Antimatter annihilation feels like a good starting point for midly terrifying. Napkin math conversion rate is 1:40 Billion equivalent TNT explosion. Meaning a gram of anti-matter annihilating...
Antimatter annihilation feels like a good starting point for midly terrifying. Napkin math conversion rate is 1:40 Billion equivalent TNT explosion. Meaning a gram of anti-matter annihilating would be equivalent to a 40 billion gram TNT explosion. However, I'm assuming we are still a ways off before we are considering shipping anywhere near a gram (or a few orders of magnitude near it) of the stuff.
Humanity has produce 15 nanograms in all of history, CERN about 1 nanogram. If we were capable of producing 1 billion times as much as we have, it wouldn't be cause for concern, it would be cause...
Humanity has produce 15 nanograms in all of history, CERN about 1 nanogram. If we were capable of producing 1 billion times as much as we have, it wouldn't be cause for concern, it would be cause for a path towards practical implementation as an energy storage method.
It's a bit weird to see this up voted, this is simply not a concern. At least according to ChatGPT, 15 nanograms of annihilation would be about a hand grenade.
Hand grenades are preeeeeetty terrifying. Something 15 times less powerful probably isn't so scary, but the idea of transporting a hand grenade on a highway that automatically triggers if it...
Hand grenades are preeeeeetty terrifying. Something 15 times less powerful probably isn't so scary, but the idea of transporting a hand grenade on a highway that automatically triggers if it touches anything is kinda scary.
Can’t even synthesize anywhere near that much last I checked. I’m shocked they even have a reason to ship it given it’d almost certainly be cheaper and more efficient to move whatever you needed...
Can’t even synthesize anywhere near that much last I checked. I’m shocked they even have a reason to ship it given it’d almost certainly be cheaper and more efficient to move whatever you needed closer
It seems that it's a struggle to keep single digit numbers of antimatter sufficiently suspended by electromagnetic fields to avoid annihilation with the container. If it was just about usage as a...
It seems that it's a struggle to keep single digit numbers of antimatter sufficiently suspended by electromagnetic fields to avoid annihilation with the container.
If it was just about usage as a weapon, a banana would have more many magnitudes more antimatter annihilation reactions than they could transfer.
I've heard "grams of TNT" as a scale reference before, but as a relatively normal person who doesn't regularly use TNT, I have no idea how much that actually is, besides "40 billion grams is a lot...
I've heard "grams of TNT" as a scale reference before, but as a relatively normal person who doesn't regularly use TNT, I have no idea how much that actually is, besides "40 billion grams is a lot of grams".
Is 40 billion grams of TNT a "remove an unfortunate town from Europe" amount, or a "remove Europe" amount?
For context on what TNT blast strength looks like because the numbers get weird when in the billions and our view of nuclear strikes is very limited. This is 20kg, 5m away from blast proof...
For context on what TNT blast strength looks like because the numbers get weird when in the billions and our view of nuclear strikes is very limited.
This is 20kg, 5m away from blast proof concrete.. See how that paper just atomizes in under 10 milliseconds. That's the pressure wave that will most likely kill you. All the heat and fire is fairly contained and could safely be blocked if you had the right shielding to withstand that few seconds. But the pressure wave is going to reverberate through everything and will probably rip apart anything not designed to resist it. I think it was shown that your are not surviving a large blast in a heavy duty fridge because of shock-wave, then rapid acceleration and then being pin-balled across a landscape.
A better illustration is 50kg in a stage house. The take away from that is shrapnel. Everything that breaks is going to be part of an explosions damage potential. Most magnitudes above that are just bigger booms and it sort of looses meaning. We developed substances with increased potential and that how we got to kiloton effects.
For a kiloton impact in a populated area, an example would be the Beirut Grain Silo explosion. That was considered about 1kiloton. About a 40th of the 40billion grams (I think). This was enough to completely ruin an already troubled city and it was partially mitigated by circumstances. You can see the outcomes of just that through the news reporting.
So 40 kilotons would be on the level of most of central Paris is just gone and the collateral would be a humanitarian crisis with lives lost by the second. I was a Mythbusters kid and always loved explosions and violent reactions. But there's that line where it it's just scary.
Just cause it's a fun story - the fastest object launched into space is sewer hole cover as a result of a bomb. https://www.businessinsider.com/fastest-object-robert-brownlee-2016-2
Just cause it's a fun story - the fastest object launched into space is sewer hole cover as a result of a bomb.
Something to note is that antimatter annihilation is "inefficient" from a destruction standpoint: about half the energy from annihilation of massive particles (like protons/antiprotons or...
Something to note is that antimatter annihilation is "inefficient" from a destruction standpoint: about half the energy from annihilation of massive particles (like protons/antiprotons or neutrons/antineutrons) is released as neutrinos, which are statistically near-certain to escape the blast site without interacting. (The approximation is that a single neutrino has about a 50/50 chance of passing unimpeded through a light-year of lead.)
Granted, this isn't a qualitative difference—20 kilotons TNT equivalent is still on the scale of a city-killer nuke. And I'm pretty sure we don't really know much about how bulk annihilation reactions behave, which could push that effective yield in either direction. But if you're trying to fine-tune yield, it's an important consideration.
(And to reiterate, we're twenty-something orders of magnitude away from having antimatter in gram quantities. There have probably never been more than a few hundred captured antiparticles on Earth at any time.)
That's 40 kilotons of TNT explosive equivalent, or roughly two Hiroshima or Nagasaki-sized nuclear weapons. But manufacturing, containing, or transporting a gram of naked anti-protons is far...
That's 40 kilotons of TNT explosive equivalent, or roughly two Hiroshima or Nagasaki-sized nuclear weapons. But manufacturing, containing, or transporting a gram of naked anti-protons is far beyond any capabilities we'll have for the foreseeable future. There are about 5.978633201E+23 protons (or anti-protons) to a gram, and the article talks about moving just a few anti-protons at a time.
Straight sci-fi stuff really. Storing it and transporting it are a couple of the first steps to making a super-a-bomb. I'm not actually concerned given where we're at now, maybe it's never...
Straight sci-fi stuff really. Storing it and transporting it are a couple of the first steps to making a super-a-bomb.
I'm not actually concerned given where we're at now, maybe it's never feasible. I also can't imagine it ever being considered safe to have, say, a gram of it around. I don't know what a safe amount would be but I'm guessing nowhere near a gram.
On a CERN tour of the antimatter factory we were told that In the twenty years that it's been open it has produced enough antimatter that if we pooled it all together and let it anihilate with...
On a CERN tour of the antimatter factory we were told that In the twenty years that it's been open it has produced enough antimatter that if we pooled it all together and let it anihilate with matter, it would produce almost enough energy to brew one cup of tea.
I get that you're afraid but storing antimatter is just so, so difficult that the amount stored is probably not nearly enough to make an explosive out of it. Let alone something akin to a nuke....
I get that you're afraid but storing antimatter is just so, so difficult that the amount stored is probably not nearly enough to make an explosive out of it. Let alone something akin to a nuke. Even looking over the paper I'm not sure how much it is(maybe if I read it entirely but it's early in the morning and I've got other work, unfortunately) - but conventional explosive material from chemistry get transported every day, in huge amounts, in a safe manner.
Also, producing the stuff costs so much energy, we're not going to see explosives made out of it anytime soon, if ever. @FireTime is correct, there's no way this is more dangerous compared to all other issues and in fact, the research for transporting this may actually benefit safety measures in other engineering fields involving magnets.
I'm not afraid of the current state of it (or anything in the foreseeable future) it's just a terrifying idea is all. I do get that its not realistic to manufacture or store any real amount of it...
I'm not afraid of the current state of it (or anything in the foreseeable future) it's just a terrifying idea is all. I do get that its not realistic to manufacture or store any real amount of it at this point.
Glad to hear that the antimatter experiemnts are keeping up the wellfunded mad scientists vibes. Building a whole ass freight-container sized unit to store and move what is probably a very...
Glad to hear that the antimatter experiemnts are keeping up the wellfunded mad scientists vibes. Building a whole ass freight-container sized unit to store and move what is probably a very countable number of antiatoms is exactly the kind of energy I expect and appreciate from those peeps. Absurd, impressive and entirely reasonable.
Thus I now have a scientific source for light traveling at speeds just over 40km/h. I'm not sure what to do with this new information, but I am keeping it. It'll come in handy somewhere, I'm sure....
Based on the map included in the paper describing the work, it appears that the protons started out in France but briefly crossed the border into Switzerland. All told, they traveled just under 4 kilometers and reached speeds of over 40 km/hour.
Thus I now have a scientific source for light traveling at speeds just over 40km/h.
I'm not sure what to do with this new information, but I am keeping it. It'll come in handy somewhere, I'm sure. :)
Also, thankfully this is in the Shengen zone, else it would have been awkward declaring at customs…
edit: A little research indicates a single antimatter atom escaping would be no worries and not noticeable without special equipment. But a gram of antimatter would cause something like a nuclear bomb exploding. soooo, let's maybe not transport that much please.
They transported protons, not photons, slightly different spelling but very different meaning. Protons are small positively-charged particles that have mass and are part of the nucleus of every(?)...
They transported protons, not photons, slightly different spelling but very different meaning. Protons are small positively-charged particles that have mass and are part of the nucleus of every(?) atom. Photons are massless particles that are kinda a single packet of light.
This feels like its ripped right out of sci-fi. Super exciting stuff. Also maybe mildly terrifying.
What is mildly terrifying about it?
Antimatter annihilation feels like a good starting point for midly terrifying. Napkin math conversion rate is 1:40 Billion equivalent TNT explosion. Meaning a gram of anti-matter annihilating would be equivalent to a 40 billion gram TNT explosion. However, I'm assuming we are still a ways off before we are considering shipping anywhere near a gram (or a few orders of magnitude near it) of the stuff.
Humanity has produce 15 nanograms in all of history, CERN about 1 nanogram. If we were capable of producing 1 billion times as much as we have, it wouldn't be cause for concern, it would be cause for a path towards practical implementation as an energy storage method.
It's a bit weird to see this up voted, this is simply not a concern. At least according to ChatGPT, 15 nanograms of annihilation would be about a hand grenade.
Hand grenades are preeeeeetty terrifying. Something 15 times less powerful probably isn't so scary, but the idea of transporting a hand grenade on a highway that automatically triggers if it touches anything is kinda scary.
Can’t even synthesize anywhere near that much last I checked. I’m shocked they even have a reason to ship it given it’d almost certainly be cheaper and more efficient to move whatever you needed closer
It seems that it's a struggle to keep single digit numbers of antimatter sufficiently suspended by electromagnetic fields to avoid annihilation with the container.
If it was just about usage as a weapon, a banana would have more many magnitudes more antimatter annihilation reactions than they could transfer.
I've heard "grams of TNT" as a scale reference before, but as a relatively normal person who doesn't regularly use TNT, I have no idea how much that actually is, besides "40 billion grams is a lot of grams".
Is 40 billion grams of TNT a "remove an unfortunate town from Europe" amount, or a "remove Europe" amount?
If my napkin math is right, this would be 40 kilotons TNT equivalent which is roughly 2x as powerful as the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
For context on what TNT blast strength looks like because the numbers get weird when in the billions and our view of nuclear strikes is very limited.
This is 20kg, 5m away from blast proof concrete.. See how that paper just atomizes in under 10 milliseconds. That's the pressure wave that will most likely kill you. All the heat and fire is fairly contained and could safely be blocked if you had the right shielding to withstand that few seconds. But the pressure wave is going to reverberate through everything and will probably rip apart anything not designed to resist it. I think it was shown that your are not surviving a large blast in a heavy duty fridge because of shock-wave, then rapid acceleration and then being pin-balled across a landscape.
A better illustration is 50kg in a stage house. The take away from that is shrapnel. Everything that breaks is going to be part of an explosions damage potential. Most magnitudes above that are just bigger booms and it sort of looses meaning. We developed substances with increased potential and that how we got to kiloton effects.
For a kiloton impact in a populated area, an example would be the Beirut Grain Silo explosion. That was considered about 1kiloton. About a 40th of the 40billion grams (I think). This was enough to completely ruin an already troubled city and it was partially mitigated by circumstances. You can see the outcomes of just that through the news reporting.
So 40 kilotons would be on the level of most of central Paris is just gone and the collateral would be a humanitarian crisis with lives lost by the second. I was a Mythbusters kid and always loved explosions and violent reactions. But there's that line where it it's just scary.
Just cause it's a fun story - the fastest object launched into space is sewer hole cover as a result of a bomb.
https://www.businessinsider.com/fastest-object-robert-brownlee-2016-2
Something to note is that antimatter annihilation is "inefficient" from a destruction standpoint: about half the energy from annihilation of massive particles (like protons/antiprotons or neutrons/antineutrons) is released as neutrinos, which are statistically near-certain to escape the blast site without interacting. (The approximation is that a single neutrino has about a 50/50 chance of passing unimpeded through a light-year of lead.)
Granted, this isn't a qualitative difference—20 kilotons TNT equivalent is still on the scale of a city-killer nuke. And I'm pretty sure we don't really know much about how bulk annihilation reactions behave, which could push that effective yield in either direction. But if you're trying to fine-tune yield, it's an important consideration.
(And to reiterate, we're twenty-something orders of magnitude away from having antimatter in gram quantities. There have probably never been more than a few hundred captured antiparticles on Earth at any time.)
edit: relevant Schlock Mercenary
That's 40 kilotons of TNT explosive equivalent, or roughly two Hiroshima or Nagasaki-sized nuclear weapons. But manufacturing, containing, or transporting a gram of naked anti-protons is far beyond any capabilities we'll have for the foreseeable future. There are about 5.978633201E+23 protons (or anti-protons) to a gram, and the article talks about moving just a few anti-protons at a time.
Straight sci-fi stuff really. Storing it and transporting it are a couple of the first steps to making a super-a-bomb.
I'm not actually concerned given where we're at now, maybe it's never feasible. I also can't imagine it ever being considered safe to have, say, a gram of it around. I don't know what a safe amount would be but I'm guessing nowhere near a gram.
On a CERN tour of the antimatter factory we were told that In the twenty years that it's been open it has produced enough antimatter that if we pooled it all together and let it anihilate with matter, it would produce almost enough energy to brew one cup of tea.
I get that you're afraid but storing antimatter is just so, so difficult that the amount stored is probably not nearly enough to make an explosive out of it. Let alone something akin to a nuke. Even looking over the paper I'm not sure how much it is(maybe if I read it entirely but it's early in the morning and I've got other work, unfortunately) - but conventional explosive material from chemistry get transported every day, in huge amounts, in a safe manner.
Also, producing the stuff costs so much energy, we're not going to see explosives made out of it anytime soon, if ever. @FireTime is correct, there's no way this is more dangerous compared to all other issues and in fact, the research for transporting this may actually benefit safety measures in other engineering fields involving magnets.
I'm not afraid of the current state of it (or anything in the foreseeable future) it's just a terrifying idea is all. I do get that its not realistic to manufacture or store any real amount of it at this point.
Glad to hear that the antimatter experiemnts are keeping up the wellfunded mad scientists vibes. Building a whole ass freight-container sized unit to store and move what is probably a very countable number of antiatoms is exactly the kind of energy I expect and appreciate from those peeps. Absurd, impressive and entirely reasonable.
Thus I now have a scientific source for light traveling at speeds just over 40km/h.
I'm not sure what to do with this new information, but I am keeping it. It'll come in handy somewhere, I'm sure. :)
Also, thankfully this is in the Shengen zone, else it would have been awkward declaring at customs…
edit: A little research indicates a single antimatter atom escaping would be no worries and not noticeable without special equipment. But a gram of antimatter would cause something like a nuclear bomb exploding. soooo, let's maybe not transport that much please.
They transported protons, not photons, slightly different spelling but very different meaning. Protons are small positively-charged particles that have mass and are part of the nucleus of every(?) atom. Photons are massless particles that are kinda a single packet of light.