all these hypes about hybrid, hydrogen, air and blah blah...so apparently anti-matter drives uses 100% of nearly 100% of the energy released, supposedly the nuclear bombs used in hiroshima and nagasaki only used about 17% of its potential energy. no physics major here but im just wondering if this is possible or probably. oil is gona run out sonner or later, might as well develop now.
i was watching a video and it said something like a tea spoon of the substance can sustain a rocket launch and in space propulsion for years.
Yeah... some are already fear-mongering the hydrogen technology, I'm sure this will go over well. The space implications are fascinating though.
At present, antimatter costs $62.5 trillion per gram (source). And people complain about current gas prices? Current anual production of antimater is about 1.5 nano-grams (that is 1.5 × 10-9 grams) (source). Also, you would need an absolutely perfect magnetic containment system - if antimatter ever touches normal matter you have annihilation and total energy release (the source of that 100% efficiency). And because of the perfect conversion, it is possible to make a bomb about the size of a grape that would make nuclear weapons seem quaint and small. So - expensive, difficult to handle, use and make, and dangerous, all to the nth degree. Um... Next?
Here's an interesting excerpt from a Fox News article a little while back Antimatter drives one day? The general consensus seems to be that size is the biggest obstacle towards successful antimatter drives with huge particle accelerators/etc needed to produce antimatter and several magnets needed to hold one gram of antimatter thus making it very heavy and not the lightweight goal.
Lol, I don't think those will be 'reality' for about a million years. For now, anti-matter is just far too under-researched and, well, WAAAY too tiny to be used, I mean it's like asking the Victorians, hey when's the nuclear car going to come around? It's that kind of misplacement, even now nuclear cars are nowhere near a reality, electric cars are far more likely.
If I recall right , the first nuclear car was actually invented by Sir Isaac Newton. Spoiler SYKE! LMFAOROFLOLOLOLBARBEQUE!
I'm sorry, but I just busted out laughing after reading that. The things you can find on the Internet...
The figure actually comes from the NASA paper in the second link, page 4: [rquoter] Equation 2 clearly shows that conversion efficiency h is a major factor in dictating energy costs. Unfortunately, the values of h associated with present-day facilities are extremely low. A good example of this is FNAL which creates antiprotons by means of colliding beams of relativistic protons with high-atomic number (high-Z) material targets. The protons, which are accelerated to an energy of 120 GeV (120 x 10<sup>9</sup> electron volts), yield a spray of photons, proton-antiproton pairs and other particles at the collision site. Only a small portion of these antiprotons leave the target at the proper momentum and small enough exit angle to be magnetically focused and r****ded for subsequent storage. The performance of the overall collection process is quite low and yields about 1antiproton per 10<sup>5</sup> proton collisions. Multiplying acceleration energy (120 GeV/proton) by collection ratio (10<sup>5</sup> proton/antiproton) yields an energy requirement E<sub>in</sub> / M<sub>a</sub> of 1.2 x 10<sup>16</sup> eV/antiproton or, in terms of mass, 1.16 x 10<sup>21</sup> J/g. Applying a “wall-plug” power efficiency of 50% and substituting into Eq. (1) results in an h of 4 x 10<sup>-8</sup>. Substituting this value of h and a kgrid of $0.10 per kilowatt-hour (kW-hr) into Eq. (2) yields an energy cost of $62.5 trillion per gram (g) of antiprotons. The cost of producing large quantities of antimatter (i.e., gram-scale or above) with current facilities is exceedingly high. However, studies have shown that the efficiency of production based on proton/high-Z material collisions can be improved substantially by optimizing proton acceleration energy and incorporating improved collection methods. Assuming an optimized energy of 200 GeV and a collection ratio of 1 antiproton per 20 collisions yields an h of 2 x 10<sup>-4</sup> (or 10<sup>-4</sup> if a 50% wall-plug efficiency is again assumed). This 3 to 4 order of magnitude improvement over current capability yields a cost of $25 billion per gram, which is roughly 1,000 times the cost of an equivalent energy load of Shuttle ET propellants. As we will explain later, such improvements would require a substantial investment of 3 to 10 billion dollars for a dedicated production facility. Equation 2 suggests that as long as commercial power rates remain near current levels of $0.01 to $0.1 per kW-hr, the cost of producing large quantities of antimatter will be high, regardless of the extent to which efficiency can be improved. Even at the maximum theoretical h of 1/2, antiprotons will cost $5 million per gram. Although this is comparable in terms of energy content to the cost of Shuttle ET propellants, no one has conceived of a technology that could come close to this level of performance. Therefore in order for large-scale production to become even remotely practical (especially at the kilogram (kg) to metric ton (mT) quantities required for interstellar missions using “pure” antimatter rockets), power utility costs will have to drop dramatically below current levels (kgrid << $0.1/kW-hr). This is unlikely to occur until abundant power based on a conceivably “free” resource, such as Deuterium-Deuterium (D-D) fusion, becomes available. [/rquoter]
I wonder what the highest level of personal transportation will be before teleportation. I'm thinking flying cars powered by mr. fusion.
Whoa, antiprotons? If it reacts with normal protons, (eg blow the world to bits or something like that) then I hate to think what it would do when it meets the normal electrons, probably destroy the solar system. Although I do remember seeing something from CERN in that the amount of antimatter they have made was enough to power.... Spoiler a light bulb for a few minutes
I disagree....oil will always be in the ground.....now, the cost of extracting it, or the relative use for it(i.e. alternative energy sources) may come to pass sooner, but oil will always be in the ground.
I don't think that's feasible, but I do think that magnetic railways will ultimately be the future mode of transport, with your private car hooked onto the railway. It's already been used in Japan, I saw them in Tokyo Disneyland, although I'm not sure what would happen if you stuck tons of them together on a highway. Probably magnetise everything in range and blow out all credit cards and watches, stuff like that.
I've read several times in different articles for the oil and gas industry that say that roughly 1/2 the crude oil in the ground is gone. Not half of the accessble sources, 1/2 of the oil. My understanding is that this is the generally accepted figure in that industry. I assume that figure doesn't include the nontraditional sources like shale oil. Additionally, at some point/need level/cost point they can start doing the process of rendering organic materials into crude oil. But the supply isn't as limitless as you seem to think.
