works out to ~191 chicxulub equivalents (assuming I did all the math correctly).
According to Wikipedia Castle Bravo was ~500 L of lithium deuteride and yielded ~63 PJ making it ~5 million of those to 1 chicxulub equivalent; the supertanker would equate to about 1 billion. In other words ~1000× more energy density than lithium deuteride powered fusion which is itself already so absurd that it's difficult to comprehend.
That was a lot more involved than I expected. I really hope I didn't misplace an order of magnitude or three anywhere.
Was kind of disappointed to see it was transported via 18-wheeler.
Of course, it's compact because it only has to last so long. CERN's press release discusses needing a generator and a cryocooler in the truck for longer trips: https://home.cern/news/press-release/experiments/base-experi...
This older article about the test they did with ordinary protons, indicates the outer frame measures "2.00 meters in length, 0.87 meters in width, and 1.85 meters in height" and comes in under 1000kg https://ep-news.web.cern.ch/content/cerns-base-step-leap-for...
Either nothing would happen, or like molten salt in water, the joule currents would be instant and drive it all to go boom in a big way. I wonder which.
It would immediately explode.
My guess is that even in this case the lump’s positrons would immediately interact with the table’s electrons and explode.
Or something.
People should read the comment history more critically.
The fact that no time traveler is mentioned in the article is probably a good sign for our future.
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?
Not necessarily because I want to use it, but because I have a vague idea of what it's capable of, and what that would mean in the hands of certain groups capable of producing it.
Antimatter production is so inefficient that they will be much more expensive per unit energy yield.
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...
The upshot was, it was likely that less than a mol of hydrogen had been run through the ring.
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.
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.
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 store energy. It's not like you are bringing 100x as much energy with you just because it's hydrogen. So that doesn't make an ICE car any less of a bomb...
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 an extremely hard vacuum. And even then, you're going to get collisions with stray atoms and annihilation events which release gamma rays and other radiation products - although shielding is probably the least of your worries in this scenario.
A typical research lab at a university or large corporation can't make a vacuum strong enough to store even tiny quantities of antimatter for more than a few minutes, and they can't produce the magnetic confinement strength required to store macro quantities of it, either.
So the question with an antimatter-powered car is not if it's going to destroy the surrounding region and bathe it in hard radiation, but how many milliseconds (or less) it will take before that inevitably happens.
But probably luckily for us, this is all moot, because we have no way of producing enough antimatter for this to be an issue. If all the antimatter that's ever been created by humans annihilated simultaneously, only scientists monitoring their instruments closely enough would notice, because it's such a microscopic amount.
Edit: for perspective, you'd need about 7 billion times the 92 antiprotons transported in the truck in the story to produce the energy produced by a single grain of gunpowder.
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 energy in a single moment, setting off a chain reaction to the remaining antimatter. It's like sitting on an armed nuclear bomb, where you rely on electrified, highly sophisticated containment equipment never failing a single time for months to years... In a radiation-heavy environment known for causing sophisticated electronics to have errors.
And, yes, hydrogen cars were looked at critically because of the perception they can Hindenburg (I'm unsure if it's true or not). Which is a good example because you don't particularly see any hydrogen blimps anymore - we made them illegal because they're dangerous.
With antimatter the tiniest leak will annihilate your ship.
> Following Fig. 9, beam core and plasma core configurations can produce direct thrust by directing the charged particles produced into an exhaust beam using a magnetic nozzle. Gas core systems use the energy released from the reaction to heat a gas that is exhausted for thrust. Finally, solid core configuration heats a metal core like Tungsten that acts as a heat exchanger to a propellant that is then exhausted from a regular nozzle.
Not the same paper, but goes into more detail.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266620272...
A slightly less insane fuel source is a micro black hole. Drag a tiny black hole behind your ship and drip-feed it any kind of mass you come across. You still get >90% mass-energy efficiency which is far beyond anything else we know of.
Besides, one of the big problems with antimatter is that it's a battery, not a fuel source. We must first collect the unimaginable amount of energy and then process it into antimatter one particle at a time. If you build a ton of factories around a star you can get meaningful production. But a black hole drive can suck up interstellar gas or any asteroids you come across. Matter is easy to get. Don't ask where the micro black hole comes from.
The fact that no time traveler is mentioned in the article is probably a good sign for our future.
The fact that we don't see these glowing boundaries in space is evidence that there are not antimatter regions and that the visible universe is almost entirely composed of matter.
It talks about symmetries, but has a nice story about this exact hypothetical scenario. (Someone else already replied why this probably isn't possible in our observable universe, but the episode is cool so I thought I'd share)
But what you can't get away from is heat dissipation.
Any life will use energy will generate heat will need to dissipate heat to maintain homeostasis.
Could you dissipate enough heat to exist at <10K, to maintain a technological civilization? Or would you be reduced to supercooling your entire environment?
Are there naturally occurring pools of liquid helium out there in the universe, maintained by natural processes, or are you left with vacuum relying on radiative cooling?
Imagine the estate of this in 10 years with all the tech advancements, and all the applications it could have.
https://www.youtube.com/@pbsspacetime/search?query=antimatte...
More accurately: we aren't sure if antineutrinos are the same or different from neutrinos!
