Imagine the poor post-doc in the back of the truck, no seatbelt, watching and noting anything going on, while the driver is doing donuts in a parking lot to really stress-test the magnetic containment.
How could we make enough antimatter to do something useful? Would we need to go hang out near the sun or deorbit Jupiter's moons with superconducting coils to get enough energy?
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?
The confinement scheme used here is likely a Penning Trap. Such devices are limited in the amount of antimatter they can store by the Brillouin limit. The energy stored will be no more than the magnetic energy of the field of the trap, and so much less than the explosive yield of a mass of TNT (say) equal to the mass of the trap.
I don't like antimatter because it's the most volatile fuel possible. If power is ever interrupted for any reason for any amount of time, the entire mass explodes.
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.
Black holes have similar problems to antimatter. A micro black hole is pretty close to an ongoing antimatter explosion in terms of effects on its surroundings. If any part of your shielding fails, it irradiates you or melts you. Their radiation increases as they get smaller, and if not fed they're always getting smaller, until they "explode" (yes, but even more so) and disappear. So you still have the problem that if you don't maintain it just right, it will annihilate your ship. So, "less insane" is dubious IMO. (Still my favorite starship idea, though.)
To propel things in space you don't need as much energy as you need momentum. With antimatter you just have momentum of the photons that were produced in the annihilation. I don't know if that's the best way of getting momentum. Might be.
Unless we'd be fighting literal alines in space, and need a weapon for them, I think this would be many many many orders of magnitude too expensive / tricky for earth use. We have plenty of non sci-fi big boom sticks already as it is...
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.
The comic Yoko Tsuno: The time spiral from 1981 (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Spirale_du_temps) is about a time traveler, who arrives from the future to prevent the creation/invention of antimatter. This is important, because in a future world war an antimatter bomb destroyed the earth.
The fact that no time traveler is mentioned in the article is probably a good sign for our future.
Every time I read one of these, I am amazed by how much stuff superconductivity allows, and how limited we are because it needs ultra low temperatures.
I am curious about how much energy needs to be expanded to contain the anti-matter. Say it the matter/anti-matter is to be used for propulsion/energy generation can we reach a threshold were we are actually energy positive
Imagine your own, household matter/antimatter reaction chamber. I can hardly wait for antimatter to be transported through pipes underground along side water mains, natural gas pipes, and sewer connections.
I wonder what would happen if you had a solid piece of antimatter, say a gram of anti-iron... and just set it down. Would it really annihaliate immediately on contact with air, a lab table, or anything... or would the normal forces that keep us from falling through things still be in effect?
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.
I'm not sure I ever got a straight answer about whether the reason we don't fall through things is actually Pauli exclusion or electrostatic repulsion, but I'm pretty sure even Pauli exclusion won't apply to different kinds of particles trying to occupy the same space. And electrostatic repulsion definitely won't work to keep electrons and positrons apart. I think the positrons and electrons in the outer shells would make contact instantly, and everything would unravel from there.
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Or something.
Was kind of disappointed to see it was transported via 18-wheeler.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-neutral_plasma
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.
https://www.youtube.com/@pbsspacetime/search?query=antimatte...
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.